Looking Back

R. Swain Gifford, Howland House at Round Hill, circa 1890. Dry plate glass negative. NBWM 1981.34.176

Swain Gifford took this photograph of the Benjamin Howland (1659-1726) and Judith Sampson Howland (1664-1759) house at Round Hill Farm, South Dartmouth, sometime between 1886-1905. In addition to his prowess as a draftsman and painter, Gifford took an interest in photography evidently enjoying landscape scenes of the local South Dartmouth neighborhood and the Elizabeth Islands. A large number of his dryplate negatives of such scenes survive in the New Bedford Whaling Museum collection. This particular cluster of buildings stood since the colonial era and were long considered among the more historic and picturesque of the Old Dartmouth First Period houses. In 1695 Benjamin Howland bought an “indefinite tract of land” from Dartmouth township freeman John Russell (1608-1695) in the region of “Salt-house Point,” later “Salter’s Point.” It became known as the Benjamin Howland Homestead. Benjamin’s son Barnabas (1699-1773) inherited the property and built the gambrel-roof central portion in the 1720s. His grandson Stephen (17641854) built the two-story addition before 1800. The house and property remained in the family down the generations until Hetty Green (1834-1916) eventually inherited it, and her son, Edward H.R. “Colonel” Green (1868-1936) lived on the property well into the twentieth century. In 1969 the house was dismantled and reassembled in Newport, RI, at 6 Bridge Street, under the auspices of the Newport Restoration Foundation.

18 Johnny Cake Hill New Bedford, MA 02740 www.whalingmuseum.org