Restoration Begins on Historic Cushman House!

The following text and images found on The Portal, a Newsletter of the Medfield Historical Society.

Restoration Begins on Historic Cushman House!

Things are finally looking up for the 1850 Jacob Cushman house (the former bicycle shop) at 67 North Street.

The Medfield Historical Commission, anxiously watching the house's decline, had for six years been prompting and urging discussions between the Montrose School and several potential developers. Last fall the commission was finally able to bring school officials and Medfield developer Bob Borrelli to the table, who bought the house from the school.

The studs milled on just two sides.

front part of the house has good bones and will be kept. Interestingly, when it was built about 1850, the studs, though they are still very straight and true, were milled only on two sides. He will remove and replace the deteriorated back section with something new but similar in style. The interior is being gutted and modernized in a way that will meet today's market needs for apartments and office and retail space
when the house is complete next fall.

Jacob Cushman was born in 1813 in Attleboro but at age eight came to live in Medfield with his uncle, from
whom he learned to be a wheelwright. He opened his own business in 1834 and formed a carriage manufacturing business with Joseph Baker in 1851.

Cushman was a local philanthropist, very active in the Baptist church and the temperance movement. At his death in 1886 he also left $100 to each of the other three churches for relief for their worthy poor. He held several municipal offices in Medfield, and was a representative in the General Court in 1860 and 1872. He also paid part of the cost of publishing the history of Medfield.