Stone, Joseph, House

The Joseph Stone Farm is set back about 100 feet from Stone Street in the southern part of Auburn, Massachusetts. The house sits on the crest of a flat-topped 1ow terrace, on a five-acre lot. The land within 100 feet of the house is level and supports substantial tree growth. The lot's eastern boundary is marked by a steep drop off, with a 50-foot change in elevation. The southern and southeastern parts of the lot gradually drop off into Stone Brook Valley, about 60 feet below the house site. The western boundary is about 25 feet from Stone Brook, which flows 200 feet below the edge of the property line. The house is a five-bay, 1 1/2-story cottage with a central entrance. A large chimney is set on the ridge of the steep-pitched gable roof.

The house was built in 1729 as a three-bay half house with side entrance and end chimney; the two southern bays were added in 1790. A seven-bay ell extends to the west at a right angle to the main block. Believed originally to have been a leanto, added in 1790, the ell was altered in 1886and enlarged in 1946. The house rests on a fieldstone foundation, and has a below-grade basement. The basement extends completely under the house, with the exception of the central infeteny fndend the nouse" chimney area, which is underlain by a 15 by 20 foot unexcavated stone-walled area. The building's exterior fabric at present is cedar shingles applied in a scallop pattern, ca. 1873, and is now painted. Asbestos shingles cover the roof.

The main elevation, which faces east (at a right angle to the present roadway), is dominated by the simply enframed center doorway; the door itself, which includes a fanlight, is a Colonial Revival-style 20th century alteration.

(in one paragraph) Builder Architect Unknown The Joseph Stone House, Auburn, retains integrity of location, design, setting, intact colonial-period cottage whose present form reflects two stages of 18th 1729, and is believed to be the oldest surviving residence in Auburn. The building was enlarged in 1790 by a leanto, altered in 1886 and enlarged again in 1946. Among the building's many owners was Joseph Stone, who owned the nouse from 1/85 to 1826, and was a prolific composer of psalmody (the choral setting of sacred texts). The Stone House thus fulfils Criteria B and C of the National Register of Historic Places on the local level. CETEE Auburn was incorporated as the town of Ward in 1778 (renamed Auburn in 1837), and little information exists on its earliest settlement by Europeans.

The first white settled arrived in the 1720s and included a man named Lord who is believed to have built the nominated property on a 52-acre plot ca. 1729. In the late 17th century, the area was the site of the native American village known as Pakachoag (its center was located two miles from the nominated property), and local history has it that the Stone House sits by an early trail that led from the Nipmuck village at Pakachoag Hill to the earliest Auburn Tils bel ver is unsuostant ated, Mid 18th century Auburn was sparsely settled, a peripheral agricultural area with Woodstock Road, leading from Woodstock, Connecticut, to Worcester, as one of the few roadways through the town.

On the eve of the Revolutionary War, the house may have been owned by a Tory, Theophilus Lilly, who left his family for Boston in April 1775 and, eventually, Nova Scotia, where he later died.