Red House : Being a Mostly Accurate Account of New England's Oldest Continuously Lived-in Ho Use

A quirky and fascinating memoir of a childhood spent with the legacy and ghosts of a 300-year-old houseIn her critically acclaimed, ingenious memoir, Sarah Messer explores America’s fascination with history, family, and Great Houses. Her Massachusetts childhood home had sheltered the Hatch family for 325 years when her parents bought it in 1965. The will of the house’s original owner, Walter Hatch—which stipulated Red House was to be passed down, "never to be sold or mortgaged from my children and grandchildren forever"—still hung in the living room. In Red House, Messer explores the strange and enriching consequences of growing up with another family’s birthright. Answering the riddle of when shelter becomes first a home and then an identity, Messer has created a classic exploration of heritage, community, and the role architecture plays in our national identity.

In her critically acclaimed, ingenious memoir, Sarah Messer explores America’s fascination with history, family, and Great Houses. Her Massachusetts childhood home had sheltered the Hatch family for 325 years when her parents bought it in 1965. The will of the house’s original owner, Walter Hatch—which stipulated Red House was to be passed down, "never to be sold or mortgaged from my children and grandchildren forever"—still hung in the living room. In Red House, Messer explores the strange and enriching consequences of growing up with another family’s birthright. Answering the riddle of when shelter becomes first a home and then an identity, Messer has created a classic exploration of heritage, community, and the role architecture plays in our national identity.

"Built in 1647, the Red House in Marshfield, Massachusetts, was the home of one family for eight generations. The will of Walter Hatch, the original owner and builder, hung on the living room wall and warned that Red House was to be passed down "forever from generation to generation to the world's end never to be sold or mortgaged from my children and grandchildren forever." In 1965, Richard Warren Hatch went against the weight of tradition and sold the house to Sarah Messer's parents. Shortly after the Messers moved in, Hatch began returning photographs, furniture, and other objects to the house, many several hundred years old, saying they belonged there." Before the highway, the oil slick, the outflow pipe; before the blizzard, the sea monster, the Girl Scout camp; before the nudist colony and flower farm; before the tidal wave broke the river's mouth, salting the cedar forest; before the ironworks, tack factory, and shoe-peg mill; before the landing where skinny- dipping white boys jumped through berry bushes; before hayfield, ferry, oyster bed; before Daniel Webster's horses stood buried in their graves; before militiamen's talk of separating; before Unitarians and Quakers, the shipyards and mills, the nineteen barns burned in the Indian raid-even then the Hatches had already built the Red House. The author of the poetry collection Bandit Letters recounts her upbringing in a three-hundred-year-old New England colonial home, a childhood marked by the legacies of the house's original family as recorded in journals, letters, daguerreotypes, and other family documents that were left behind. Reprint.