Thomas Halsey Sr., one of Southampton’s founders, and his family built the first farmhouse after arriving in 1640. The current house was built c. 1683 by Thomas Halsey Jr. who inherited his father’s property and used wood frame timbers from his father’s house to build his own. The house remained in the Halsey family for several generations. Visitors who pass through the weathered front door find the wide-planked floors, hand-hewn beams, furnishings, textiles and objects that were the backdrop for domestic farm life in colonial times. Outside, the culinary and medicinal plants that were once household necessities flourish in a replication of a colonial herb garden.
The 1677 will of Thomas Halsey Sr. describes his house as having a "porch chamber," which would have been the upper room of a two-story enclosed porch projecting from the chimney bay and containing the front entrance on the first floor.
Isaac Halsey reconstituted his father's nine acre home lot when he acquired his brother's five-acre share in 1691. The house changed hands many times over the years. In 1695, Isaac sold the southerly 2 1/2 acres of his home lot to Richard Howell. In 1697, Josiah Howell sold to Jonathan Raynor half of the 2 1/2 acres he had purchased from Isaac Halsey. Jonathan left all the land to his son Hugh. By 1800, Hugh’s son, James, owned the Halsey House. In 1812, James Raynor sold this twenty-acre parcel with the Halsey House to Elias Pelletreau. Maltby Pelletreau, who had inherited the parcel from his father, transferred the twenty acres in 1833 to a group of four men (Daniel Fordham, James Scott, Isaac Sayre, Jr. and Henry Reeves). In 1839 this group (now consisting of Henry and Emily Reeve, Isaac and Eliza Sayre, Jesse Reeves and Gilbert and Fanny Carll) sold the twenty-acre parcel to Oliver White. Thomas Nicholas White inherited the land when his father, Oliver, died in 1842. Thomas N. White and Nancy R. White sold a 2 1/4 acre parcel containing the Halsey House to Arthur J. Peabody on August 3, 1886. In 1958, John Tillotson Wainwright III, Arthur Peabody's great- grandson, sold the Halsey House on a .7 acre parcel to the Southampton Colonial Society.
During the late eighteenth-century, the Halsey House was remodeled. Casement windows were replaced with plank-frame windows having up-and-down sash and the interior was modernized with plaster ceilings and fielded paneling on the walls. The Southampton Colonial Society undertook a project to install new three-foot shingles on the Halsey House in 1999. By the fall of 2000, the frame was repaired and the new shingles installed.
The grounds are always open to the public from dawn to dusk but tours of the home are by appointment only.
Sources:
Flanagan, Connor. “Halsey House - Historic Structure Report, 2014.” Southampton, 8 Sept. 2020, www.southamptonhistory.org/post/halsey-house-historic-structure-report-2014
“Halsey House & Garden: Southampton History.” Southampton, www.southamptonhistory.org/hhgarden. Accessed 28 July 2023
