The Medlicott House

If you had driven down Longmeadow Street around the turn of the 20th Century, you would have definitely noticed the Medlicott house at 720 Longmeadow Street. This imposing home caught the eye of Longmeadow photographer Pasiello Emerson and he photographed it many times.

While we refer to the building as the “Medlicott house”, Mr. Medlicott was not its first owner. Captain Calvin Burt, a merchant in Longmeadow, built the house around 1786 near the north end of the Longmeadow green. A contemporary of the Richard Salter Storrs house (now the Storrs House Museum), the Calvin Burt house was situated just north of what is now the Brewer-Young Mansion.

Capt. Burt passed away in 1848 and William G. Medlicott, a woolen stockinette manufacturer, purchased the house from the Burt estate in 1851.

William G. Medlicott courtesy of Stephen Forbes

Mr. Medlicott, his wife, and his five children lived in the Burt house and, by 1864, he had substantially remodeled the house. Last summer, a descendant of the Medlicott-Allen-Kibbe family shared a collection of family photographs with the Longmeadow Historical Society; included in the collection is an image of the Calvin Burt house before it was remodeled.

In addition to altering the façade of the building, William G. Medlicott substantially enlarged it. It is likely that Mr. Medlicott needed the extra space to hold his 20,000 volume private library. On the 1910 map of Longmeadow, the home looks comparable in size to its neighbor to the south, the Brewer-Young Mansion. The map shows a barn behind the house, and there was also a garden. The view from the back of the house stretched westward to the Connecticut River.

1910 Map of Longmeadow