College to Preserve Webster and Choate

WEBSTER Cottage and Choate House, both built by the Rev Sylvanus Ripley, a graduate of the College's first class of 1771, will be on the move again in a College plan to clear a site close to the Bradley Mathematics Center for the new Kiewit Com- puter Center, a recent gift of Peter Kiewit '22.

The preservation move as approved at the fall meeting of the Board of Trustees fulfills the desire to keep these two historic structures on North Main Street. Webster Cottage will be moved to a site north of Silsby Hall near North Main Street and Webster Avenue, fairly close to its original site from which it was moved when Silsby was built in 1928. The Cottage will be restored as closely as possible to its original state and will be utilized as a museum for many of the Daniel Webster items owned by the College which cannot now be suitably exhibited.

Choate House will be moved across North Main Street to a site near the present location of East Hall which is to be torn down. There Choate House will be used to provide guest facilities for visiting faculty, visiting artists, and other official College visitors who come to Hanover for temporary residence of several months.

Built in 1780 on land given to Sylvanus Ripley's wife Abigail by her father, President Eleazar Wheelock, Webster Cottage is the sixth oldest house surviving in the village of Hanover. Mr. Ripley was a member of the faculty from 1772 until his death as a result of being thrown from a sleigh when returning from preaching in Hanover Center in 1787. The year before the accident he had built Choate House on the north side of the Green for his family. Widow Ripley returned to Webster House in 1794 and lived there until 1802, having sold Choate House to George Foote who turned it into an inn "with victualing and lodging accommodations for travellers."

Daniel Webster, Class of 1801, is reported to have spent his first night in Choate House on arriving in Hanover. For a portion of his undergraduate days he occupied a small upstairs chamber in what has thus come to be called Webster Cottage. It was in this same house that the founder of Wellesley College, Henry Fowle Durant, was born in 1822. For most of the 19th Century, however, it was known as the McMurphy House for the sisters who owned it and boarded students there. After the College acquired ownership, the house and its furnishings were celebrated by Alice Van Leer Carrick, the wife of Prof. P. O. Skinner, in her book The Next to Nothing House, published in 1922.

After serving as an inn, Choate House, which may well have been built by the same carpenters who were at the time completing nearby Dartmouth Hall, was owned by leading citizen Mills Olcott, Class of 1790, and later Treasurer of the College. Olcott's daughter Helen married Rufus Choate, Class of 1819, in the home's east parlor in 1825, and the name Choate House was acquired from its association with that famous lawyer and statesman. The house remained in the Olcott family until 1854 and for most of the next 63 years served as the parsonage of the College Church. In 1915 it was purchased by the College and made into a faculty residence. It was moved to North Main Street in 1927.

In addition to Webster and Choate, among the many distinguished persons who were guests in Choate House were President James Monroe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Walt Whitman, and General William Tecumseh Sherman.

Webster Cottage, 1780, will be relocated near its original site.

Choate House, 1786, will provide quarters for visiting professors.