Samuel Dottridge was born in London on December 26, 1786. By the age of 18 he left his home country and arrived in Brewster, Massachusetts working as an apprentice to John Baker to learn the trade of house carpentry. From age 18-21 he was indentured to Baker and had to follow strict rules including attendance to work every day unless authorized and he could never frequent the local pubs.

As soon as his apprenticeship ended in 1808, he married Abigail Kelley Chase, a 31 year old widow with two children.  While living in Harwich, they had two more children and decided to move to a village that friends and neighbors were also making the move to, Cotuit. The three room house was set on a drag and pulled by yokes of 17 oxen from Harwich to Cotuit.

Once in Cotuit Highground, the house was then placed on the corner of Shell Lane and Ocean View Ave (then called County Lane), facing the ocean. The front doorstep was right on the road and there were lilac bushes out front just as there are today. Samuel not only made his name as the village carpenter but he also owned a salt works on Bluff Point that provided the greatly needed salt to the local fisherman.

By 1837 Samuel owned a house, a barn, expanded his three rooms to five, had 45 acres of land and 1,150 feet of salt works. At the time, all this was worth a total of $300. 

Samuel and Abigail had five children together; seven including her two from her previous marriage. After her death, Samuel remarried two years later to a woman in Sandwich and moved to the town with her leaving his home to his grown family.

The home passed hands several times mainly within the Dottridge lineage until it was inherited by HSSC’s founder, Nita Crawford. She moved the house back from Ocean View Ave. and used it as the laundry for her hotel, The Pines. When the hotel closed in 1958,  she worked with others in the village to restore the home to how it would have looked when Samuel Dottridge owned it. It was then moved to its current property on the corner of Shell Lane and Main Street and formally given by Nita Crawford to the Historical Society of Santuit and Cotuit. Learn more about the Dottridge Homestead HERE.