The Last of the Jacob Osgood House?

Back in 2012, I picked up a local news report that the Andover board of health had issued orders for the owners of the house where Jacob Osgood lived during the Revolution to remove garbage bags piled up on the front lawn.

According to Andover Historic Preservation’s 2016 page about this house, the earliest part might have been built in 1699, and it was expanded with new decoration in the mid-1700s.

On 23 May 1783, James Otis, Jr., the former leader of the Massachusetts Whigs, was staying at this house, while hoping to recover from mental illness.

William Tudor’s 1823 biography of Otis included a picture of the Osgood house and said:

…the greater part of the family were collected in one of the rooms to wait till the shower should have past. Otis, with his cane in one hand, stood against the post of the door which opened from this apartment into the front entry. He was in the act of telling the assembled group a story, when an explosion took place which seemed to shake the solid earth, and he fell without a struggle, or a word, instantaneously dead, into the arms of Mr. Osgood, who seeing him falling, sprang forward to receive him. . . .

His own room was on the left hand side of the front door, when looking at the plate; and at his death, he was standing in the door way of the room to the right. The lightning struck the chimney, followed a rafter of the roof which rested upon one of the upright timbers, to which the door post was contiguous. The casing of this door was split, and several of the nails torn out all which marks still remain as they were at the time.

This week Donovan Loucks sent me this new photograph of the Osgood house, showing much more damage than that.

He wrote:

The place is in terrible condition and has a red square with a white cross prominently displayed on the front so emergency personnel know it’s unsafe for entry. The front door is gone, the entry is piled high with refuse, and I suspect it’ll end up being demolished at some point.

The house had clearly deteriorated since 2012. It may be too late to preserve anything more than a few architectural elements.

Jacob Osgood’s House Today

I’ve been writing about the death of James Otis, Jr., in Andover at a house owned by the Osgood family. That house still exists, and is listed on this Andover Historic Preservation website maintained by the town library. It describes the house and its history:

Isaac [Osgood]’s fourth son, Jacob, inherited the property and was a wealthy and highly respected farmer. He served in Nicholas Holt’s company during the Revolutionary War and was friend and host to James Otis, the patriot lawyer and orator. Otis spent nearly two years at the Osgood farm recuperating form a head injury and was killed here by lightening [sic] in 1783. Osgoods occupied the house until 1849; of the following owners the most historically significant has been Wadley Noyes, who kept an inn and tavern here from 1853-1863.

The awkwardly composed design reflects its centuries of architectural growth. The original building consisted of four rooms built around a central chimney; Isaac Osgood is thought to have added the eastern part of the house (making its L shape) and the northeast corner wing. The pretentiousness of this status-conscious owner is reflected in the buildings dignified window cornices—uncommon in Andover—fine pedimented doorway, large windows, and hipped roof.

A Boston 1775 reader alerted me that house has also become the focus of a local controversy as the current owner has stored large piles of trash bags on the property. After two items in the Andover Townsman in early February pushed for action, the town board of health found evidence that those heaps were endangering the public and ordered them removed. In April the board of health went to court to enforce that order. The photograph above accompanied one of those February articles.

In May a Boston Globe article linked the problem to compulsive hoarding, a behavior that appears to be receiving extra attention lately because it’s so telegenic. Whether or not that diagnosis has anything to do with the property’s current situation is another question. But there’s some historical irony in the house where James Otis, Jr., went to recover from one mental condition being linked to another.

James Otis, Jr., Struck by Lightning

The first biography of James Otis, Jr., published in 1823 by William Tudor, Jr., described the Patriot lawyer’s death in Andover this way:

…on Friday afternoon the 23d day of May 1783, a heavy cloud suddenly arose, and the greater part of the family were collected in one of the rooms to wait till the shower should have past. Otis, with his cane in one hand, stood against the post of the door which opened from this apartment into the front entry.* He was in the act of telling the assembled group a story, when an explosion took place which seemed to shake the solid earth, and he fell without a struggle, or a word, instantaneously dead, into the arms of Mr. [Jacob] Osgood, who seeing him falling, sprang forward to receive him. This flash of lightning was the first that came from the cloud, and was not followed by any others that were remarkable. . . .

* His own room was on the left hand side of the front door, when looking at the plate [shown above]; and at his death, he was standing in the door way of the room to the right. The lightning struck the chimney, followed a rafter of the roof which rested upon one of the upright timbers, to which the door post was contiguous. The casing of this door was split, and several of the nails torn out all which marks still remain as they were at the time.

Tudor obviously received these details from the family of Jacob Osgood (1752-1838)—though not descendants, since that man didn’t leave any. A few pages earlier Tudor recorded an anecdote about Otis from Jacob’s younger brother, Revolutionary surgeon Kendall Osgood (1757-1801), who left children in New Hampshire. An older brother, the Rev. Dr. David Osgood (1747-1822), was a prominent minister in Medford and also had children. The house still belonged to the Osgood family when Tudor wrote, and he evidently visited the property.

But by the end of the 1800s, another story had sprung up.

TOMORROW: The hired man speaks?