We’re going waaay back for today’s Torn Down Tuesday feature, the Cooke-Holyoke House.
George and Joseph Cooke arrived from England in 1635 and bought several lots southeast of the village from settlers who were leaving for Connecticut. George served as speaker of the General Court and captain of Cambridge’s first militia company, but he returned to England in 1645 and became a colonel in Cromwell’s army. Joseph held local offices and raised a family in America before he went back in 1658. Their homestead—bounded today by Mt. Auburn, Plympton, Mill, and Holyoke streets—included “the hill by his house which have been hitherto reserved for a place to build a fort upon for defense with all the lane leading thereto provided that if the town shall ever make use of it for that end he shall yield it again” (Town Records, Jan. 2, 1636, 25). In 1665 Joseph Cooke Jr. received the five-acre homestead from his father as a wedding gift, and the next year the town granted him “liberty for timber on the Common to build him a dwelling house” (ibid. 162). Three generations of Cookes made little further impression on the town, and in 1761 President Edward Holyoke, anticipating retirement, purchased the property. It passed through Holyoke’s estate in 1769 and was acquired by William Winthrop in 1803.
In 1803 Winthrop “removed the old cills and roof … raised the house and put in new cills; added the third story and put on the present roof instead of the old gambril roof” (William T. Harris, DAR Guide, 74). Winthrop lived there until 1811. In 1832 Sidney Willard, Professor of Hebrew and Oriental Languages, sold it to Charles Folsom, the former Harvard librarian, who purchased the University Press from Eliab Metcalf a year later. In 1836 Folsom laid out Holyoke Place and subdivided the two-acre property into eight lots. The house passed through many hands until the heirs of the last owner occupant sold it to the trustees of the Phi Delta Psi Club in 1901. It was probably Cambridge’s oldest house when the club demolished it in 1905.
Today’s post comes from Building Old Cambridge Architecture and Development
by Susan E. Maycock and Charles M. Sullivan (2016).
