The Whipple House

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Known as the “gem of first period houses” in the region North of Boston (meaning that it was built during America’s “first period” of architecture, 1625-1725) the Whipple House was built in 1677* by Captain John Whipple (1625-83), a military officer and successful entrepreneur with interests in a malt house, fulling mill, and saw mill. It was constructed as a half-house, or single-cell house, “quite similar to the timber-framed buildings they were accustomed to back home in England,” according to former Whipple House curator, James Z. Kyprianos.

It was 2 ½ stories high, and featured a façade gable. The house’s interior included a first-floor multi-purpose room, or hall, with a full-sized chamber on the second floor and a garret above. The hall’s fine crease-molded boards, painted in bright colors, attested to Captain Whipple’ s wealth. Other features included casement windows, tamarack summer beams molded with quarter-round chamfers with flat collars and lamb’s tongue stops, and a walk-in cooking hearth.

Captain Whipple built his home as a townhouse, located near the center of Ipswich at the corner of today’s Saltonstall and Market Streets. It was not placed in a rural setting, as it is today.

In 1677, Captain Whipple had lost one son, and his family comprised his second wife, Elizabeth Paine, and five children. It is likely that at least one servant lived with them as well. The inventory of his estate lists “Lawrence, ye Indian,” valued at 4 pounds. During the next few years, Captain Whipple added four rooms to his house, making it a full house. The 1683 inventory of his estate lists an impressive amount of possessions that only a large house could have accommodated. Captain Whipple was also able to leave half of his house for his widow’s use.

In 1690, Captain Whipple’s son, Major John Whipple (1657-1722), a Cornet in the militia who had inherited the house, expanded the structure by adding a grand parlor which was, according to Kyprianos, “probably one of the most impressive and sumptuous parlors in all of Ipswich, and possibly the Massachusetts Bay Colony.” More rooms for chambers were added above, along with the beginnings of a lean-to out back which Major Whipple continued to expand. As Kyprianos explains, “by 1722, upon Major Whipple’s death, the mass and footprint of the present structure was therefore complete, a mansion house of 15 rooms, 6 ample rooms at the front of the house for the family, and 9 smaller rooms in the lean-to for service.”

The Whipple/Crocker Families

In 1690, after the death of one daughter, Major Whipple’s family included his wife, Katherine Layton, and seven surviving children. He left his home to his daughter Mary, and her husband, Benjamin Crocker, a highly regarded legislator and chaplain. Mary and Benjamin had two children, John and Mary, before she died in 1723. They also kept two slaves, Tom and Flora, the last slaves to live in the “old mansion,” according to Waters. Benjamin married as his second wife the widow Experience Coolidge in 1736; she died in 1759. For his third wife, Crocker married Elizabeth Williams. The Crockers redecorated the house in early Georgian style, removing the exterior façade gables and replacing the casement windows with sash windows. A new ceiling was put in to hide the joists, and the earlier wooden chimney walls were removed.

Mary and Benjamin’s son, John, known as “Deacon John Crocker” (1723-1806) because of his affiliation with the Second Church, inherited the house. He had 11 children with his first wife, Mehitable Burley, although only 9 survived to adulthood. With his second wife, Elizabeth Lakeman, Deacon Crocker had two children. As the Reverend Thomas Franklin Waters conjectured in his 1915 definitive essay on the Whipple House residents, “it is very probable that the old homestead was full of life and bustle. There were babies in their cradles, little children, with their sports, and older girls, who had their daily stint of knitting and sewing and working of samplers, and the grown up daughters had the privilege of the parlor for entertaining their bashful lovers.” One of these daughters, Lydia Treadwell, married Colonel Joseph Hodgkins (1743-1829).

Upon Deacon Crocker’s death, his son John inherited the majority of the house; his daughter, Elizabeth, inherited the “great west chamber” as long as she remained unmarried. John, who was not living in the area, sold his share of the Whipple House to his brother Joseph. In 1813, when Joseph died, he sold the house to Colonel Joseph Hodgkins and Lydia Treadwell Crocker stipulating once again that the west chamber be kept available to Elizabeth Crocker. Colonel Hodgkins, a Revolutionary War hero, was an older man when he bought the house. He died in 1829, in the family sitting room, and was survived by his wife for four more years. Their granddaughter, Sarah Wade, recalled at least one tenant living in the house during these years, Polly Crafts, who made her living by weaving towels.

The House Declines, But is Saved

When Lydia Hodgkins died, the Whipple House passed out of the family. Her heirs sold the house to Caleb K. Moore of Canterbury, N.H., a “peddler,” in 1833 for $501. Moore sold to Abraham H. Bond, a manufacturer and one of the Nottingham stocking weavers for $900. By 1897, this house, that was such an “admirable type of the earliest style of architecture, was much decayed and likely to fall into utter ruin,” Rev. Waters recalled. At the time, it was situated in an industrial part of town, near the Ipswich Hosiery Mills, and had been subdivided into tenement housing for mill workers.

Several years earlier, in 1890, Reverend Waters had formed a group of citizens who, like him, were interested in preserving artifacts and documents from Ipswich history. They were in search of a permanent home for their organization, and the opportunity presented itself when they recognized the importance of saving the Whipple House. They purchased the house from Abraham Bond’s son, James, in 1898 for $1,650, and spent the summer restoring it to its pre-Georgian days.

The Ipswich Historical Society dedicated the Whipple House that fall as the official headquarters of their newly incorporated organization. In July 1899, they opened the house to the public, making it “not only one of the oldest standing structures in the country, but also one of the earliest house museums established in America still in continued operation,” James Kyprianos points out.

Final Chapter

Almost thirty years later, Richard Crane of Ipswich gave the Society a parcel of meadow and woodland in a more “acceptable” part of town, stipulating that the Whipple House should be moved to the property. This was accomplished in 1927, removing the Whipple House from its original location near the town center (at the corner of Market and Saltonstall Streets), moving it slowly through town and across the Choate Bridge, and placing the building in its present rural setting.

In 1953-4 the Society closed the house for extensive renovations, including the addition of the present façade gables and leaded casement windows. A modern resident caretaker’s apartment was created out of the rear rooms some years later, closing off that section to the public but keeping the higher style front rooms open.

*Based on 2005 dendrochronology testing.

Sources:
James Kyprianos, Whipple House Docent Manual, 2000.
Ipswich Historical Society, Dedication of the Ancient House Now Occupied by the Society, 1899.
Thomas Franklin Waters, The John Whipple House and the People Who have Owned and Lived in It, 1915.