Dole-Little House (ca. 1715)

Indigenous and Enslaved People and Richard Dole 

The land on which Dole-Little House sits was home to indigenous people for thousands of years. At the time of contact with European colonists, the Native people living in the area were the Pawtucket, a collection of semi-autonomous family groups who all spoke a dialect of the Algonquian language and shared extremely close kinship ties with the Pennacook tribe of southern New Hampshire. The Pawtucket-Pennacook people had settlements or villages throughout the area we now call Massachusetts’ North Shore. They migrated seasonally and used the land according to the resources available which included foraging, planting crops, fishing, and hunting. Both the nearby Merrimack and the Quascacunquen (now called the Parker) Rivers would have afforded the indigenous people with valuable access to sustenance, fertile land, and salt marsh hay.

Family Home

Built around 1715 with materials salvaged from an earlier structure, Dole-Little House was a two-room house of a center-chimney hall/parlor plan. It was built on land and with wealth accumulated by the first Richard Dole (1622-1705) through real estate transactions and the labor of enslaved people. The 1715 date coincides with William Dole gaining a lease to run the ferry to cross the Parker River, but it may have been constructed a few years later for William’s son Richard. He was born December 31, 1689, and married Sarah Emery in 1719, with whom he had ten children.

The house was built on a two-room, central-chimney plan with a small kitchen shed at the rear. This shed has since been replaced with a larger lean-to. Decorative carpentry and finish include chamfered edges, molded sheathing (especially in the great hall and parlor), and possibly original stair balusters.

The house and property were then passed down through six generations of the Dole family. In 1878, Nathaniel Dole sold the property to Francis Little.  The next known sale was in 1948 to Eleanor Dole Fillmore.

Restoration

Dole-Little House was acquired by Florence Evans Bushee in 1951. Bushee was a Newbury resident who owned property near the Lower Green and had a preservationist mind-set. Along with Dole-Little, she purchased and protected several important seventeenth-century houses in Essex County as well as donating hundreds of acres of land to conservation local organizations.

Bushee hired Roy W. Baker, a restoration contractor, to work on Dole-Little House. He restored the building in 1955 to reflect the then-presumed original period of 1670s. Later research dates the house more accurately to the first quarter of the eighteenth century. Baker discovered that new mortise and tenon joints and various other changes had been added to many of the salvaged framing members to allow them to conform to the plan of the house. During restoration efforts, the lean-to was removed and reconstructed with new timbers, and a small-paned sash from the front of the house was reinstalled in the lean-to. The paneling from one chamber was removed and reinstalled as an exhibition room at the National Museum of History and Technology in Washington, D.C. A copied version was reinstalled in the chamber. The stair balusters, removed by Baker in 1955, are now on display in the house.

The property is architecturally and historically significant in large part for its restoration story. When restored in the 1950s, the philosophy was to restore to the “original” date at the expense of historical accretions and clues to the past. These preservation philosophies have drastically changed over the intervening decades, in part because of stories like that of Dole-Little House. Now all eras of occupation and ownership are considered essential to the fabric and history of a house and careful documentation is a top priority in preservation.

Becoming a Museum

Dole-Little House was given to Historic New England in 1975 upon the death of Mrs. Bushee. It is open to the public on select days each year. The tour focuses on mid-twentieth century restoration techniques.