Tobey Archeology Dig

'Little House' Discovery Sheds Light

On Early Sandwich History

By James Kinsella

In late 2010, Tom and Melissa Keyes bought the house at 22 Water Street in Sandwich, a structure that they believed dated to 1817.

They contracted for what they thought would be a moderate rehabilitation.

What they ended up doing was embarking on an unexpected historical exploration of one of the earliest colonial homes extant in New England, let alone Sandwich.

The couple, it turns out, had bought a house hidden inside the house.

The hidden “little house,” as it is being called, revealed itself through architectural design and materials to go far back in history: circa 1650, if not earlier.

As such, the little house was around for the earliest days of Sandwich, which was founded as a town in 1637.

But the story gets better. An investigation by archaeologists Craig Chartier and David Wheelock, assisted by their intuition and some good luck, showed that the little house had not always sat next to Water Street, but had been moved there from a nearby knoll overlooking Shawme Lake.

On the knoll, the archaeologists have unearthed the little house's original hearth, along with items clearly dating from the 1600s.

Mr. Chartier said the little house and the knoll site are significant enough to merit inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places.

For his part, Mr. Keyes plans to form a nonprofit corporation and to seek an historic preservation restriction to protect the knoll property from future development.

Mr. Chartier said the plan will preserve the site for a continuing archaeological exploration.

That in itself is a departure. Much more common, Mr. Chartier said, is for a developer to require archaeological work to be done quickly, so that redevelopment of a property can begin as soon as possible.

The very survival of the little house is also a departure.

In contrast to Virginia, where the agricultural economy had left hundreds of Early American houses standing, Massachusetts has few.

Mr. Wheelock blames the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, which radically altered towns and cities in New England.

Many of the houses not torn down in that period were eventually victims of the urban renewal movement in the 1960s, when buildings in older neighborhoods were razed and replaced with new structures. Mr. Wheelock said Plymouth lost many Early American buildings through urban renewal.

Centuries ago, the archaeologists and Mr. Keyes said, the little house found itself caught up in earlier prominent trends: the practice of putting a series of additions on the original houses, and the practice of moving houses to new sites.

While still on the knoll, Mr. Keyes said, the original house—a one-story structure that measured all of 18 feet by 12 feet, four inches—received additions that included a second story and a salt box extension to the rear.

Sometime around 1800, Mr. Keyes said, the enlarged structure was moved to its current location a few feet from Water Street.

Owners continued to add sections to the house, including a two-story addition in 1928 that turned the structure into a full colonial.

In 2010, Tom and Melissa Keyes bought the property on Water Street, as well as another lot (containing the knoll) to the rear of the property.

Mr. Keyes said the house, which as far as they knew dated from 1817, had not been lived in for about 15 years. He said he and his wife contracted for what he called “a relatively mild rehabilitation” of the structure.

As the contractor began taking down 20th-century plaster and false walls, the little house began to reveal itself through its dark, rough-hewn beams at the front left corner of the house.

On the advice of the contractor, Mr. Keyes called in Mr. Wheelock, an archaeologist and a longtime caretaker of the Wing Fort House, an East Sandwich structure that dates to 1641.

According to Mr. Keyes, Mr. Wheelock's words when he first saw what the contractor had found were, “Uh oh.”

After further examination, Mr. Wheelock told Mr. Keyes that on a scale of one to 10, the chance that the house was built at least as early as 1650 was a “9.9.”

Next to be called in was Mr. Chartier, principal archaeologist at the Plymouth Archaelogical Rediscovery Project.

He had Mr. Keyes stand in the oldest room in the house, the one at the front left corner, and take a tape measure to help calculate the size of the room.

Hearing the measurements, Mr. Chartier told him, the room was a “12-4.”—one of the standard sizes for 17th-century houses.

The room, it turns out, was the original little house. The beams still were blackened and the walls and ceiling still were white, a common mid-1600s building style known as “harlequin.”

The little house's original attic still was contained within the newer envelope of the larger house. When the second story was added to the original structure, the attic simply was hoisted intact and placed on top of the second story.

Mr. Chartier and Mr. Wheelock began digging pits near the present house in an attempt to find centuries-old trash from the period.

They found trash in the pits but it was from the 1800s, not the 1600s.

The archaeologists then postulated that the little house had been moved from somewhere else, a common practice then in New England.

The knoll overlooking Shawme Lake—but which then was the undammed Shawme River—seemed the kind of spot that an early English colonist would have chosen.

They dug pits at the knoll, which in fact yielded trash from the 1600s.

But an even bigger discovery was in store for them.

One day, to provide a focus of interest for a visit by a group of 7th grade Sandwich students, the archaeologists began digging at some rocks.

The impromptu dig revealed a dual-sided masonry structure, what the archaeologists inferred was the original hearth of the little house, complete with a whale vertebrae on top that had been used by the colonists as a cutting board. A small, silver lady's brooch was found just to one side of the hearth.

Although much of the original material making up the hearth had been removed, probably for use elsewhere, enough remained to show its function.

On Tuesday morning, the archaeologists and Mr. Keyes continued to work the site at the knoll.

Mr. Keyes said the knoll has yielded not only artifacts from English colonists in the 1600s, but far older items, such as a still-sharp arrowhead that Mr. Keyes said dates from 1,000 years ago, and a counter-weight, a device to increase the throwing power of a spear that he said dates from 6,000 years ago.

Mr. Chartier said he hopes to conduct further digs on the knoll in hopes of turning up the former sites of likely outbuildings such as barns and sheds.

So who built the little house? Early property records for Cape Cod are spotty, thanks in large part to a disastrous fire at the Barnstable County Registry of Deeds.

But that has not stopped the archaeologists and Mr. Keyes from doing some historical detective work.

They know that the property containing the knoll was owned by the Tobey family, while the property to the north was owned by the Knott family.

And they know that Thomas Tobey married Martha Knott in 1650. Martha was the daughter of George Knott, one of the “ten men from Saugus” who founded Sandwich in 1637.

Their conclusion: that the little house would have been Thomas Tobey's home.

Their theory, they said they believe, is further strengthened by Thomas Tobey's will, which left one room in his house to one of his sons, and the other room to his second son. That would tie in with the double-sided hearth at the knoll site, with a room to each side of the hearth.

Mr. Keyes has no doubt about the value of what has been discovered and unearthed.

“It needs to be preserved and protected and learned from,” he said.

He recalled a comment that Mr. Wheelock made to him: “You know what history this house has seen? All of it.”