"Shipcote"

John Souther, Sr. built 4 houses on the corners of Ship (formerly Fish) and Cottage Streets in Hingham, Plymouth, MA. He made his home at 31 Ship Street. The current owners of the home, Donald Robert and Grace LETTIS have been living in the home since 1967 and were kind enough to share with me some historical background about the home and the SOUTHER family.

The John Souther House

31 Ship Street
(current home of Donald and Grace Lettis)

"This pleasant Colonial house facing on Hingham Harbor was built in 1792 by John SOUTHER. Captain Francis BARKER of the Old Ordinary owned a large amount of land around here and operated a shipyard in the marsh below from several small buildings situated where the house now is. He sold it all to SOUTHER in 1791 for £118. SOUTHER was a privateer in the Revolutionary War. He was captured by the British and held on a prison ship in New York harbor where he contracted small pox and the itch!"

SOUTHER's son, John SOUTHER Jr., moved the shipyard to Quincy in 1815 but the family retained the home. In the 1840's and 1850's Leavitt SOUTHER sold parts of the property at auction but the house remained in the family until 1888. At that time it was acquired by George WRIGHT. (George WRIGHT married 2nd to Emma Maria SOUTHER and third to Sarah Ann SOUTHER, both daughters of Leavitt SOUTHER). In 1924 Elizabeth COATSWORTH bought the property and she and her husband, Henry BESTON, both well known authors, lived there until the 1940's when they gradually began to spend all their time in Maine. The house was rented to many tenants until Donald & Grace LETTIS bought it from the COATSWORTH estate in 1983.

Elizabeth COATSWORTH named the house "Shipcote" and she wrote lovingly of it in her book South Shore Town. She had renovated it in 1926. The fireplace then in the old kitchen (now the living room) was removed to reveal the original one with its beehive oven and the maps on the wall above it were probably installed at that time. Also then the wallpaper with peacocks was hung in the dining room. The panels in the front parlor came from China.

Ms. COATSWORTH had her desk in the southwest corner of the living room and one may see the hole where she had a speaking tube to communicate with the kitchen. In the front hall is a spyglass and a knife, said to have belonged to the privateer, which are to stay with the house.

Mr. and Mrs. LETTIS have been living here since 1967 but they were only able to buy the house in 1983. They installed the new kitchen and they have been lovingly and carefully restoring the entire house.

"Each house has its personality, and some are hard and even wicked and some are kind. When I first walked through Shipcote and saw it wide, low rooms, its ample fireplaces in their paneled walls, and how the sun flooded into all its southern windows, and the bay stretched before all its northern windows, I thought, "What a gentle house in which to live and die." And that is still my thought after many years of rather intermittent living in it. The eighteenth century built houses for human beings, fitted to the spirit, as no other century even succeeded in doing. Spacious, clear, and untroubled are all the lines; even proportion is naturally right. Some people say that in America one reason for this is that the local builders got their plans from drawings made by eminent British architect, but the cause is deeper than that. Man must have reached some felicitous equilibrium in himself during that century, which is reflected in everything which his hand touched."

The Parlor

When baseboard heat was installed in this room we discovered stenciling under a large board used to support the old radiator. So the parlor, the "best" room of this old house, had a stenciled floor as well as dentilation along the ceiling and on the mantel. Elizabeth COATSWORTH placed the eighteenth century Chinese scrolls on the walls. She had purchased them on her trip to China during the first World War. It was called the Music Room by the former owners.

The Kitchen

We discovered several things when renovating the 1925 kitchen. First, the ell had originally been a one story shed. We found this out when the siding was removed. At some point in time a second story had been added and these newly created rooms were used as servant's quarters. Before the ell became the kitchen it was the woodshed and household laundry. By the west wall, under the large screw eye in the ceiling, was the well. It has since been filled in but provided drinking and cooking water for the house. Water for washing clothes came from another source. We discovered in the basement a large bottle-shaped cistern built into the wall and located under the present sink. On the south wall is "...a great copper pot set in soapstone, with a copper lid and a place for building a fire beneath it, where clothes must once have been boiled and soap made by the women of the household."

We found that the wall between the kitchen and the living room had bricks set within the structure of the posts. The Red Lion Inn in Cohasset has the same type of construction. This clay brick construction was for the purpose of insulation and gives us another clue that the shed had been set against an outside wall after the original structure had been built.

In modernizing the kitchen we retained most of the original character of the room. The old woodbox, the configuration of the pantry and the washtub were saved. The enclosed stairway was opened and the solid door used for the closet. The grillwork for the new stairs was modeled after the bar cage at the "Old Ordinary", adding light and size to that part of the room.

