Captain Edward Compton House facts for kids
The Captain Edward Compton House is a two-story house built with brick and wood. It's designed in a beautiful old style called Victorian and Italianate. The house has a simple sloped roof and two porches. There's a large porch at the front, facing east, and a smaller one on the north side.
Today, the house is home to the Mauricetown Historical Society. You can find it at 1229 Front Street in Mauricetown, New Jersey. If you want to see inside, the house is open for tours twice a month.
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What Does the House Look Like?
The outside walls of the house are covered with special wooden shingles called white cedar shakes. The main roof is made of rolled asphalt. The roofs of the porches are covered with asphalt shingles, except for the side porch which has an aluminum roof.
The porches have wide overhangs supported by fancy, decorative brackets. The main roof also has a wide trim, but it doesn't have these brackets. The large front porch is held up by four round columns, and the side porch has two similar columns. Inside, the house has its original oak floors and decorative plaster designs on the ceilings in some rooms.
Behind the house, on the south side, you can still see the old foundations of the house's original cookhouse. A new cookhouse, built to look like the original, stands on the west lawn. A gravel driveway from Front Street leads to the side porch, making it easy to get to the house. The house has been carefully restored, but it still has some of its original parts.
A Look Back: The House's History
The land where the Captain Edward Compton House stands was bought by Edward Compton from his parents in 1862. The Compton family owned a lot of land in Mauricetown. Many other houses in the area, like the James Compton House and the David Compton House, were built on land that once belonged to the Comptons.
Building the House
The Captain Edward Compton House was built in 1864 by local carpenters, Griffith Pichard and Samuel Cobb. We know the exact year thanks to a letter from the American Civil War written in 1863 by William T. Cobb, Samuel Cobb's son. The Historical Society also has a piece of an original column from the house. It has a special message from Samuel Cobb that confirms the 1864 building date.
Interestingly, the Captain Isaac Peterson House on Front Street looks very similar to the Edward Compton House. It was built around the same time on land also owned by the Compton family. Both houses share many features, including their inside layout, porches, and decorations.
Special Features of the House
The house is built in the Italianate style, which means it has many decorative features. You can see fancy "gingerbread" brackets around the edges of the porches and roofs. It also has several eight-sided columns and an original iron fence in the front yard.
In an old photograph from the late 1800s, the house also had a large decorative wall on its roof. It also had a small tower called a cupola, which was another common feature on Italianate houses like the Captain Isaac Peterson House and the James Compton House.
The House Through the Years
Even after Edward Compton passed away in 1870 due to an illness, the house stayed in the family for some time. It was owned by Elizabeth Compton, Edward's mother, until 1887. After that, the house was passed between different family members, sometimes for very small amounts of money.
A local resident remembered that the house was divided into two apartments between 1954 and 1964. Before the Mauricetown Historical Society bought it, the house was in very poor condition. Much of the outside was rotted, the inside was damaged, and there were serious plumbing problems.
The Historical Society bought the house in 1984 and began a huge restoration project. This work has continued for over 25 years, bringing the house back to its original beauty, including replacing the decorative brackets.
