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UPDATED February 1, 2025
Murphy House
Murphy Road, Bennington, Vermont
A little house, a cape, sits at the intersection of Murphy and Austin Hill Roads. Its simple shape with few windows, a steep roof, and a center chimney are hallmarks of early Georgian houses in south west Vermont, built before the American Revolution.
The Hinsdill Map* shows a dot here - indicating there was a house in this location in 1835. The map labels another dot, nearby to the west, as 'Breckenridge'.
The Breckenridge Papers, a
family history written about 1910, are housed in the Bennington Museum. The Papers say that in 1788, John Breckenridge’s
father, Daniel (1769-1847) built a “substantial and capacious house perhaps a
quarter of a mile from the pioneer cabin in which he was born”. That ‘substantial and capacious house’ is the
one labeled on the 1835 Hinsdill map. JY Breckenridge died in 1880. The family moved away. The house burned in 1889. A photograph of it survives
and was printed in The Shires of Bennington, in 1985. The house pictured has a gambrel roof, a style which was built in Bennington after the
Revolutionary War.
The ‘pioneer cabin’ is the dot on the
Hinsdill map, “ a quarter mile” from the family's new house, whose dot Hinsdill labeled ‘Breckenridge’.
Bennington’s Registry if Deeds records that on April 4,1860, Micheal and Mary Murphy paid JY Breckenridge $130 for the land and house. The Murphy family owned the house and land for 148 years. They sold both in 2008.
The current owner of the Murphy House graciously showed me the fireplaces, the timber frame, the room layout, the stone
foundation; all of which date the house to c. 1761, before the Breckenridge
Standoff.
Daniel’s father,
James Breckenridge, who came to Bennington in 1761, built the cabin. It is the dwelling which the NY Sheriff came
to destroy, the house which the Bennington citizens defended.
Since
the 1930's, a stone memorial has
commemorated the Breckenridge Standoff in front the house built in1788. The memorial is in the wrong place.
*A copy of the 1835 Hinsdill map can be seen in the Bennington Town Clerk’s office as well as in the Regional History Room of the Bennington Museum.
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