Townsend, Dr. James House and Office

The Townsend House (also called 'Bittersweet') at 290 Paine Hollow Road in Wellfleet is an excellent, well-preserved example of the full Cape Cod house form, built about 1804. A 1.5-story post-and-beam dwelling with a five-bay facade, central chimney, and brick foundation, it is significant under National Register Criterion C for its high level of integrity and the quality of its interior finishes, including hand-planed wainscoting, china cupboards flanking the front-room fireplaces, a beehive oven, gunstock corner posts, and wide hemlock floorboards. Local historians identify the first owners as Dr. James Townsend, a physician, and his wife Hannah (Doane); family tradition holds that Townsend built the house so it would be habitable by the winter of 1804, and he died in 1812 at age 31, after which his practice was continued by Dr. William Stone, Jr. The house remained in the Townsend family into the 20th century, and the family also operated a salt works on the higher land nearby. The nominated property, which includes an early-19th-century woodshed/summer kitchen and privy as contributing resources, is among the best-preserved of Wellfleet's roughly twenty comparable five-bay Cape Cod houses.

Townsend, Dr. James House and Office is a landmark in Wellfleet, Barnstable County. It is one of 6,558 landmarks documented in Barnstable County, among 6,897 historic sites cataloged across the county on MassRoam.

The site sits at 41.9118, -70.0097 near Wellfleet. The nearest cataloged historic site is Saunders - Paine House (landmark), about under a tenth of a mile away. Others within a short drive include Smith, Eva Paine Garage, Paine, Capt. Otis West Cottage, and Paine, Capt. Otis West Outhouse.

This record is drawn from public historical records. Use the map below for its exact position and turn-by-turn directions.