Past Owners History
The house had been home to the Freeman family for 70 years (1856 – 1926). Herman and Annie Theile then had purchased the home in 1926 and converted the property to apartments. The property was then owned and managed by George and Lillian Cooke (1951) and then Grace Lynch in 1965, William and Sandra Discepolo in 1983 and finally Stasia Powers (1995) and maintained as rental space.
Bruce and Melanie Rosenbaum purchased the property in June 2007 to fully and lovingly restore 390 Mount Hope Street back as single family historically-sensitive and completely modernized home.
Historical Overview of Home’s Original Owner
Benjamin Stanley Freeman started his career as a jewelry manufacturer (primarily inexpensive finger-rings) and created the B.S. Freeman & Company in the mid 1800s in a small shop connected to his father’s home on Mount Hope Street in Attleborough Falls. As Freeman’s successful business grew, he formed a co-partnership with his younger brother, Joseph J. Freeman (who built his Victorian home right next door to Benjamin’s home who he purchased from his father) and moved their company to the Braid Mill – just down the street from their homes. At the Braid Mill location – for the next 5 years, they manufactured rolled gold plate jewelry goods (i.e. plated vest-chains) – the first manufacturers of these types of products in N Attleboro.
Later, the brothers created a partnership with Virgil Richards, purchased and moved into the larger factory complex within the Robinsonville Avenue property in N Attleboro – but later bought out Richards share and maintained the brother’s partnership. Soon after, Joseph Freeman bought an imported, hand made curb-chain so he could experiment on coming up with machinery to manufacture rolled gold curb-chain, replacing expensive hand labor. Joseph and Benjamin ultimately invented the manufacturing process of rolled plated curb-chain which became known as “Freeman’s Curb-Chains” in America and throughout the World. The firm’s success was credited to a great degree to Joseph Freeman’s extraordinary mechanical skill and ingenuity. Joseph Freeman was a man of original ideas, an inventor and developer of several valuable and profitable patents.
During the Civil War years in the 1860s – the name of the company was changed to Freeman & Co and manufacturing was switched to making war badges, military buttons, and brass chains for soldiers. Joseph Freeman died in 1879 (company name changes again to B.S. Freeman & Co) and Benjamin’s son, B.S. Freeman Jr. joins the firm in 1882. The company employed 85 workers at its factory on the Robinsonville Avenue property.
The entire Freeman family is now interred just down the street at Mount Hope Cemetery – a beautiful, park-setting and historic cemetery in N Attleboro.
For a more detailed history of the home and its owner, Benjamin Stanley Freeman – read the summarized article below – “From Plain to Palatial: The Renovation Story of the Freeman Family Home (ca 1830, ca 1877) in Attleborough Falls Massachusetts”, or download the full version from the In the Press section. It includes biographical information about the Freeman family that lived in the 390 Mount Hope Street home during the house’s heyday in the 19th and early 20th centuries, along with a brief, easy to understand architectural evaluation of the home.
Architectural Historian Article
From Plain to Palatial: The Renovation Story of the Freeman Family Home (ca 1830, ca 1877) in Attleborough Falls Massachusetts
by Architectural Historian – William McKenzie Woodward
A savory Victorian concoction, the Freeman House architecturally epitomizes that era’s attitude in form, location, and setting. Large and elaborate, it presents itself proudly atop an ample hillside, the home of a family made wealthy through the manufacture of gold-plated chains.
Benjamin Stanley Freeman (1822-1903), born in a small house across the street and down the hill from here, in his early twenties joined the nearby jewelry factory of Henry Robinson and soon married the boss’s daughter Ann (1827-1913). With his brother Joseph (ca 1826-1878), he soon formed a new jewelry firm, and a decade later they acquired the Robinson factory for their growing business, which thrived for the rest of Benjamin’s life.
Built by Benjamin Freeman (ca 1788-1875), this began as a simple 2½-story house. While it was not today’s commanding presence, it represented a step up, literally and figuratively, for the Freemans from the modest house across the street. Little changed by 1860, when Benjamin Stanley Freeman had moved here with his wife, four children, Irish-born domestic servant, and farm-worker boarder, it suited a prosperous man with net worth of $26,000—not yet really rich, but on his way. The house assumed its present guise between 1876 and 1880, when Ann and Benjamin Stanley added the tower, porches, bay windows, and large-scale cresting on the roofline; together they enjoyed their creation for thirty years. Like many self-made 19th-century industrialists, especially in small towns, Freeman wanted a signature house in a prominent location near his place of work.
While proximity to his factory appealed to industrialists in the 19th century, 20th-century owners lacked that connection. After the Freemans’ deaths, the house was divided, first into two units and then into five. While its condition declined steadily over the ensuing century, it remarkably underwent no major changes externally or internally, only flimsy partitions increasingly dividing the interiors.
The Freeman House evokes a variety of interpretations. It is foremost the house of a newly manufacturing-rich family, suddenly awash in money. It also typifies provincial architectural preferences: style conscious, but not cutting edge. Finally, it recalls changes in taste: by the mid-20th century, Victorian architecture was comically disparaged; no wonder cartoonist Charles Addams situated his ghoulish family in a house almost identical to this. Beginning in the 1970s, however, a new generation began to celebrate the architecture of the previous century and again wants to live in a single-family Victorian house.
The Freeman House, one of the community’s houses eminently worthy of preservation, is swaggering testimony to the entrepreneurial spirit that drove this community in the second half of the 19th century.
To read the full version, please visit the In the Press Section. The full version is available to you in pdf format.