The Losee Homestead

I. The Question, and the Answer

This narrative documents the identification of the Brewster, New York lot where William A. Losee grew up. William died with Custer’s 7th Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876, at the age of twenty-four — the only documented Brewster resident known to have died there. He left no descendants and no surviving photograph. What survives is the land he walked, the deeds that name his father, the federal census records that placed him in this house at every enumeration from age eight to age eighteen, the 1867 Beers, Ellis & Soule village plate of Brewsters Station, and three Brewster Standard newspaper items — a July 1876 dispatch, his father Joseph’s 1899 obituary, and a 1926 remembrance written by his nephew — that together establish the family’s identity and presence on the parcel beyond reasonable doubt.

William’s home is today the property at the eastern point of the fork where Oak Street meets Main Street — modern 110–114 Oak Street. The chain of title runs unbroken from Albert Brush’s 1854 sale to Joseph Losee through to the current owners. Every deed in the chain recites the 1854 Brush iron-ore reservation; that single clause survives as a 170-year paper fingerprint tying the modern parcel directly to the deed Joseph Losee signed for his three acres in the spring of 1854.

A separate house at 88 Oak Street, west of Wells Park, is sometimes locally identified as the Losee home. It is not. The case for the documented site of the Losee homestead at 110–114 Oak Street — and the case against the 88 Oak Street property as a candidate — are developed in the sections that follow.

II. Who William Was

William Losee was born February 7, 1852 in Brewster, the son of Joseph Losee (1818–1899) and Phebe Ann Garnsey Losee (1821–1900). Per Joseph’s 1899 obituary in the Brewster Standard, the couple were married in 1839 and had six surviving or remembered children at the time of the obituary: Isaac (a hatter, later of Patterson), Wellington (who remained in Brewster), Josephine (who married George Charter of Brewster), William, Jane, and James L. Losee. The family also had a daughter Abbey Jane, who predeceased Joseph by 28 years and is memorialized on the family monument in the Old Methodist Cemetery. Jane and James both died in December 1898, just three months before Joseph’s own death in March 1899; the 1899 obituary names only Isaac, Wellington, and Josephine as surviving siblings of the deceased Joseph.

Joseph’s biography matters for the identification of the house. He was born in Yorktown, New York on October 16, 1818, son of Samuel and Hannah Losee. He lived for some years in Peekskill and Somers and served as a New York City policeman before moving to Brewster around 1844, more than fifty years before his death. His marriage to Phebe Ann Garnsey in 1839 tied him into established Brewster families — Phebe’s family surname appears in the 1854 Brush deed as the family of the eastern-boundary neighbor, Nathaniel Garnsey.

After settling in Brewster Joseph began building stone walls by contract; the work was so physically demanding that a strain he sustained in middle age caused permanent damage to his legs — a numbness and inability to raise his feet from the ground — that contributed to his death thirty years later. The stone-mason trade is taken up again in Section IX in connection with the surviving wall at the Losee parcel.

III. William’s Death at the Little Bighorn

William enlisted in the United States Army and was assigned to Company F of the 7th Cavalry under Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer. He was killed at the Battle of the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876, age twenty-four. His death was first reported in the Brewster Standard on July 7, 1876 — twelve days after the battle, when the family in Brewster did not yet know his fate.

Fifty years later, in 1926, William’s nephew published a remembrance in the Brewster Standard titled “Brewster Boy with Gen. Custer.” The article reproduced William’s last surviving letter home — written from Fort Abraham Lincoln in the Dakota Territory on April 20, 1876, two months and five days before he died. The letter is the only surviving voice we have of William himself.

Two months later the 7th Cavalry was on the Little Bighorn. William was twenty-four.

The postmark — Fort A. Lincoln, Dakota Territory — and the return address to Joseph and Phebe in Brewster fix William at exactly the household established by the 1854 Brush deed. The house they had on the fork at the old highway in Brewster is the home William was writing to, the home he hoped to return to, and the home where Joseph and Phebe received the eventual news of his death.

