Photograph by Historical Perspective, Public domain. Via
Wikimedia Commons.
Plymouth Antiquarian House
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in
1974. A historic map-sheet match is not published yet. The record needs a coordinate-quality review before it can be joined to a sheet boundary.
From the record
“The Plymouth Antiquarian House is an historic house museum in Plymouth, Massachusetts owned by the Plymouth Antiquarian Society.”
Wikipedia article Plymouth Antiquarian House, CC BY-SA 4.0.
one of 93 National Register listings in Plymouth County · listed in 1974 · category: Building · one of 1 National Historic Landmarks in Plymouth County.
National Register reference number.74002034- the number the National Park Service assigned this property when it was listed, and the key its nomination file is catalogued under at the National Archives.
In preparing the work the records of the town of Bridgewater, and of its several parishes and churches, have been the first and principal sources, whence the materials have been derived. The old Colony and Plymouth county records have furnished also valuable information. Judge Davis' improved edition of Morton's, New England Memorial, Farmer's Register, the Collections of the Mass. Hist. Society, and various local histories have also been advantageously consulted. But so many and so various have been the sources, both public and private, from which information and facts have been obtained, that it would be difficult, if recollected, to enumerate them. The loss of all the early records of Duxbury previous to 1G54, which are said to have been burnt, is greatly to be regretted, as it was the parent town of Bridgewater, the first home and residence in this country of most of our fathers and original settlers in this then Plantation. It may well be supposed those records would have furnished us with much valuable information. The Colony records of births and deaths previous to 1CI7 are also lost, some of the first leaves by time or accident having been destroyed, which to the antiquarian is a deprivation much to be deplored.
Bridgewater was originally a plantation granted to Duxbury. When the township of Marshfield became a separate and distinct corporation, Duxbury, from which Marshfield had been principally taken, applied to the Old Colony court, at Plymouth, for a grant of common land, or, as they expressed it, " an extension to the westward," as a compensation for the great loss of territory they had thus sustained. We find in the records the following order of court relating to it : -
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. The
federal wildfire occurrence database
lists 322 fires within 5 miles of Plymouth Antiquarian House between
2015 and 2020, burning about 99 acres in total. 3 started naturally. 4 were recorded as arson.
Distance is straight-line from the map coordinates, so a fire counted
here may appear on a neighbouring settlement's page as well.
Reported cause
Fires
Debris and open burning
212
Missing data/not specified/undetermined
61
Misuse of fire by a minor
30
Recreation and ceremony
5
Arson/incendiarism
4
Natural
3
Smoking
3
Equipment and vehicle use
2
Fireworks
1
Power generation/transmission/distribution
1
The most recent of
them, most recent first, with the day each was reported and the service
that recorded it.
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. Museums hold 2,431 specimens
collected within 10 miles of Plymouth Antiquarian House between 1816 and
1975: 1,767 Animalia, 404 Plantae, 180 Fungi, 59 Chromista, 14 Protozoa, 7 Unrecorded. 12 distinct Species records are shown.
Collected by -- Russell, A., A. C. Mathieson and others. Each is a
physical object with a catalogue
number, and each entry opens the museum's record. This is what was
collected and kept, not a survey of what lives here - nothing can be
concluded from a species being absent.
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. The federal mineral resources record lists
4 workings within 5 miles of Plymouth Antiquarian House: 2 past producers, 2 producers.
2 still produce. What was taken out: Sand and Gravel, Construction. Distance is straight-line from the
map coordinates, so a quarry counted here may appear on a neighbouring
settlement's page as well.
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. The National Weather Service names
Plymouth, the town this property stands in, in 43 storm reports between 1997 and 2023: 13 hail, 10 thunderstorm wind, 7 heavy rain, 4 flood.
The reports record 1 death. Each account below is quoted exactly as the forecast office
filed it, from the NOAA Storm Events Database, and each date
opens the federal record of that event.
Police reported a road flooded, with water half-way up the doors of a car. Street unspecified. Report relayed by amateur radio. The public reported 2.07 of rain with this localized storm.
No historic map-sheet match is published
for this property yet. That does not mean no map exists. This record needs
a coordinate-quality review before it can be joined to a sheet boundary.
Browse the county's mapped places while that work is
pending.
From the nomination file
2,003 words on record
When this property was proposed for the
National Register, someone wrote the case for it: what the building is,
and why it matters. That document is a federal record in the public domain.
It is quoted below word for word, never summarised. The text was read off the scanned case file by machine, so the
occasional stray character is the recogniser's and the 1970s
typewriter's.
Description of the property
- Ruins X Moved - Unexposed (Check One) - Original Site The 1809 Plymouth Antiguarian House faces east on a slight rise overlooking Plymouth Harbor, flanked and fronted by modern commercial development. The two-story main section of the house has a truncated hip roof/and forms an elongated octagon, running from north to south. It is Federal in style, as is the three-story ridge roof ell which extends from the northwest rear corner. A variety of fabrics cover the exterior walls. The facade's first story is covered with horizontal flush boarding. The second story and ell are clapboard but the south side of the main house and part of the ell are exposed brick. A delicate dentiled Ionic porch fronts the first floor of the facade and is topped by a small balustrade.
The octagonal entrance hall repeats the design of the main house and extends out under the porch so that the doorway.is flush with the porch columns. The main house has two end chimneys; the ell has two interior chimneys. The facade is 7 bays wide with 6/6 sash. The entrance door is flanked by two 4/4 windows and above it, on the second floor, is a 6/6 window flanked by two narrow 2/2 windows. The house is 7 bays deep, first floor windows being 6/6'and second and third floor windows being 8/12 and 8/8 respectively. The entrance door opens into an octagonal hall with stairway, which is flanked by an octagonal parlor and an octagonal keeping room. Over these two rooms, on the second floor, are two bedrooms, a sewing room, and a dressing room.
The first floor of the ell contains a dining room, kitchen, summer kitchen and carriage shed. The top two floors of the ell house bedrooms.
Quoted from the National Register nomination
for reference 74002034, 9 pages, held by the National Archives in Record
Group 79. See the
catalogue record.
Listed places nearby
6 within 8 miles
Other National Register properties close
enough to walk or drive between, ordered by distance from this one. Both
positions come from the same geocoding pass that matched these properties
to their map sheets.
Listing record. National Park Service National Register of Historic Places, listed-properties dataset, current to 2026-05-22.
Map join. Address geocoded through the United States Census geocoder, then tested against the published boundary of every sheet in the USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection.
How this page is made. Listing fields come from federal records; map-sheet coverage is a labelled coordinate-to-boundary calculation, not a source-field claim.
Wildfire. Short, Karen C. 2022. Spatial wildfire occurrence data for the United States, 1992-2020 [FPA_FOD_20221014]. 6th Edition. Fort Collins, CO: Forest Service Research Data Archive. https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2013-0009.6 Collected with United States Government funding and usable without additional permissions or fees.
Specimens. Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), https://www.gbif.org/. Only records licensed CC0 or CC BY are used. Records licensed CC BY-NC are excluded because this site carries advertising. Images are checked individually and any whose licence is non-commercial, no-derivatives or unreadable is refused.
Mines and quarries. USGS Mineral Resources Data System (MRDS) https://mrdata.usgs.gov/mrds/ A work of the United States government, no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105.
Storms. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Storm Events Database https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/stormevents/ A work of the United States government, no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105. Narratives are quoted verbatim from the National Weather Service report and are not edited or summarised.
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