Barrett House (Poughkeepsie, New York) Informations

Barrett House is a historic home located at Poughkeepsie, Dutchess County, New York, today home to Barrett Art Center. This triple-landmark (National, State, and municipal) Greek Revival brick townhouse was built in the early 1840s. The Barrett House reflects three phases of construction. The original building is a ca. 1842 three-story, three-bay by four-bay Greek Revival brick house with a side-gabled, stepped roof. A two-story, three-bay by two-bay, front-gabled brick addition was constructed to its rear ca. 1867.

In the twentieth century, Barrett House achieved notoriety as the family home of Poughkeepsie-born WPA muralist Thomas Weeks Barrett. Jr. (1902-1947), who founded the Dutchess County Art Association (DCAA) in 1935 and lived there until his death in 1947. His artwork, family archive, and DCAA records remain in the house today.

Thomas W. Barrett, Jr. graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1926, but his energies and artwork centered on the Hudson Valley. Barrett worked professionally as a designer, painter, printmaker, and as a muralist for the Treasury Relief Art Project (1936) and the Works Progress Administration (1937). As a Hudson Valley “American Scene” painter Barrett fashioned a modern iteration of the region’s landscapes first immortalized a century earlier by the founders of the nation’s first major art movement, the Hudson River School. Barrett turned his artistic attention to the urban landscapes of cities along the Hudson as symbols of a resilient and modern American character. Barrett organized the first art exhibition in Dutchess County at the Luckey Platt Department Store in 1934. Barrett founded the DCAA a year later.

Barrett died in 1947 and his sister bequeathed the townhouse to the DCAA in 1974. The DCAA subsequently converted its first and second floor living spaces to four galleries, a community arts space, and offices, and operates under the name Barrett Art Center. Today, the third-floor studio Barrett designed in 1930, with a 7-foot by 9-foot north-facing sky-light, is an active studio used by an artist in residence. The DCAA collection includes artwork – much of it Barrett’s – and archives including his family papers, film, photographs, manuscripts, memorabilia, and DCAA records, all of which remain in the house.

The three-story, three bay brick building in the Greek Revival style. It is on a raised basement and features brownstone trim and a third story Eastlake style porch.

It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

Early 19th century Poughkeepsie and the Construction of 55 Noxon Street

One of the oldest communities along the Hudson River, was initially settled during the late seventeenth century. Though it grew slowly, it was well situated near the major transportation routes of the and was named the county seat in 1717. The village became a center of commerce and trade and by the nineteenth century its economy came to be dominated by industry and manufacturing. For about a decade starting in 1832, Poughkeepsie also became an important center of the regional whaling industry. During the late 1830s and early 1840s, Poughkeepsie experienced a real estate boom in response to the growth of these enterprises and the efforts of the local Improvement Party, a group of businessmen and politicians who boosted the City within the region. The area’s role as a manufacturing center was spurred by the completion of the Hudson River railroad to Poughkeepsie in 1849.

Virgil D. Bonesteel, an ambitious Yale graduate (Phi Beta Kappa, Class of 1827) and descendant of Red Hook’s early settlers, was one of the new professionals attracted to the bright future of Poughkeepsie that was heavily promoted during the boom years of the 1830s..His first position was that of law student in the office of James Hooker, Dutchess County’s Surrogate for 16 years and a dominant force in the awarding of political patronage jobs within the Democratic Party. Bonesteel quickly became an up and coming young leader in county and state Democratic Committee work and was appointed Clerk of the County Board of Supervisors. . His rise in these political and legal circles may have been assisted by his marriage in 1840 to Sarah E. Todd of New Milford Connecticut, the niece of Poughkeepsie attorney and former Secretary of the Navy, Smith Thompson who was then serving as a Justice on the United States Supreme Court.

Following the national financial panic of 1837, Poughkeepsie’s booming real estate market ground to a near-halt. Bonesteel was able to take advantage of this, purchasing a lot for $1,325 on Noxon Street at a foreclosure auction in November of 1841. The lot was made available by the financial collapse of shoe manufacturer Benjamin Bissell, one of the many who had ventured into real estate speculation during the ‘years of Poughkeepsie’s “Improvement Party” boom in the mid-1830s.

Newly married, Virgil and Sarah Bonesteel began constructing their home soon after; construction most likely occurred in 1842 since Bonesteel is listed as residing at 55 Noxon St. in the first extant village directory of 1843. The builder is unknown. The completion of the elegant brick town home projected Bonesteel’s success within the community. Well-to-do families of this period, such as the Bonesteels, expressed their taste within this restrained form of domestic architecture that symbolized a young nation’s hopes for becoming the new embodiment of the purity, strength and equality of an idealized ancient Greece. With its wide frieze of wreathed attic windows, ornamental stoop railing, two story porch with fluted Doric columns, and recessed double front door with rectangular transom, the Bonesteels’ Greek Revival townhouse embodied the quiet elegance typical of this style.