IV. The Family Monument — Old Methodist Cemetery, Brewster

The Losee family is buried in the Old Methodist Cemetery in Brewster. The family monument is a four-faced obelisk: each face is inscribed with a different family member — Joseph (the father), Phebe Ann (the mother), William (killed at the Little Bighorn), and Abbey Jane (the daughter who predeceased William by five years). All four are commemorated on a single LOSEE base stone.

Abbey Jane Losee — born approximately July 18, 1844, died March 21, 1871, age 26 years 8 months 3 days — was the eldest daughter of Joseph and Phebe and a sister to William. She is not named in Joseph’s 1899 obituary, which lists only the surviving and recently deceased children, but her presence on the monument confirms she was part of the household in the 1850s and 1860s, during William’s boyhood.

V. The 1854 Brush Deed — The Land Joseph Bought

On April 1, 1854 (the deed itself is dated March 16, 1854; the body text closes with April 1 as the effective date), Albert Brush and his wife Julia sold a three-acre parcel out of their larger family farm to Joseph Losee for nine hundred dollars. The Brush family owned the surrounding tract, which had itself been assembled by Albert Brush across three earlier purchases: an 1849 deed from Samuel and Eliza Brewster (Liber W, p. 201, approximately 105 acres for $6,825), an 1852 deed from Alvah Trowbridge (Liber 26, p. 554), and an 1853 deed from Francis Buckmaster (Liber 31, p. 243).

The three-acre piece Joseph bought in 1854 was carved out of this larger Brush family holding, on its southeast corner, at the fork of the old highway. The 1849 Brewster-to-Brush deed describes a two-lot tract bounded south by the Philipse–Morris patent boundary line — the colonial-era survey line dividing the 1697 Philipse Patent from the adjacent Morris Patent — anchoring the chain to one of the foundational land grants of the lower Hudson Valley. The iron-ore reservation that propagates through every subsequent deed in this chain originates with Samuel Brewster in that 1849 conveyance, not with Albert Brush; Brush carried forward Brewster’s reservation when he sold to Losee in 1854, and every owner since has done the same.

The 1854 deed locates the parcel precisely. It begins “at the East side of a bridge near a walnut tree” over a brook crossing the old highway. The brook is the creek that still shows on some maps today, forming the eastern edge of Wells Park. The “old highway” — referenced in nearly every subsequent deed in the chain — is identified as Oak Street in the 1904 Eva V. Weed deed, which states explicitly that the boundary begins “at the east side of a bridge over a brook crossing the old highway, now called Oak Street.”

From the bridge the boundary ran north along the brook, then east along the Brush family farm boundary, then south along Nathaniel Garnsey’s land back to the road. The deed reserves all mining rights and privileges, particularly for iron ore — a reflection of the active iron mining industry in 19th-century Putnam County. The same 1854 acquisition year saw Joseph join the Monkeytown Methodist Episcopal Church — both formal commitments to settling permanently in Brewster.

VI. The Brewsters Station Village Plate — “J. Losey” at the Fork

Where Section I established the conclusion, the close detail of the village plate proves it. The label “J. Losey” sits precisely at the fork of the old highway (now Oak Street) in the exact position that today’s 110–114 Oak Street parcel occupies on the modern tax map. Immediately west, the “Hat. Sh.” label identifies the workplace that the 1870 census records for William — then 18 and enumerated as a hat shop worker, in a dwelling adjacent to Howard Lansden, the hatter who was almost certainly the shop’s proprietor. William’s older brother Isaac had been enumerated at the same trade a decade earlier. The shop was a short walk from the Losee front door.

The surrounding labels root the parcel in its 19th-century context. “A. Brush” north of the lot names Albert Brush, the seller who had conveyed the three acres to Joseph in 1854 and who retained the surrounding farm. “A. Wixon” south and west names Alvah Wixon, the village miller whose mill stood on the creek; his farm was the Losees’ western neighbor across the brook.

