The House Called “By Ways”

I. At a glance

“By Ways” was the Eastview Avenue residence of Henry H. Wells — the man who would become, in a centennial headline a half-century later, “Mr. Brewster.” The house carries a proper name in every clipping, the period habit of christening a fine home rather than numbering it, and it appears in the record across a tight thirteen-year window: present by the 1910 Sanborn map, given a sun parlor in 1913, listed for sale in 1922, and then sold, resold, and sold again until 1926.

What makes the property worth a piece of its own is that compression. In the four years from 1922 to 1926 “By Ways” passed through four hands — Henry H. Wells, then Charles Erickson of Mahopac, then a New York City singer named William Jones, then L. A. Reinhardt of the Associated Gas & Electric Company — each transfer reported in the Brewster Standard. The house is also a doorway into the Wells family, whose three generations sit behind a striking share of the village’s institutions and behind the development of Eastview Avenue itself.

One note belongs at the top. The clippings place the house on “Eastview avenue” (and, in 1913, “East View avenue”) but never give a street number, and this piece deliberately does not assign one — the parcel is identified by deed and metes-and-bounds, not by address. Section V sets out that title trail in full: an unbroken chain of deeds now runs back to a 1922 sale by Caroline C. Wells, matching, step for step, the newspaper’s account of how “By Ways” left the Wells family and passed to Erickson, Jones, and Reinhardt.

II. The Wells family — bank, newspaper, and “Mr. Brewster”

The Wells story in Brewster begins with Major Frank Wells (1841–1919). Born in Litchfield, Connecticut, he served as an officer in the 13th Connecticut Volunteers — the siege of Port Hudson and the Shenandoah Valley campaign under Sheridan — and settled in Brewster in 1869 as bookkeeper at Gail Borden’s milk condensery. He boarded with the widow Crosby on Main Street and married her daughter, Caroline Crosby. From the condensery he rose into the institution that would define the family, co-founding the village’s First National Bank (organized as Borden, Wells & Co.) as cashier and later president; for a time he also ran the Brewster Standard, and he commanded the Crosby Post of the Grand Army of the Republic. He died at his residence at the top of Prospect Street on December 17, 1919, in his seventy-ninth year. The cross street at the By Ways corner — Cornell Avenue, recorded in the deeds as “a.k.a. Wells Street” — carries the family name.

Frank Wells is also, separately, a figure behind the physical Eastview Avenue: the project’s narrative has him consolidating open land at the village’s eastern edge around 1903–1913 and selling building lots there — the “sister houses” at 14 and 16 Eastview rose on lots he conveyed to the builder William M. Smalley about 1911. The By Ways lot, though, was not part of that activity. As the deed trail shows (Section V), it was carved out earlier and by a different hand: Octavia A. Mead subdivided her own Prospect Street land — cutting the two “new streets” — and sold this bare corner to Elias B. Brundage in 1894 for $400; Brundage appears to have built the house that year (he resold for $2,500 in 1895). It passed Brundage → Reed → Caroline C. Wells in 1902. So the family bought an existing eight-year-old house on a lot someone else had platted; they neither cut the streets nor raised the house. The lot’s origin lies with Mead and Brundage, not the Wellses.

Henry Hubbard Wells (1877–1978), the youngest of Frank and Caroline’s three children, was the “By Ways” resident the 1913 clipping names. Born in his grandmother Crosby’s Main Street home, schooled at Hotchkiss and Yale (1900), a Spanish-American War veteran, he trained in law and married Caroline Washburn in 1909 — a second Caroline Wells, not to be confused with his mother. By the time his father died in 1919 he was practicing law in White Plains (the obituary calls him “of White Plains”); a 1977 centennial profile describes him returning to Brewster after that death, needed to attend to the family’s affairs, and settling not back on Eastview but into a home remodeled from Samuel Church’s former “Casino” near the Prospect Street house. He went on to be mayor (1935–1947) and Putnam’s long-serving Selective Service director, the “Mr. Brewster” who saw servicemen off at the railroad station; the village middle school carries his name. The “Casino” and “By Ways” were always distinct houses, and the record keeps them apart.

That sequence resolves the one name the deed trail turned on. The 1922 grantor was Caroline C. Wells — and the middle initial is the key: C for Crosby. The seller was Caroline Crosby Wells (1850–1939), Frank’s wife and (by 1922) widow — not Henry’s wife, Caroline Washburn Wells. The 1902 deed sharpens it further: Caroline bought this lot in her own name in 1902, while Frank was still living, and held it for twenty years. So the occupancy-versus-title distinction is unusually clean here — the lot was Caroline’s throughout (1902–1922), while her son Henry was the one living at “By Ways” in 1913; she sold it in 1922 once he had moved on. (Two small uncertainties are worth keeping: the obituaries give Frank and Caroline’s marriage as 1871 in some notices and 1874 in others; and the Crosby line — Caroline’s mother was the widow Pauline Crosby of Main Street — is locally prominent, but any tie to the Enoch or Fanny Crosby of the project’s other markers is unproven.)

