Otis House (1796)

Land of the Massachusett

When the Massachusetts Bay Colony inhabitants arrived in 1630, the land of what would become Metro Boston was inhabited by the Massachusett. At that time, Chickataubut was the sac’hem, or leader, of the Neoponset Band of the Massachusett. Chickataubut’s grandson, Wampatuck, received payment in 1695 in exchange for a quietclaim deed for the site of Boston and its neighboring islands. This exchange took place around seventy years after the first settler, William Blaxton, made his home on the peninsula and fifty-five years after the Massachusetts Bay Company marked it as the colony’s capital.

The Massachusett utilized this land to gather, farm, fish, hunt, and build. Trade and seasonal movements likely resulted in a complex network of relations with the nearby Pawtucket, Nipmuc, Wampanoag, Agawam, and Pokanoket nations.

Descendants of the first people of Massachusetts persist today through the Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag, the Praying Indians of Natick, and other federally recognized or unrecognized indigenous nations.

The land that the Otis House sits on today was on the edge of Trimount, a triple-peaked hill among other hills on the peninsula. One hundred years of land modification later, Boston is 500 acres larger and the current slope of Beacon Hill is the remnant of Trimount.

An Elegant Mansion

Harrison Gray Otis (1765-1848), a wealthy young lawyer who grew up during the American Revolution, built Otis House in 1796. Otis (pictured) was only thirty years old when he hired his friend, architect Charles Bulfinch, to design this elegant townhouse for himself, his wife Sally Foster Otis (1770-1836), and their four young children. Otis was elected to the United States House of Representatives when the family was living here. He went on to become a United States Senator in 1817, and then the third mayor of Boston in 1829. Mrs. Otis was a popular hostess: she, like her husband, loved city life and enjoyed entertaining their many friends and political acquaintances.

As a prominent citizen of Boston, Otis wanted to live in the most stylish neighborhood. In 1796 Bowdoin Square was a very respectable address. Surrounded by quiet hills and the Charles River, it was a peaceful, almost rural alternative to busy downtown Boston, but the commercial growth of the area happened quickly. Only four years after the Otises built their first house, they decided to move to Beacon Hill, which was fast becoming a very elegant place to live. Otis had a special interest in Beacon Hill. He was one of the “Mount Vernon Proprietors,” a group of real estate developers who owned the south slope of Beacon Hill, where the Massachusetts State House was located, and successfully transformed it from undeveloped pasture land into the grandest residential area in Boston. The Otises chose Bulfinch as the architect for their second house as well. The Otis family spent only five years in this house on Mount Vernon Street before having Bulfinch design them a third and final house. This one, on Beacon Street just down the hill from the State House, had a full view of the Boston Common and was two-and-a-half times larger than the first Otis House.

John Osborn, A Wealthy Paint Merchant

After the Otises moved to the south slope of Beacon Hill in 1801, John Osborn, a paint merchant, and his family purchased the house. Harrison Gray Otis declared in a letter to his wife that the Osborns were “tickled” with the purchase. This was the second time that Osborn had been drawn to a building by Charles Bulfinch; in 1798 he owned a unit in Bulfinch’s Tontine Crescent.

In 1807 Osborn sold the property to Nehemiah Parsons and bought the Otises’ second house on Mount Vernon Street. Parsons was a merchant whose place of business was on Long Wharf. However, in 1814, John Osborn repurchased the first Otis house, and his family occupied it until his death in 1819. At that time, a detailed inventory was taken that provides information on the furnishings and possessions in the house. Two mirrors believed to be in the house at this time are now on display in the Otis House dining room and parlor.

Catherine Osborn, John’s daughter, inherited the property from her father, but sold the house and many of its fine furnishings and fittings.

Multi-Family House

After the house was sold, Otis House went into divided ownership. The eastern rooms of the house were sold to one owner; the stair hall, western rooms, and rear ell to another owner, with the owner of the eastern half receiving permission to build a kitchen and entry in the angle of the ell. In the front of the house, small parcels of land were sold separately to a new owner. A strip of land twelve feet, six inches wide between the house and the lots sold was reserved for the use of the owners of the house. Provisions in the deed specified that nothing could be built in this space that would block light and air from Otis House.

Many occupants lived in the house during these years. Information from Boston city directories tells us about some of the people, but there were probably many residents whose names did not find their way into official records. There is no information regarding which rooms within the house were occupied by certain residents. Residents during this time included Stillman Lothrop, a gilder and lookingglass manufacturer; Samuel B. Doane, the owner and conductor of a sugar refinery; and Henry Jaques, the president of Tremont Bank, among others.

Dr. and Mrs. Mott’s “Patent Champoo Baths” and Other Owners

Perhaps the house’s most unusual occupants were the British-born Mrs. Mott, “the celebrated Female Physician,” and her husband, Dr. Mott, who operated Otis House as a medical establishment for “invalid ladies, and gentlemen with their wives.” A notice in the Daily Evening Transcript stated:

“Dr. and Mrs. Mott…have taken, for a term of years, those spacious premises at the corner of Lynde and Cambridge streets, for the reception of ladies who labor under diseases or infirmities. No expense has been spared to make it replete with every comfort and convenience; every bed room will be furnished with medicated baths, suited to the case, if needed, and patients will be enabled to receive, at a minute’s notice medical assistance by night and day. Pledging themselves to keep the establishment select and to conduct it on principles to merit the patronage of the public.”

A Genteel Boarding House and Rooming House

By 1854 the house was owned by a man named Henry Wood, and was no longer divided into a multi-family home. The Misses Williams, four sisters named Lavina, Maria, Eliza, and Caroline, were listed as proprietors of a boarding house at 1 Lynde Street. According to a former boarder, Susan Thatcher, the eldest sister was “blind and helpless, but said to have been a most intelligent woman.” Miss Thatcher stayed at the house as a child with her mother when her father, an admiral, was at sea. She remembered that the boarding house was “first-class in reputation and prices. An old-fashioned boarding house, more like a large family. Governor John A. Andrew was a boarder when a young man with his family, also Cornelius N. Bliss, afterward a wealthy and prominent New Yorker.”

Genteel boarding houses, like Otis House, provided a comfortable, respectable middle-class home-like setting. Boarders could expect to live in sizable, well-kept rooms furnished with their own or “house” furniture, to sit down to three home-cooked meals per day in the dining room, and to entertain their guests in a well-appointed communal parlor on the first floor. Keepers and boarders could establish stable, long-term relationships and serve as surrogate family members for one another.

Becoming a Museum

Otis House was on the verge of becoming a home for newly arrived Jewish immigrants, the Benoth Israel Sheltering Home, when William Sumner Appleton began negotiations to acquire it. A friend of Appleton’s persuaded the organization to sell the property to the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, now Historic New England.

Early in 1916 Appleton identified the house as a building worth saving, and a suitable headquarters for his newly founded organization: “The house is a capacious brick mansion with a large central hall and two rooms on each side and another in the ell…the mantels (at least five or six of them) are very fine wooden ones with elaborate carved or applied decoration. They are the best I have seen in Boston and about as good as the best in Salem.”