Brooks, Jonathan, House

The Jonathan Brooks House is located at the junction of High Street and Woburn Street, facing Judkins Square. Built c. 1781-91, it is one of the oldest houses in the area and was part of the eighteenth and nineteenth century rural area which grew up west of the larger settlement at Medford Square. The house, a 2½ story structure with a gambrel roof, is covered with gold/brown wooden shingles on the facade and north and west elevations, (originally added in the mid-nineteenth century) and with aluminum siding of the same color on the south elevation. The steeply pitched gambrel roof is covered with asphalt shingles and has three shed do rmers symmetrically placed on the roof facade. The house rests on a stone and brick foundation, covered with stucco.

The facade is five bays wide, with regular fenestration and 6/6 windows behind modern storm windows. A one bay enclosed central entrance porch has a gable facing the street. The front door is flanked by pilasters and topped by four modern bull's eye lights. The interior of the house retains many of its original features, including the raised panel walls in two of the second floor bedrooms and in the first floor room in the southwest ell. There are many original six panel doors, some brass hardward, and the original window seats in the northeast parlor. The house has two ells; a 1½ story structure set on a foundation of stuccoed stone to the southwest, and a 1 story shed attached at a forty-five degree angle to the northwest corner of the main structure.

The structure and details indicate that it may have served as a passage to a connecting barn or other out building, since demolished.

/ARCHITECT STATEMENT OF SIGNIFICANCE The Jonathan Brooks House is significant as one of the few remaining eighteenth century houses in Medford, and for its long association with the Brooks family, who dominated Medford history throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The house was somewhat altered in the mid-nineteenth century but retains most of its original fabric, both exterior and interior, though the former is now covered. Various local sources assign dates as early as 1692 to the oldest part of the house, though this has not been verified. It is known that in 1768 when Jonathan Bradshaw, Jr., sold the property to Jonathan Patten, a "Frame covered with Boards" built by Bradshaw, stood on the property.

This frame stood on the site of the south side and southwest ell of the present house. In 1781 Patten sold the property to Thomas Brooks III. Between 1781 and 1791 Thomas Brooks III sold the property to Thomas Brooks, Jr., who in turn, sold it to his son, Jonathan, in 1791. The 1791 deed specifically mentions a house and barn on the land, suggesting that the - house, as it now stands, was built between 1781 and 1791, onto the existing cottage. Jonathan Brooks was a member of the wealthy Brooks family, who owned most of West Medford in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jonathan owned a tanning yard near High and Canal Streets until his marriage in 1791 to Elizabeth Albree.

After his marriage he moved his tannery to Whitman Road, where his wife's brothers, John and Samuel Albree, had run a tanning yard since the 1780's. Brooks kept his business at this location until 1837 when he sold both his house and the "Tanyard Place" to his son Charles.