Coffin House (1678)

After first contact with Europeans, indigenous populations in New England were ravaged by diseases and greatly diminished in number. White colonists began arriving in large numbers in the seventeenth century and colonized the area, disrupting the lives of the indigenous people through conflict, disease, and displacement. By the early eighteenth century, most of the Pawtucket-Pennacook family groups who called this land home were forced to relocate, joining larger and stronger tribes in Canada and further south in Massachusetts. Today, members of the Cowasuck Band of the Pennacook-Abenaki people are direct descendants of those refugees.

In 1635, the first English colonists sailed up the Quascacunquen River and established their new town of Newbury on its shores. They claimed the land and built their town center around the Lower Green. White men were given property according to wealth and status and the small community flourished. By the 1670s, the younger generation was pushing out and moving northward toward the larger Merrimack River, creating a new town center around the Upper Green. Coffin House, which was built along the well-travelled High Road, was part of this new settlement. Decades after colonists forcibly occupied the land, the European colonists retroactively “purchased” large plots through dubious land deeds with the descendants of indigenous peoples. The land on which Coffin House sits was no different.

In 1646 the family, with the exception of the two older sons, Peter and Tristram, emigrated, eventually settling on Nantucket. Peter, the eldest son, left for New Hampshire, leaving fourteen-year-old Tristram Jr. the only remaining Coffin in Newbury. It is believed that Tristram was indentured to a local tradesman, as was common. His master was most likely a tailor, Henry Somerby. In fact, when Somerby died, it was twenty-one-year-old Tristram who married Somerby’s widow, Judith, in 1654.

Judith had three children from her first marriage, and, after marrying Tristram, she had ten more. The couple began their married life in a home on the Lower Green, which Judith had inherited from her first husband. Although this was a period of economic growth in Newbury, there were significant tensions between the English and the indigenous peoples, who were being forcibly removed from their ancestral lands. In 1675, strained relations broke out into full-scale conflict, known today as Metacom’s Rebellion or King Phillip’s War. Tristram Coffin, Jr. served in the War, and his son John and stepson Daniel Somerby were both killed during the fighting. After the conflict ended, and perhaps because of it, Tristram, Judith, and their youngest children moved up the road to a new home on the Upper Green.

The upper green in Newbury grew rapidly in the 1660s and 1670s as the sons and daughters of the first colonists built homesteads. Stephen Swett built the house at 4 High Road in 1670, and the Atkinson house on the upper green was built in 1664. The carpenters who built all of these houses adapted the building style and methods of England to the growing population of Newbury and the more severe climate of New England.

The original Coffin House, or part of it, survives today as the back section, except for the small addition on the southwest corner, which was added in the nineteenth century. Typical of seventeenth-century New England buildings, the main facade faced south to take maximum advantage of the sun’s warmth in winter. There may have been a porch with a chamber above off the south side of the house originally.

Nathaniel, like his father, appears to have combined a variety of activities to support his family. On many documents, Nathaniel is listed as a merchant-tailor. Family account books indicate that he also started the tanning business that would sustain the family into the 1800s.

These same family and business accounts show that he enslaved man named Jack. Several generations of the Coffin family were involved in slavery and enslaved people lived and worked at Coffin House in the eighteenth century. Jack’s work included working in the tannery or on the farm, as well as tasks listed in the account books such as carting rocks, wood, and dung. There is also evidence that enslaved people in Newbury worked haying and threshing fields and on the salt marshes to harvest and stack the salt marsh hay which was very valuable for feeding cattle. Nathaniel also benefited from economic institution of slavery in his community, often accepting labor as payment or trading Jack’s time for commodities. The account book shows that he held debts for people in the community that he sold goods to, and for services rendered. A few years later, Nathaniel recorded the gifting of Jack to his son Edmund Coffin.

In 1725, Nathaniel’s son Joseph married Margaret Morse and brought her to Coffin House to set up a new household. When Joseph and Margaret moved in, Joseph’s parents and three of his siblings were still living there. Margaret and Joseph had eight children. Joseph, like the generations before him, engaged in a variety of activities to sustain the family. They continued in the tanning business, but also maintained tillage land, orchards, pasture, and livestock. Joseph Coffin himself purchased and enslaved a young woman named Lucy and gifted her to two of his daughters in 1771. He gave each daughter, Sarah Little and Susannah Boyd, half of Lucy’s labor and each “part” was valued at £45.

Both Nathaniel and Joseph were active in the local community. They held the office of Newbury town clerk consecutively from 1711 to 1773. The town’s population continued to grow. The first census, taken in 1765, indicates that the town’s population had reached 2,960. The town was an important agricultural community, but manufacturing enterprises were growing.

In 1755 Joseph’s son Joshua married Sarah Bartlett and brought his bride back to the house where his parents continued to live. Joshua and Sarah had twelve children (eight survived to adulthood). Joshua and Sarah also took in apprentices. Historic New England has a copy of the 1772 indenture between a Daniel Mitchell of Wells, Maine, and the Coffins. The agreement is that the Coffins will teach Daniel “the art, trade, and mastery of a tanner…during the term of 5 years, seven months, and 75 days..and also to learn him to read and write legibly…and at expiration of term give him 2 good suits of apparel for all parts of his body, one for the Lord’s day, the other for working days.”

In 1785 the house, which had consistently had three generations living as one family, was legally divided. Edmund Coffin, one of Joshua’s two sons, reached twenty-one and wanted his share of his deceased father’s estate. Consequently, a division was made first between the two sons and their widowed mother Sarah, and after her death in 1798, between the two sons. Each had exclusive use of certain rooms, stairways, and cellars with right of passage through some of the other rooms. The “families” lived separately under one roof, using different kitchens and entertaining rooms. The house remained divided this way through the last generation of Coffins to occupy the house.

He published A Sketch of the History of Newbury, Newburyport, and West Newbury from 1635 to 1845, genealogies of the Woodman, Little, and Toppan families, and wrote for the famous anti-slavery bulletin, The Guardian. As an adult, Coffin lived for a time in the downstairs southwest room of the house where his study is still visible today.

Meanwhile, Joshua’s first cousin Lucy (pictured) lived her whole life in the front range of the house, becoming the sole resident after the marriage of her sister, Elizabeth. She was musical, artistic, and scholarly, reading her Bible every morning in the original Greek. She lived her entire life in the house and made very few changes. By doing so, her preservationist mindset kept the house authentic and her dwindling family assets contributed to its preservation.