After our April meeting when some members brought pictures of places that are gone, I started thinking of some of the buildings that were a part of Rochester history, but are no longer here and wondering what became of some of them. If we go back to 1710, there was Whitehall, also known as the White House. It was the imposing residence of Samuel Prince. While not one of the original proprietors, Prince, early on bought up many lots and at one time was Rochester’s largest landowner, he was active in the community until moving to Middleboro in 1723. After the Prince family moved, the house stood empty for many years. It is said that during the Revolutionary War, the floorboards were removed before the house was demolished. The boards were used “to procure materials for making saltpeter for use of the army.”
The Savory house which many consider to have been Rochester’s oldest house was at some time dismantled and the pieces were taken to Barnstable and are believed to be part of the Patuxet Trading Post. Of all the town’s buildings, those that housed mill machinery seem to have fared the worst. Rochester had many mills, among them the Sippican, Church, Hathaway, Rounseville, and Stillwater Mills. Some, like Rounseville’s burned, while others succumbed to the ravages of time. The only building at the original Hartley Sawmill site is the office, but Henry Hartley has given that mill new life on Vaughan Hill Rd.
While the Union Meeting House, a Methodist church is no longer around having been destroyed by fire, we are lucky to still have three historic church buildings in town. They are the First Congregational Church of Rochester whose current building was erected in 1837, the North Rochester Congregational Church constructed around 1841 and the East Rochester Congregational Church built in 1857 and now home to the Rochester Historical Society Museum.
As anyone who’s been involved with an old building knows, upkeep is both constant and expensive which can be difficult for a nonprofit as small as our society. Fortunately, for us there are volunteers like Art Benner and Mack Phinney, who fix everything from running toilets to shaky windows or patch holes made by a woodpecker with no respect for historical buildings. However, some jobs need to be done by professionals, particularly if they have to be done forty feet in the air. When we noticed puddles in the basement, we knew something needed to be done to our blocked gutters. The historical society is so thankful to the Southcoast Gutter Monkey team that cheerfully and expertly cleared our blocked gutters at no cost to us. Because of the company’s generosity, we will have more financial resources for the next, inevitable repair.
By Connie Eshbach