Morse, Amos, House

About this property

The Amos Morse House was a historic house at 77 North Street in Foxborough, Massachusetts. It was a two-story wood-frame house, five bays wide, with a hip roof and twin interior chimneys. It was a center entry, Federal Colonial design. It was built circa 1803 by Amos Morse, Sr., for his children, Amos Jr. and Sarah. One of its ells was used by the Morses as a shop for producing straw hats, a significant industry in early 19th-century Foxborough. The house was demolished on December 20, 2019. The Kraft Group had purchased the property in 2002 while planning for expansion of the New England Patriots' home stadium. The building fell into disrepair over the years until deemed unsafe by the Kraft Group which announced their intent to demolish the building in late 2018. The town and the Kraft Group sought other alternatives over the years and also during a 6-month moratorium of the demolition, but none was agreed on. == National Register of Historic Places designation == The house was submitted for the National Register of Historic Places in November 1985, by historic preservation consultant Mary Pyne, in conjunction with owners Thomas Deakins and Carol Nathan. The Amos Morse house is situated in rural North Foxboro on a partially wooded three-acre site. The house, which faces north, is set back 33 feet from North Street on a low rise. Abutting the lot to the rear (south) is Crack Rock Pond, a man made (1734) pond fed by headwaters of the Neponset River that is today a small part of the Neponset Reservoir system. The tracks of the N.Y., N.H., and Hartford Railroad border the property to the east, while to the west are open fields. Built circa 1803, the Amos Morse house is an imposing, vernacular example of Federal-period architecture. The building consists of a two-story, hipped roof main block, with symmetrical fenestration, flanked by two asymmetrical 1 1/2 story, gable roofed wings (added circa 1820). A barn and garage, built circa 1848 and 1950, respectively, are located to the south of the house. Essentially intact, the house retains the integrity of location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, and association. It is one of the few intact Federal-period dwellings of such size and scale in Foxboro, and, with its two prominent linear wings, is an extremely rare building both in Foxboro and in Massachusetts as a whole. The house holds associations with the growth of industry in Foxboro and it's evolution from a small, relatively undeveloped agricultural community in the late 18th century to a major regional center for the manufacture of straw goods in the 19th century. The Amos Morse House thus fulfills Criteria A and C of the National Register of Historic Places on the local level.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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