In 1844, Bonesteel was appointed to the position of Dutchess County Surrogate. But the rough and tumble of politics derailed Bonesteel’s rise when his enemies in the opposing Whig party accused him of levying “bloodsucking” fees on defenseless widows and orphans forced to settle their estates in his court. Bonesteel’s seemingly extravagant personal life also came under fire by his enemies in the Whig party newspaper who sarcastically observed, “We understand that our surrogate made an excursion the other day to New Milford WITH A COACH AND FOUR. Now it is clearly none of our business how he rides, but as he is now the leader of the party in the county, he must excuse us for feeling concerned about THE DEMOCRACY OF THE THING…”

Whether it was a “coach and four” lifestyle, excessive real estate speculation or some other unknown factor, Bonesteel declared bankruptcy in 1848. In 1849, his extensive real estate holdings were sold to pay his debts. The Bonesteel home at 55 Noxon Street was described in foreclosure auction advertisements as a “large and spacious house, one of the most desirable in Poughkeepsie.”

19th Century History of 55 Noxon Street

From 1849 to 1866, 55 Noxon St. was owned by Eliza Thompson, the widow of Supreme Court Judge Smith Thompson. Eliza Thompson was the daughter of Henry Livingston, Jr. and grew up on the Livingston estate we know today as Locust Grove. In 1836, she married the much older widower, Supreme Court Justice Smith Thompson and became the elegant young hostess of an elite political circle at her husband’s riverfront estate “Rust Plaetz” (now part of Poughkeepsie Rural Cemetery). Eliza Thompson used 55 Noxon as an income-producing property, renting it to a series of well-to-do tenants.

During the years she owned 55 Noxon Street, Eliza Thompson remarried and began a new life elsewhere. The rental of 55 Noxon Street may have been managed for her, possibly by Jennette Jewett who purchased the property in 1866 and two lots on Mill Street for $14,425. Jewett owned other properties in the city and was not new to the real estate world. In fact, she was the daughter of one of Poughkeepsie’s first Main Street developers, the industrialist and inventor Gilbert Brewster. Jennette Jewett likely saw a good investment opportunity in 55 Noxon Street. Properties like it, which were being used as “high class boarding houses,” were in high demand in 1866. A year later, Jewett sold 55 Noxon for $7,000. By 1869, she had sold the property on Mill St. for $8,500 - netting a profit of $1,075 on the deal. The doubling of the house’s value from $3,550 in 1849 to $7,000 in 1867 suggests that the large rear addition to the house was completed sometime between 1849 and 1867.

In 1867, Jewett sold the property to retired Marlborough farmer Benjamin F. Townsend and his wife Lucy. Census records show that they operated 55 Noxon as a boarding house; assorted white-collar boarders occupied rooms in the house during the Townsend years at 55 Noxon Street. The number of boarders grew to as high as 14 by 1875 when Lucy Townsend (by then a widow) was described as “keeping a boarding house” in the federal census. At Lucy Townsend’s death in 1879, the house was inherited by her wealthy nephew George W. Townsend. The house was sold by his heirs in 1882 to Captain James H. Wheeler and his wife Phebe. Wheeler’s earliest years were said to have been spent at sea followed by work as a ship builder, hotel keeper and operator of a small boat on the Hudson. The nickname “Captain” followed him his entire life. During his years at 55 Noxon Street, from 1882 to 1887, Wheeler used the house as his family home and for his business as an awning and sail maker.

After failing to sell the house at auction in 1887, the Wheelers sold it two years later to Miss Mary Elizabeth Weeks for $4,500. Within the decade after her purchase, the family likely added the rearmost addition to the house to update and expand its kitchen space. For the next three generations, the house would stay in the Weeks-Barrett family. The sister of prominent lawyer James H. Weeks, Mary purchased the house at a time when the family was in transition soon after her brother’s death. Without the patriarch James Weeks, described in an 1881 newspaper article on real estate assessments as “the richest man in town,” the family began sinking into shabby gentility. The family’s first decade in their new home at 55 Noxon was filled with loss. In 1892, Mary Elizabeth died of pneumonia. In 1893, Charles W. Barrett, the husband of James Weeks’ sister Eloise, also died. Perhaps most tragic was the loss of Eloise and Charles Barrett’s son, the quiet and reserved young bank clerk Charles K. Barrett, who died of tuberculosis at age 27 in 1894. Finally, another of Weeks’ sisters, Emily Weeks Vary died in 1897. It must have seemed that the spell of sadness was at last broken in 1900 when Eloise and Charles Barrett’s other son, Tom Barrett, married Miss Kate Stoutenburgh of Washington D.C. and Hyde Park. Unfortunately, a year later, Tom Barrett and his wife Kate were burying their infant son.

However, Kate’s arrival did start a new, more prosperous chapter in the family’s history. Tom Barrett began a promising career at the Poughkeepsie National Bank, following in the footsteps of his deceased brother Charles and his uncle Isaac. At 55 Noxon Street, Tom and Kate Barrett settled into the quiet life of a small-town banker and his wife raising their two children, Thomas Jr. and Elizabeth, in a sheltered and loving environment with idyllic summers spent at the Putnam, Connecticut farm of Kate Barrett’s father.

Thomas Weeks Barrett, Jr. (1902-1947)

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