VII. The Census Records — Four Decades of the Family at the Fork

Federal census records confirm Joseph and Phebe Losee resided continuously at this location from 1854 through Joseph’s death in 1899. The census enumerators in Brewster walked from house to house in sequence, so the order of dwellings on the census page corresponds to the order of houses along the road. The Losee family’s position in the 1860, 1870, and 1880 censuses is consistently bracketed by the same neighbors — most notably Alvah Wixon, the western neighbor across the brook — confirming that the family did not move.

VIII. The Complete Chain of Title — 1854 to 2000

Every deed in the chain below recites back to the previous conveyance, ultimately citing Joseph Losee’s 1854 acquisition from Albert Brush, and every deed carries forward the original iron-ore reservation.

The 1895 sale by Joseph and Phebe Losee to Walter W. Weed marks the family’s departure from the parcel after forty-one years. Joseph was 76 and Phebe 74; they sold for $4,000 cash plus the assumption of two existing mortgages. Walter W. Weed was a Patterson-area resident with substantial means. He died less than four years later on January 19, 1899 — just two months before Joseph Losee’s own death on March 15, 1899 — and the parcel passed to his daughter and sole heir Eva V. Weed. On January 19, 1904, exactly five years to the day after her father’s death, Eva conveyed the parcel to Herbert M. Turner of Patterson for $3,600. Turner held it briefly and in 1906 conveyed the full three-acre tract to the Nichols & Adams real estate firm, who subdivided it into multiple lots between 1906 and 1912. The eastern wedge with the existing house was sold to Edward and Rose Wright in 1912 — this is the parcel that became today’s lot 44 (110–114 Oak Street).

IX. The House at 110–114 Oak Street

The form distinguishes the house from the gable-front Victorian houses on adjacent parcels, all of which were built by early purchasers after the 1906–1912 subdivision of the original three-acre tract. The most reasonable inference is that the house predates that subdivision — meaning it predates 1906 and likely predates 1895, when Joseph and Phebe sold the parcel to Walter W. Weed. It appears, in other words, to be the original Losee family home, possibly with later additions and renovations, but substantially the structure William grew up in.

The fieldstone retaining wall has no architectural “date,” but it is exactly the kind of work Joseph Losee did for a living. His 1899 obituary states that after settling in Brewster he “began to build stone walls by contract, and it was while engaged in this work that he sustained a strain which was an indirect cause of his death.” Stone walls built by skilled masons in the 1850s–1870s using local fieldstone often outlast the wooden houses behind them by a century or more. There is no documentary proof that this specific wall was laid by Joseph himself, but it stands on his land, in the place his trade would have placed it, in the form his trade would have built. Of all the physical features on the parcel, the wall is the most likely surviving artifact of the Losee family’s forty-one-year tenure.

X. Why It Is Not the House at 88 Oak Street

A separate house at 88 Oak Street — a cream-painted gable-front structure with prominent paired bracketed eaves — has been locally identified by some as the Losee home. Two things rule that out: the geography and the chain of title. The house sits west of the brook that formed Joseph Losee’s western boundary in the 1854 deed; the Losee parcel was east of the brook. And the parcel’s ownership history shows no Losee in the chain at any point.

Chain of Title for 88 Oak Street

The Brush family that owned this parcel through 1904 is the same Brush family that sold three acres to Joseph Losee in 1854. The two parcels touched, but they were distinct holdings: parcel 38 remained Brush land for fifty years after the Losee parcel became Losee land, and it was never any Losee’s home.

XI. Conclusion

Our lot, 110–114 Oak Street, at the eastern fork where Oak Street meets Main Street in the Village of Brewster, is the documented site of the William Losee family home. Five independent strands of evidence converge on the same conclusion:

The house at 88 Oak Street, west of Wells Park, is on land that was Brush family farm property from 1849 through 1904 — never Losee land. It is a real and beautiful piece of Brewster’s 19th-century architectural heritage, but it was most likely a Brush family house, not a Losee one.

William A. Losee — born February 7, 1852, killed at the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876, age twenty-four — grew up at 110–114 Oak Street. He left from there for the Army in his early twenties and never returned. His last letter home is the only document I found in his own voice.

Research by Rob G.  ·  A Property History