Celebrating 100 Years at Browne House

by DAVID ACHENBACH, Lead Guide, Browne House

It’s a landmark year for Browne House in Watertown, Massachusetts—2024 marks its 100th anniversary as a museum. Built between 1694 and 1701, Browne House features rare surviving architectural elements from the late seventeenth century.

Browne House is important in the history of historic preservation for its role in the establishment of a “scientific” approach within what was at the time an emerging discipline. In a near ruinous state when Historic New England founder William Sumner Appleton acquired it in 1919, the house was painstakingly brought back to life in what is generally considered the first fully documented building restoration in the United States.

Browne House as it looks today, one hundred years after becoming a museum. Photograph by Jeff Bousquet.

Preservationists may be familiar with Appleton’s restoration methodology, but the way he funded the emerging science of preservation is less well known. To pay the bills, Appleton rented out Historic New England properties for commercial and residential uses. And so it came to pass that Browne House, like several other Historic New England properties (most prominently, Swett-Ilsley House in Newbury, Massachusetts), operated as a tea room for several years.

Tea rooms sprang up on well-traveled roads in the early days of recreational automobiling to serve motorists looking for light refreshment in a wholesome atmosphere. The proliferation of tea rooms coincided with the peak in popularity of the Colonial Revival style in architecture and interior decoration, and they were commonly found in historic structures such as houses, barns, and mills. Tea rooms were primarily women-owned businesses, often combined with gift shops or activities oriented to a female clientele, such as fortune-telling or mahjong. In the 1910s and 1920s, in fact, women’s magazines frequently published articles explaining the economics of running a tea room.

Interior of Browne House during the period it was used as a tea room, August 1924. Photograph by George Brayton.

We don’t know what drew Celestia Lapham and Susie Burnham to the trade, but both women served as museum curators and tea room hostesses at Browne House in the 1920s. In 1924—the year Browne House opened as a museum—the Watertown Sun reported that Lapham, who lived at Browne House with her widowed mother, planned to serve food downstairs with the upstairs “reserved for mah-jong and other fastidious festivities.” In 1927, The Boston Globe reported Burnham served “a lunch of dainty sandwiches, fruit cake and coffee” at a meeting of the Colonial Wars Society, “while a cozy glow was cast upon the scene by a crackling fire.”

Today, Browne House still operates as a museum, but guides wouldn’t dare risk lighting even a small fire in the enormous fireplace. And while you can’t get a sandwich, dainty or otherwise, you can see how an eighteenth-century farming family lived and learn about the evolution of the “science” of preservation.

Browne House is closed for the season, but we invite you to visit in 2025. To learn more about William Sumner Appleton’s scientific restoration techniques, read “The Abraham Browne House: A Preservation Icon” in our Winter 2005/Spring 2006 issue, available online at issuu.com/historicnewengland.