The Marrett House: A Colonial Cambridge Family Beneath the Longfellow House Lawn

Before the Georgian mansion at 105 Brattle Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was built, the spot on the old road to Watertown held a smaller English colonial house. Excavations in 2003 and 2022 found its foundation in the forecourt — the front yard — of the Vassall-Craigie-Longfellow House, now Longfellow House-Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site. By combining archeology, ground-penetrating radar and other geophysical imaging with research in the historical record, the National Park Service has pieced together the lives of two generations of the family who lived there: the Marretts.

Hear from archeologists and park staff about the 2022 excavations of the Marrett House Cellar and the relationship of historical research and geophysical imaging technology. NPS.

NPS archeologists placed excavation units in 2022 to uncover the Marrett house cellar, guided by earlier digs and ground-penetrating radar. NPS Photo / Kate Hanson Plass

The first Marretts

The family's story in Cambridge begins with Thomas Marrett (1589–1664) and his wife, Susanna Craniwell Marrett, who brought their family from Ipswich, England, around 1635. Deeds, probate files, church and vital records, and the town's own records trace them and their descendants. Thomas, a shoemaker, owned property near today's Widener Library at Harvard University and held leadership roles in the town. He and Susanna had at least five children. Their son John and his wife, Abigail Richardson, had 11, among them Amos Marrett, who would build the house on today's Brattle Street.

Lieutenant Amos Marrett

Amos Marrett married Bethia Longhorn on November 2, 1681. They were married for nearly fifty years but had no children. Like many men of his day, Amos worked several trades — farming his land as a yeoman, making bricks and barrels — and served the town as hogreeve (making sure local hogs had rings in their noses to stop them rooting up the ground), fence-viewer, constable, surveyor of highways and selectman. In the 1700s he called himself "Lieutenant," probably an honorific reflecting his standing in town; his military service amounted to about two weeks supporting a militia supply convoy in King Philip's War in December 1675.

After his father's death, Amos set about enlarging the family estate. In 1698 he bought a twenty-acre tract of meadow, marsh and upland, the first of more than twenty purchases over the next thirty years. In 1704 he bought ten acres of orchard, known as the Willis orchard, from Francis Foxcroft. It lay beside his brother Edward's land, on the road to Watertown, and included the lot the historic site occupies today. That deed mentions no house, and no structure is documented until 1732; the foundation suggests Amos built a small house around then.

His place as a selectman surely helped. A seat on a town committee in 1706 put him in charge of selling town land, and when the committee's lands were granted in 1707 he acquired parcels in the "2nd Squadron," in "the Ware Field" and at "Jackson's Corner." He also helped lay out the boundaries between Cambridge and Billerica in 1709 and Cambridge and Lexington in 1714, and served on such committees through the 1710s and 1720s.

Bethia and Amos Marrett's headstones in the Old Burying Ground in Harvard Square. NPS Photo / Kate Hanson Plass

Bethia died on November 20, 1730. With no children of his own, Amos made his brother Edward's son and namesake his heir. On September 14, 1732, he deeded to him the northern half of his house, the western half of his barn, 8.5 acres of orchard and seven acres of pasture in Watertown, "for and in consideration of the love good will and affection which I have and do bear towards my loving nephew Amos Marrett Jr." A week later the younger Amos married Mary Dunster, and the couple most likely moved in with his uncle.

Two months after that, the elder Amos married a relative of Mary's, Ruth Dunster, born Ruth Pierce, who had already outlived two husbands. He died in 1739 and was buried beside Bethia in the Old Burying Ground, leaving the rest of his house and land to his nephew, with provisions for Ruth while she remained his widow. Ruth married a fourth and last time, to Peter Hayes, on October 29, 1742.

Amos Marrett Jr.

Like his father Edward, Amos Jr. (1703–1747) was a glazier, cutting and installing glass, as well as a gentleman farmer, and he kept up the family habit of buying land. He and Mary had six children between 1733 and 1741, two of whom died young. In 1747 he sold Colonel John Vassall six and a half acres, with "the dwelling house and another edifice thereon," for 1,320 pounds, having sold him another fifty acres the year before, and moved the family to nearby land across the Watertown line. He died suddenly in 1747, aged forty-four. His son John became the first in the family to graduate from Harvard College, in 1763. In about a century the Marretts had gone from immigrant shoemakers to established middle-class tradespeople with land, wealth and education.

NPS archeologists from the Northeast Archaeological Resource Program work in excavation units revealing the foundation of the Marrett cellar. NPS Photo / Kate Hanson Plass.

A lead came of the kind a glazier used to hold small panes of glass together. So few were found at the house that Amos Jr. probably did most of his glazing elsewhere. NPS Photo

The cellar hole

Colonel Vassall died soon after buying the estate. He owned property in Boston and probably never lived in the Marrett house, which passed to his young son, also named John Vassall. The younger Vassall probably had it torn down around 1759 to build the mansion that stands today, a symbol of the family's great wealth, which came from enslaved labor on their Jamaican sugar plantations.

The Marretts' cellar hole records how their house grew. In 2022 archeologists found the wall along the road to be about 36 feet long, much longer than expected for a 24-by-18-foot house of the period. The two halves differ:

When the addition was built is uncertain. It may date to the younger Amos's marriage and inheritance of half the house in 1732, to his uncle's death in 1739, or to Ruth's remarriage in 1742. Either way, its size and materials point to more wealth than the original house built decades before.

The 2003 and 2022 excavations traced the front walls of the earlier house (red) and the addition (green) and found the back corner of the earlier house. NPS / Northeast Archeological Resources Program

The house is gone, but its foundation, the artifacts found there and the written record together show the part an ordinary family played in the early history of New England.

Sources

• National Park Service, "A Window Into the 1700s: The Marrett House and Family of Cambridge" (Longfellow House-Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site): https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/a-window-into-the-1700s-the-marrett-house-and-family-of-cambridge.htm
• The NPS article draws on Cambridge town records, Massachusetts land and vital records, Middlesex County probate files, and a 2022 report by Amanda Womack on the Marretts.
• The source gives two different birth years for the elder Amos Marrett; this page states neither. Pictures an earlier version of this page left out were restored on 2026-09-26.
• The film and any audio are the National Park Service's own files, from the source page.