Original cooking fireplace (9-1/2' wide)

Experience colonial New England firsthand in the quiet setting of the Riggs house and gardens with harbor and river views. Furnished entirely with period pieces, including historic household tools and cooking implements (many in the Riggs family for nine generations), you can see, feel and taste old New England.

Main bed chamber

Three accommodations are available. Two in the old part of the house have 18th-c. panelling and working fireplaces. One is ensuite with an additional additional panelled bed chamber. The thirs is the wing's loft with a view of Anniswquam village and its harbor, ensuite with the great room below. Your breakfast features delectable New England specialties served in your choice of settings.

Loft and view of Annisquam Harbor

Nearby are world-class museums and a wealth of antique shops and galleries filled with art inspired by the luminous light that has mesmerized so many of America's finest artists. The beaches are numerous and inviting. There are biking and hiking trails and a variety of festivals celebrating Gloucester. This is America's oldest working seaport, where you can sail on a schooner, or go on a whale watch, or travel by boat to Salem or Cape Cod. Within 25 minutes' drive is Ipswich with the highest concentration of 17th-c. houses in America; Marblehead with the largest number of colonial (pre-Revolutionary) dwellings, and Salem and Newburyport each with a confluence of colonial and especially fine federal (1780-1830) architecture.

A specialist on decorative arts and architecture, your hostess is a former museum curator. You may wish to ask for an itinerary suited to your interests, or if schedules permit, you may engage her for a private tour of the North Shore or of Boston.

The Riggs House in late spring

History. Thomas Riggs purchased the squared-log house (one of only three surviving in Massachusetts) for his bride Mary Millett in 1661. Three adventurers, the Wakely brothers and Mathew Coe, had built it sometime during the 1640s or early 1650s. On the southern peninsula of Annisquam Harbor, the house looks across to Gloucester's earliest successful settlement. It was an ideal site for ship chandlery (repairing and provisioning vessels) in the protected harbor and for farming. Amazingly, the pasture between Thomas Sr.'s house and that of his son Thomas Jr. (1690) survives to this day. Thomas Sr. was town clerk for 51 years, selectman for 20, a representative to the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and Gloucester's first schoolmaster. Much of Gloucester's early records are in Thomas Sr.'s hand.

When Thomas Sr.'s youngest son Andrew married Mary Richardson in 1704, a single-storey cape was added to the log house. In 1753 Andrew's youngest son George built the gambrel roof, accommodating three upstairs bedchambers. The house remained in the Riggs family nearly untouched until the current owner designed a timber-frame wing of 18th-c. handhewn beams that provides a great room and loft as well as the house's first permanent electricity, running water, and heat (save for the six working fireplaces).