28 Green Street

History

The house is one of Newburyport's finest homes in the Georgian style. The gambrel roof, often associated with an earlier period, was used for fine dwellings in Newburyport until the turn of the 19th century.

The doorway of the Bradbury-Spaulding house is well proportioned and quite sophisticated. The applied Doric order and entablature, consisting of triglyphs and metopes, is exceptional, as is the modillioned cornice. The three dormers, which break the roofline and the window lintels, are characteristically Georgian.

Theophilus Bradbury, the original owner of the house, was born in Newbury in 1739. He graduated from Harvard College in 1757, studied law in Boston, and practiced law in Maine before moving to Newburyport in 1786. He was a member of the Massachusetts Senate from 1791 to 1794, a representative to Congress from 1795, and from 1797 a justice of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts.

The house was occupied by Bradbury's wife and children until 1811, when it was sold to Josiah Little. Robert Jenkins purchased the property in 1814 and his family lived here until 1857, when it was sold to Hannah Kenny Johnson, who kept a grocery store at the foot of Green Street. In 1876 it passed to her heirs, who sold it to Mary Chase Toppan; it was then conveyed to the wife and children of Rev. Samuel J. Spaulding, pastor of the Whitefield Congregational Church. The house remained in the Spaulding family well into the 20th century.