NEWBURY – A few days before the town of Newbury designated the small neighborhood surrounding the Lower Green as a historic district, the back rooms of one of the new district’s most prominent historic homes were damaged by a fire.
On April 30, the Newbury Fire Department, assisted by several North Shore fire crews, extinguished the fire quickly in the 18th century home at 7 Lower Green. The state Fire Marshall is not expected to rule the official cause of the fire for another week, but Newbury Chief Dave Evans said it appeared to have been started by an overheated machine.
Evans said the crews arrived quickly and contained the fire. The house was empty and no one was hurt, Evans said. There appears to be a lot of smoke damage, but the front rooms, the original home, were not burned, and the crews tried not to cause damage by water and broken windows, he said.
The house was sold in January by Realtor Casey Peicott with Keller Williams Evolution to new owners from western Massachusetts, who were among six bidders for the house, listed at $950,000. The new owners are living in Newburyport while renovations were being made, including newly stained flooring.
The Newbury commission to oversee the new district, which was approved on a vote of 188 to 19 only on Tuesday night, has not yet been formed.
Built originally in 1728, as the Seddon Tavern that served locals and guests traveling between Boston and Portsmouth, NH, the 2,356-square-foot home once sat in the path of what today is State Rte. 1A.
Then owner Florence Bushee, a conservationist and philanthropist who was the daughter of a Boston banker, moved the house in 1933 to its current site facing the Lower Green, which has one of the nation’s last remaining single-room schoolhouses.
In her 50-plus years in Newbury, Bushee dedicated herself to preservation. In addition to renovating this home, she also renovated the 1715 Dole-Little House, and she donated more than 200 acres of the estate to the Trustees of Reservations to create Old Town Hill, a 3-mile network of trails near her home on Newman Road.
The fire was not the house’s first. Portions of it burned in the 1940s, and Bushee hired restoration carpenter, Roy Baker, who rebuilt Sudbury’s Wayside Inn for industrialist Henry Ford.
Adjacent to the house, just minutes from the Parker River, is the Newman Farm Pasture, which was donated to the Greenbelt, after local residents raised $500,000 to keep it from being developed.
The previous owners, Dr. and Ms. Gerald Mingon, who purchased the house in 2004, disassembled a building that housed a barrel maker shop in South Berwick, ME, and reassembled it as an addition to the house, complete with original flooring and stairs.
It was the area where the two structures joined that the fire occurred, Evans said.
In addition to the protections provided by the new historic district, the home is subject to restrictions enhanced by covenants with The Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities.
Assisting the Newbury Fire Department were fire crews from Amesbury, Newburyport, Salisbury, Georgetown and Rowley, as well as Cataldo Ambulance. The Groveland, Ipswich and West Newbury departments provided station coverage and responded to two medical emergencies, Chief Evans said. National Grid was on scene to assist in the shut-off of electricity to the home. ♦
