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INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET LEXINGTON 70 EAST STREET <br /> MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. <br />220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02125 <br />Continuation sheet 4 <br /> LEX.710 <br />Fiske held many town offices, having been town clerk and justice of the peace for many years.8 <br /> The 1790 federal census lists Joseph Fiske Sr. in a seven-person household, which would have included his son who had yet to <br />marry. The 1798 federal direct tax cited Joseph Fisk Jr. as a householder in addition to his father. Joseph Fiske Jr. was listed with 126 acres; he also owned the dwellings inhabited by Jeremiah Harrington and Isaac Blodgett, the latter of which stood on <br />45 acres. Joseph Fiske Sr. died in 1808, and his will left his son Joseph all of his real estate, valued at $3500, except the part of the homestead (63 Hancock St.) set off to his widow while she lived.9 <br /> Joseph and Elizabeth Fiske had six children: Elizabeth, Joseph, Jonas Stone, Sarah Ann, Franklin and Almira, born between <br />1795 and 1808. In 1820 the census listed nine persons in the Fiske household, two of whom were engaged in agriculture on the rural property. The 1830 census records the households of both Joseph Fiske Jr. and his son and namesake (1797-1860), who <br />married Mary Kennard Gardner of Kittery, Maine, and had two children—Joseph Alexander in 1830 and Timothy Kennard in 1831. <br /> According to Fiske family accounts, Joseph Fiske Jr. lived at 70 East Street until 1809, a year after his father died, and moved <br />into his father’s Hancock Street house; the East Street house was then rented.10 When Joseph Fiske died in 1837, he bequeathed to his widow Elizabeth Stone Fiske essentially the same space in the homestead that his father had left his mother <br />by his will and required sons Joseph and Franklin (1804-68) to provide similar provisions and fuel as in the earlier will, as well as “sauce and apples enough for her” and nursing and “doctring” should she require it. <br /> Aside from cash bequests to grandchildren, Fiske left all the rest of his estate to sons Joseph and Franklin. The inventory of his <br />estate lists two parcels—the “home farm” in Lexington, valued at $3255, and the Harrington farm in the same town, valued at $2925. In May 1839 Franklin Fiske deeded his interest in what is apparently the Harrington farm to his brother Joseph, and a <br />pair of mortgage deeds from later in the same year, as well as family accounts, indicate that Joseph Fiske (1797-1860) was living at the so-called Harrington farm, while Franklin may have been at the home farm. Joseph Fiske mortgaged 40 acres <br />bordering Vine Brook and his brother Franklin’s land, while Franklin mortgaged seven acres on the road leading to Bedford.11 The 1840 census lists both men but on separate pages, which suggests they were not near neighbors. <br /> In 1850 Joseph Fiske was listed as a yeoman in the census with $2000 in real estate in a household with his wife Mary and sons <br />Joseph A. and Timothy K., both laborers. The 1858 map attaches the name “J Fisk” to the 70 East Street property. In 1860 Joseph Fiske was a farmer with $1700 in real property, and he shared the household with his wife, son Timothy, Timothy’s wife <br />Barbara Peters Fiske (1834-1918), a German immigrant, and their two young children William E. and Anna L. In May 1860 Joseph Fiske died, and his inventory listed his property—“house, barn, and 23 acres of land”—at $1700, just as the census <br />had.12 <br />In September 1860, the widowed Mary Fiske and her son Joseph A. and his wife deeded their interest in 70 East Street to Timothy K. Fiske for $350.13 The deed describes the parcel as 22 acres with all of its buildings on both sides of East Street. In <br />1870 Timothy K. Fiske, a house painter, lived in the house with his wife, six children, his widowed mother, and a Prussian <br /> 8Frederick Clifton Pierce, Fiske and Fisk Family, Being the Record of the Descendants of Symond Fiske, Lord Of The Manor Of Stadhaugh, Suffolk County, England (1980). 9 Widow Hepzibah Fiske was given use of the west room, the bedroom at the west end of the house and the chamber over the west room and the right to bake in the oven; son Joseph was to provide her every year while she lives with 80 pounds of beef, 100 weight of pork, 6 bushels of Indian meal, 3 bushels of rye meal, 2 barrels of cider, 30 pounds of butter, 80 pounds of cheese, 6 pounds of flax, 2 pounds of wool, 3 pounds of “cotton wool,” 6 pounds of hog fat, wood for one fire to be cut and brought to her door, and $15 for anything else she might need. Fiske’s probate records do not describe the real property. 10 Fiske’s grandson, Timothy K. Fiske, listed the tenants in an undated typescript in the possession of the current owners of the house: “Richard Smith, Amos Stearns, Thomas Caldwell, James Blodgett, Thomas Locke, James Blodgett 2nd, Col. Russell, Moses Stearns, Attia Esterbrooks, who lived there five years, Joel Locke, Bradley Simonds, James Bailey (George Bailey’s grandfather) who lived there nine years. At this time part of the house was occupied by Daniel Kenniston, Zadoc Harrington and Daniel Angier.” 11 Franklin Fiske to Joseph Fiske, 11 May 1839, MSD 384:343; Joseph Fiske to William Chandler, 25 July 1839, MSD 385:417 (mortgage deed); Franklin Fiske to William Chandler, 19 August 1839, MSD 385:418 (mortgage deed). 12 According to Timothy K. Fiske’s account, after 1860 “part of the house was let to Russell Oliver for one year, Charles Hutchinson for one year, Mrs. Mary Child two years, Edmund Bridges two years and Jeremiah Bridges one year.” <br />13 Joseph Alexander Fiske Lovetta L Fiske, his wife, and Mary G. Fiske, widow of Joseph Fiske, to Timothy K. Fiske, 13 September 1860, MSD 849:482.