The blue pie safe in the corner came from my grandmother's farm in the town of New Lisban, Otsego County, New York. Many of the old family pieces in the house came from the same source.

The Living Room

The living room was the original kitchen and keeping room of Shipcote. At each end were birthing rooms which shared the heat from the large fireplace. The beehive oven and the present fireplace were constructions of the 1920's, when the house was extensively renovated. The original fireplace must have been more extensive and utilitarian than the present facility to accommodate kitchen tasks of the time. The old map of the world and the bookcases were installed during this reconstruction. Elizabeth COATSWORTH used this room for her workroom. Her desk was located at the far end (southwest corner). A picture of her working at her "butler's desk" hangs on the wall in that corner. Just above the wainscot is located the hole into which fitted a speaking tube to the kitchen, used to talk with her maid/cook, Lalitha.

The Front Hall

The focus of the hall is John SOUTHER's telescope holder. While the holder is original, the old telescope has been replaced by another. The sailor's knife is like those worn by privateers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, a profession the former owner is said to have participated in at that time.

The view from the front door has changed little in two hundred years. Gone is the SOUTHER Shipyard below the road, but Sarah, Langly, Ragged and Button Islands, as well as World's End look much the same.

We added the stenciling to this room and to two rooms upstairs. We used ideas from a pattern book of the 1790 to 1820 era to show what might have been had Moses EATON, Jr. passed this way.

The East Bedroom

Before this room was renovated, Grace and I had visited Hancock Village just outside of Pittsfield, Massachusetts. We were so taken with the Shaker architecture and crafts that we decided that one room of our house had to reflect these simple things. A second influence, shown in the stenciling, was Shipcote's connection to the sea. "Patience - Faith - Openness, is what the sea has to teach. Simplicity - Solitude - Intermittency. . . But there are other beaches to explore. There are more shells to find. This is only a beginning." These words of Anne Morrow LINDBERGN describe "Shipcote" for us. The shells and the Shaker character remind us of its openness and simplicity.

The South Bedroom

This room, which we use as a sitting room/guest bedroom, was divided into smaller rooms at one time. We found evidence of this while renovating which leads us to believe that this was once a rooming house in the early part of this century. Many old houses in this part of town were used for this purpose well into the 1930's.

The stenciling is a copy of a freeze found in the Franklin PIERCE Homestead in Hillsboro, New Hampshire, done some time prior to 1822. This would be in keeping with the time Shipcote was built. The fireplace mantel appears to be one of two original in the house. The other is in the east bedroom.

The West Bedroom

"...One may look...straight out across elm branches to the changing harbor and note every tide and wind and visitation of passing birds, or lie listening to the mournful mooing of the fog horn..." It is this room, her bed changer, that Elizabeth COATSWORTH writes in South Shore Town. Bedtime stories were told to her children and Christmas gifts were opened here on a large, curtained four-poster bed. The story she tells about sighting a swan from this window is delightful.

"At the end of June Margaret was born, and sometime in July I was back in my own room, looking out over the harbor. That day the baby was with me asleep. The house was quiet with the drowsy quiet of summer. Glancing idly from my front windows, I suddenly stiffened a the sight of a large white bird floating in the inlet in the lea of Goose Neck. This lies just below our house, a long stone's throw from where I stood in the peaceful chamber looking out. I could scarcely trust my eyes, but I knew that the bird was a swan, feeding so close to shore that its great breast must almost have been grounded in the shallows. There is a pond on the Cape called Swan Pond, and people sometimes report a distant flight of swans seen from the beaches far offshore, but never have I met anyone who has come upon a wild swan in these parts. But here the creature was, as tranquil as the reflection of a cloud. Here it was in midsummer curving its lovely throat, floating here and there, pausing, darting down its proud head into the water.

After a time I called Lalitha, who came up from the kitchen. I not only wanted her to see this marvel, but I wish evidence beside my own to prove that I had really seen what I though I had seen. 'What is that?' I asked. And Lalitha looked and said, 'That's sure a swan, Miss Betty.'

And then she returned to the more absorbing interests of her kitchen. But the baby and I remained watching the swan - not that the baby's kitten-blue eyes could really see that far, but I picked her up to look out, for somehow the swan belonged to her. For an hour I gazed dreamily forth upon that dream. A unicorn pacing down Otis Street would have scarcely seemed more visionary. And at the end of an hour, the swan turned from its shallows and slowly, tranquilly floated away. Between Sarah and Langley Islands I could still see it like a white water lily on the blue bay, and far out almost to Hull I caught glimpses of it like a star which appears and disappears in the blue sky of dawn. Then it was gone, the vision was gone, and from that day to this I have never seen it again"

Richard Dennis Souther
Souther Family Association
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