6 Moses Circle, Ticonderoga, NY
The original Hancock House was constructed on Beacon Hill in Boston between 1737 and 1741 by Thomas Hancock and latter occupied by his nephew, John Hancock. Despite a lengthy public debate favoring its preservation, the house was demolished in 1863. Fortunately, before its demolition, John Hubbard Sturgis, a Boston architect, prepared measured drawings of both its interior and exterior.
Built in 1926, the Ticonderoga Hancock House is based on the Sturgis drawings. Horace A. Moses, a Ticonderoga businessman, philanthropist, and a trustee of the New York State Historical Association (NYSHA), designed and gave the building to the Society to serve as their headquarters. Today, as the home of the Ticonderoga Historical Society, the building continues as an office, meeting place, library, and museum. It is the base for the Ticonderoga Historical Society’s nine-month program of talks and exhibits on topics of historic and cultural interest and a significant component of Ticonderoga’s current cultural scene.
Location and Structural Details of the Ticonderoga Hancock House
The Hancock House is located at Ticonderoga’s “Western Gateway”, at the junction of NYS Route 9 with Montcalm and Wicker Streets. It faces southwest and overlooks the large Liberty Monument in the center of the rotary. It is a reproduction of the original Hancock House, a Georgian styled colonial mansion of the early 1700’s.
The building’s exterior is a faithful copy of the original mansion. Faced with Weymouth seam-faced granite and Coventry granite trimmings, the structure is of steel and concrete with a slate roof. On the main floor inside, the entrance hallway, stairway and the parlor on the south side are replicas of the original house. On the left side of the hallway is a large library with two small office rooms in back. The ground floor below the main floor contains a meeting room, a kitchen area, an archives room, a utility closet, a small underground vault and the ladies’ and men’s restrooms. This floor has a ground level access entrance and windows on three sides. The partial basement below the ground floor includes a large room which has an outside entrance and contains the boiler, fuel tanks and the main electric panel. A small room to the west, formerly the coal bin, is used for storage.
There are two floors above the main floor. The stairs leading to the second floor open onto a large foyer and balcony. To the right is a large room used for exhibits and a small work room. To the left are two more exhibit rooms. Stairs lead from the southern-most of these two rooms to the garret area with an additional two rooms used for exhibits and storage.
Construction and History of the Original Hancock House
From an architectural standpoint, the original Hancock House is considered to have been one of the most splendid, advanced mansions of Colonial New England. Thomas Hancock, John Hancock’s uncle, was planning his home when Boston was the largest city in America. At the time, the Beacon Street area was undeveloped and considered to be “way out in the country.” As a man with a vision of the future Boston, Thomas Hancock chose a location with a beautiful view of the city, the harbor and surrounding countryside.
The floor plan, as was typical of mid-eighteenth-century plans, had the staircase hall bisecting the building from front to back on both floors. The central block of the house was a rectangle 56 feet wide and 38 feet deep. The walls were of square granite ashlar from Medford, enhanced with details of Middletown sandstone (brownstone). The design featured a double pitched gambrel roof with carved modillions at the cornice, scroll pediment, ornate engaged columns, and an ornamental door head with an elaborate balcony. However, it was the interior details that gave the house its pronounced elegance, with many of the fixtures (caps for the pilasters, glass for the window, wallpaper, Dutch tiles) and furnishings imported from England. The Colonial stairway with its double spiral newel post and two balusters of different patterns on each step was the first of its kind.
Altogether the original Hancock House was a monument to the skills of its builder, Joshua Blanchard and the colonial housewrights whose designs and skills he drew on. The stonework drew attention because such ornate work had never been seen in the region. Regional master carpenters translated the stonework of the Hancock House into wood; an example of how colonial craftsmen took old world styles and adapted them to local living conditions and surroundings, creating a style of their own.
John Hancock died in 1793. By 1863 the estate had fallen into hard times and taxes were due on the property. Public attention was divided between the Civil War and battles in the Legislature. The legislature refused to buy the Hancock House and restore it for use as the Governor’s mansion. When demolition seemed inescapable, Arthur Gilman, one of the most important architects in Boston suggested to John Hubbard Sturgis that he make a set of measured drawings of the hundred- and twenty-six-year-old mansion. These drawings served as the blueprints for Ticonderoga’s Hancock House when it was built in 1926.
Construction and History of Ticonderoga’s Hancock House
In the late 1920’s the New York State Historical Association (NYSHA) was seeking a permanent headquarters. Horace A. Moses, philanthropist, trustee of the Association and a Ticonderoga native, offered to erect a structure for them in Ticonderoga, a place of significant importance during the colonial and American Revolution era. The outrage which had followed the demolition of Boston’s Hancock House in 1863 helped launch the American movement to preserve historic buildings. Mr. Moses, as a NYSHA trustee was aware of the Sturgis measured drawings and of the importance of the original Hancock house in the development of American architecture. He chose to have the new headquarters designed as a faithful replica of the original, but with an interior designed to serve as the headquarters for NYSHA.
Mr. Moses chose Max Westhoff, a revival-style architect and preservationist to prepare the designs for Ticonderoga’s Hancock House. Westhoff had spent eighteen years practicing architecture in the Adirondacks, mainly designing camps and cottages in the Lake Placid and Saranac Lake region. A year after his design for the Hancock House, he designed Ticonderoga’s Community Center, a large two story, five bay neo-Georgian style ashlar granite building with a central bowed portico. His plans for the Hancock House reproduced exactly the exterior of the Boston original. Inside the ornate main hall, staircase, and the parlor to the right of the main hall also duplicate the original. [Add a description here of the building’s structure, especially those features that increase its structural integrity and resistance to fire.]
The New York State Historical Association occupied the building from 1926 until 1939, when they began receiving support from Stephen Clark, Sr., of the Singer Sewing Machine business. Clark offered his support on the condition that the headquarters be moved to the Fenimore House in Cooperstown, NY. NYSHA continued to maintain the library and museum space in Ticonderoga until the early 1970’s. At that time the New York State Historical Association vacated the building, and it was rededicated as the headquarters of the Ticonderoga Historical Society, who continue to use the building today.
– Susan Hayes, 2021