III. The house: a sun parlor and a $7,000 listing

The first dated glimpse of the house as the Wells home is a small society note from the winter of 1913 — a carpenter’s improvement worth a paragraph in the Standard:

Nine years later the house is described far more fully — in its own for-sale advertisement. It gives the only physical inventory of “By Ways” in the record: nine rooms and a bath, steam heat, village water, and a barn “suitable for garage and extra rooms,” offered at $7,000. That is the profile of a substantial, fully modern home for the early 1920s — central heat and municipal water were not universal — and the barn-to-garage line catches the exact moment the automobile was displacing the horse.

IV. Four owners in four years, 1922–1926

Within days of the listing, the house was sold. On March 3, 1922 the Standard reported that Charles Erickson of Mahopac had bought “By Ways” through the real-estate agent James Murty, for a consideration of $6,500 — five hundred dollars under the asking price — and that Erickson’s daughter and son-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Brearton, would “occupy the premises at once.” Title and occupancy already part company here: Erickson bought, the Breartons lived in it.

Erickson held the house only briefly. By the time it changed hands again — reported April 16, 1926 — the owner of record was no longer Erickson but William Jones, described as a “noted singer of New York City,” and the buyer was L. A. Reinhardt, superintendent of the Associated Gas & Electric Company for its Harlem Valley Division. The same item supplies, in one sentence, the chain it had been building all along:

So the reported sequence is Wells → Erickson (March 1922) → Jones → Reinhardt (1926) — with the Reinhardts occupying the house roughly a year before they bought it. This corrects the earlier project narrative, which carried the house straight from Erickson to Reinhardt and left William Jones out entirely. It is worth stating plainly what kind of evidence this is: these are newspaper accounts of ownership and occupancy, valuable and contemporary but not the same as a reviewed deed. The chain is firm enough to publish as a reported chain; promoting it to a documented one means pulling the conveyances, which have not yet been examined.

V. The parcel — tracing the title back to “By Ways”

The chain of title for this corner is now documented and continuous from the present back to 1894, when the lot was first carved out. Every step the newspapers reported in Sections III–IV has a deed behind it, and the deeds add the links the papers never mention. The full chain — with Liber and page for each conveyance, and a tier marking which were physically reviewed versus carried only by recital — is set out in the table below and detailed deed-by-deed in the Sources. What follows is what that trail establishes.

The lot is the eastern half of a single block that Octavia A. Mead bought in 1890 (Book 71/555, $800) and split in 1894. She sold this bare corner to Elias B. Brundage for $400 in February 1894 (Book 75/474, the lot’s creation); Brundage resold a year later for $2,500 (Book 76/525), and the jump from bare-lot to improved price is the clearest sign the house went up in 1894 — an inference from price, not a statement in the deeds. From Brundage the lot passed through Deborah H. Reed to Caroline C. Wells in 1902 (Book 90/69), who held it for twenty years in her own name. That single deed is what ties the parcel to the family: when “Caroline C. Wells” sold it in 1922, the seller was Caroline Crosby Wells, the Major’s widow, not her son Henry’s wife.

From 1922 forward the deeds run name-for-name and date-for-date with the Brewster Standard’s account of “By Ways”: Caroline C. Wells → Erickson (March 1922, Book 122/525, the sale the paper reported), Erickson → Jones (1923, Book 126/277, consideration $7,000 — the exact 1922 asking price), and Jones → Reinhardt (1926, Liber 135/362). The 1938 corporate deed at Liber 237/442 then recites that whole sequence in a single paragraph, locking it together. This is the identification — a continuous, deed-documented chain whose parties and dates match the newspaper record exactly. It is worth stating its one limit plainly: no deed in the chain ever uses the words “By Ways” or “Wells” in its description, so the tie of this parcel to the named house, while very strong, is circumstantial rather than stated.

The recited 1926–1938 links also explain a detour the earlier narrative never saw: between Reinhardt and the post-war residents the corner passed through a gas-and-electric utility — Reinhardt → C M-M Corp. (1928) → Associated Real Properties (1928) → New York State Electric & Gas (1936) — before returning to private hands with the Heinens in 1939, the chain’s first owner-occupants. From there it runs cleanly through the Alcorns, Thomas Johnson, the Griffins and their family trust, Louise Davis, Vatne and Hobbesland, Braun and Sattinger, and the Rogerses to the present owners.

Behind the lot, the record reaches the founding era but stops short of one splice. Mead’s 1890 parent-tract deed carries forward a reservation of all iron ore from a Samuel Brewster–to–Albert Brush deed of 1849 (~100 acres, $6,825) — the same iron-ore reservation that identifies the whole Eastview / St. Lawrence O’Toole cluster and threads through every property in it. That 1849 farm is almost certainly the ground the block was cut from, but no reviewed deed yet places the 264 × 60-ft block inside the farm’s bounds, so the ancestral farm is shown below as a separate, older chain rather than spliced on. The remaining backward work is the grantee-index search that would fill the 1849–1890 Brush-heir links.

Research by Rob G.  ·  Eastview Avenue Series