Known today for his role in the Salem witch trials, his diary, and his "Selling of Joseph," Samuel Sewall helped to govern large parts of Boston for many decades in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century.
Samuel Sewall (1652-1730) immigrated to Massachusetts as a child; his family settled in Newbury. From 1667 to 1674, he attended Harvard College; he then declined an invitation to move to Woodbridge, Massachusetts and serve as a preacher. He married the daughter of the colony's mintmaster, inherited her family's fortune, and spent the rest of his days in Boston. The following set of Google Earth placemarks locating these sites includes some speculation about the site of the Hull house that Sewall inhabited for most of his life.
"Following his marriage in 1676 to Hannah Hull, only surviving child of wealthy Boston goldsmith and merchant John Hull," reports the Samuel Sewall headnote for the Norton Anthology of American Literature, Sewall "took up residence in Hull's Boston house, which was to remain Sewall's home for the remainder of his long life" (6th ed., 372).
In John Hull: A Builder of the Bay Colony (Portland, Maine: Southworth-Anthoensen, 1940), Hermann Frederick Clarke describes the rough location and style of this home.
[During the 1630s] the homes of the settlers were clustered about the meetinghouse and scattered along the paths and lanes that radiated from the Market Place to follow the irregular shore line, or led toward the three hills that gave the peninsula the early name of Trimountain. To the southward was the path that crossed "Roxburye Neck," which joined the peninsula with the adjacents settlements of Roxbury, Dorchester, and Muddy River [i.e., Brookline]. On this lane, called the Great Street [now Washington Street], Robert Hull was allotted land upon which to build an abode for himself and family. Hull's lot was the third north from Seven Star Lane or the Mill Street [now Sumner Street], and remained in the possession of his direct descendents for one hundred and forty-six years. His orchards and gardens have long since disappeared and the site is now covered with city blocks. Though less than a mile from the business center of the Towne, it was then considered to be some distance away. Even forty years later John Hull wrote to London of the "disadvantage . . . by my habitation of most of ye dealers in our towne" because of the distance from the center of trade. (20-21)
Clarke then describes this and other early seventeenth-century Boston homes.
Here Robert Hull, doubtless aided by his two sons and step-son, built his home; here he spent the remainder of his life; and here John lived, married, and died. The houses built by the more prosperous colonists were not unlike those of rural England, and there were none of the log houses that have been pictured so often and about which Hawthorne has written. The early abodes of our forefathers were substantial frame structures built around a central chimney, with one or more, usually two, rooms. They brought with them mechanics of various trades, well supplied with tools, and subsequent immigration obviously added to their numbers. Oak and pine were available and bricks were both imported and made nearby. The framework was of oak--post and sill, plate and beam, neatly mortised and fastened with wooden trunnels. The outer walls were covered with weather-boarding and sometimes riven clapboards were added. The inside was plastered or sheathed with wide upright pine boards. The central chimney was of brick or catted.
The Hull homestead probably contained, at first, only one large room or "hall" on the ground floor, with the chimney at one end. The second story overhung the first, and the lower ends of the second-story posts were probably carved with pendants or drops. The roof was steep pitched and probably covered with thatch, and the window openings were hung with leaded casements, glazed with diamond-shaped panes. In the hall, which also served as kitchen and sleeping quarters for the parents, was centered the daily life of the family; the boys slept in the loft-like space under the roof. Through the window openings they could look towards the harbor in the distance, and at the gardens and young orchards of the neighbors near at hand. Here and there some of the earlier conical huts or wigwams still remained, with a fireplace of stone or brick added at one end and a hewn frame door installed. (21-22)
John Hull died in 1783. Clarke's description suggests that he, his father, or Sewall may have made additions to the home at some point, so this description may be true only for the home of John Hull's youth.
Finally, the placemark for the home does not indicate the original site of the home. It merely gestures toward the area that is less than a mile from the business center and a bit north of the intersection of what was once Great Street and Seven Star Lane (and is now Washington and Sumner). I do not know where the home actually was. My email is mjon at uakron dot edu if anyone knows better and wants to improve this set of places.
You might have some luck posting this on the Sewall Message Board at RootsWeb: http://boards.rootsweb.com/surnames.sewall/mb.ashx
Posted by: David Sewall | December 26, 2006 at 03:20 AM