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The Orchard House

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years, 10 months ago

 

(13) The Orchard House possibly the first Wing Homestead (Owl 1976, pp. 4240-2; 1994 pp. 5071-2)

 

Deborah (Bachiler) Wing and John Wing (1637 – c1647)

     The first homes in the colonies were crude structures. One only has to visit Plimouth Plantation to see how rudimentary these early structures were. When Sandwich was first settled, John was the only Wing brother to be of legal age. Given the fact he (and not mother Deborah) was credited as selling their home in Lynn to William Tilton, it is likely the original homestead was likewise granted to him. When he moved to Yarmouth about 10 years later, the property probably reverted back to the Town of Sandwich.

There are many references to the fact widow Deborah Bachilor Wing and her four sons settled somewhere just east of the short stream that flowed through the center of early Sandwich…. The Wings and the Edward Dillingham family were near neighbors in what was called the “Upper Field” by the late Charles Dillingham. The first houses they built were doubtless like those of the rest of the new town, a frame of heavy beams resting on corner rocks, with a dirt floor later boarded over, and the space under the beams filled with sod to keep out the draft. These early rough shelters did not survive for long because the bottom rotted quickly, but they served until the farm was established and a bigger and better built house could be raised on a permanent foundation of split fieldstones. Even with these, there was no full cellar, only a deep root cellar. (Owl 1976, p. 4240)

 

[poss.]  Lydia Wing Hamilton Abbott (c1677-p1704)

     According to Three Families of Heritage: A Short History of Heritage Plantation Lydia Wing, the second daughter of Daniel Wing, moved back to Sandwich, Mass. (from Rhode Island) about 1677, after the death of her first husband, Thomas Hamilton.  Lydia lived on a plot of land that was thought to be common land owned by the town in a primitive dwelling adjacent to former Indian planting fields. The plot of land she occupied was part of the present Heritage Plantation property located near where the Military Museum is now located, just south of what is now Upper Shawme Pond.

 

Several attempts were made by her family and the Quakers to relocate Lydia (or at least help her and her children).  She remarried John Abbott before 1685.

 

The last known reference to “Lidy Abit” is as a witness to a Quaker wedding in 1704. In 1709 the town granted John Abbott ten acres of land adjacent to the side “where his dwelling house now stands,” with no reference to a wife. This seems to indicate that Lydia had died sometime before this transaction… John Abbott must have died by 1714 when his grants were declared extinct. No record has yet been found of a reissue of his thirteen acres, but they were surrounded by Wing lands as Lydia Abbott’s brother, Daniel, Jr. and his sons, Samuel and Zaccheus, assembled large acreage as a family center. One of the three houses on this rapidly growing Wing property was the improved former house of Lydia which became known as the Orchard House. (The old Indian planting fields had become an orchard where later 40 varieties of apples were grown.) (Heritage Plantation)

 

It is possible this “primitive” dwelling may have been the original residence of the Wing family when they moved to Sandwich in 1638.  [This house] was bought and re-erected by Elisha and Lemuel Pope as an ell to the large new house they were building at 14/16 Grove Street in Sandwich [circa 1784]… At the time of the re-erection of this ell, the Sandwich Quaker community considered that it might have been the house of the matriarch, Deborah Wing, and a group of Wing descendants at a Quarterly Meeting in Sandwich went to the building and were given permission to hold a memorial service in the unfinished ell. (Owl 1994, p. 5072)

 

Samuel Wing (c1715-1732) son of Daniel Wing Jr. and nephew of Lydia (Wing) Hamilton Abbott

The Orchard House was occupied by Samuel Wing and his wife and six children. Samuel died suddenly in 1732 without a will so that the probate court granted title to his property collectively to his six children, his widow having remarried. (Heritage Plantation)

 

Samuel Wing (1690-1732) married Dorothy Clifton in 1721 and lived all his life in Sandwich. He died young in 1732, and there is no indication that he built a new house. Our assumption is that he farmed from Deborah's house. He died intestate, but he is described as living in the orchard, east of his brother Zaccheus. We know that Zaccheus had already established residence in 1731 in part of Daniel Junior's house. So, unless we assume an extra house nearer the stream below Daniel Junior's house, the description of Samuel's home exactly fits Deborah's house. (Owl SEP 1903, p. 197)

                 

[wrong house] We present as a frontspiece with this issue a picture of the "Old Samuel Wing Home" on lower Lake Shawme at Sandwich. The antiquity of this old home is generally conceded and it is believed to have been built and lived in by Samuel, the second son of Daniel, after his marriage to Dorothy Clifton in 1724 {sic}. After the death of Samuel, his three sons (Daniel, Samuel and Barnabas) seem to have moved over into Dartmouth, and the old homestead on Lake Shawme appears to have come into the possession of Samuel's brother Zaccheus, who also owned the old Daniel Wing home just over the hill. Zaccheus' grandson Samuel, who married Anna Rogers in 1799, is known to have lived in the old home, as did also Samuel's son Stephen Rogers during the years of his life. This venerable home is now (1922) the property of Asa Shove Wing of Philadelphia, son of Stephen Rogers. (Owl, MAR 1922, p. 2150)

 

Zaccheus Wing (c1750-1784)

The joint ownership by all six heirs, all of whom had married and were living outside Sandwich, made it nearly impossible to market a share, but Zaccheus Wing (brother to Samuel and uncle to the heirs) was determined to keep the Orchard House and its land in the local family. Accordingly, between 1747 and 1752 he bought, at prices substantially over assessed value, the six shares (one for 2/7, the other five for 1/7 each) of the whole property. (These six unusual deeds survived as a set and in 1976 were donated with other manuscripts to the New England Historic Genealogical Society.)

 

Zaccheus died in 1784 and the Orchard House, after periods of rental and non-use, was unsentimentally sold in 1794 for removal. It was bought and re-erected by Elisha and Lemuel Pope as an ell to the large new house they were building at 14/16 Grove Street, Sandwich. The house and ell are there today. (Heritage Plantation)

 

He purchased his father’s property from the heirs of his brother, Samuel, between 1742 – 1750. (Deeds found in the Elizabeth B. Hall [manuscript] collection at the NEHGS Library in Boston.  [Call No. Mss A D33, Nos. 1-6]) Zaccheus Wing, son of Daniel3, who succeeded to the possession of his father's homestead at Sandwich, was a slaveholder. Of this we have the indubitable proof in a time-stained document now in the possession of one of his descendants -- Mrs. Elizabeth Hoxie Ware of East Sandwich. (Owl, DEC 1909, p. 856 [gives full copy of text])

 

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