Winn House

The Winn House is the east half of the Winn-Yeaton Connected Houses, located on the southeast corner of Jefferson Street and Mast Lane, on the property of the Strawbery Banke Museum.

Timothy Winn III, a trader by trade, was married to the sister of Thales G. Yeaton. In 1794, Yeaton purchased this lot in the South End for the purpose of building his family a home. Within two weeks, Winn purchased the east half of the lot as a site for his own home. The two brothers-in-law then separately built themselves two houses that shared a common wall. Construction of their connected houses was completed around 1795. 

Timothy Winn ran a shop on Buck (now State) Street with his name over the door: “Timothy Winn 3d”. A ‘d’ in Colonial America represented a penny (like 3¢), so the proprietor became known as “Three-Penny Winn”. 

Sadly, Winn contracted tuberculosis, known as ‘consumption’ at the time, and died less than ten years after moving into this house. He was only thirty-nine.

The black-and-white photograph above is courtesy of the Library of Congress Digital Collections and was taken in 1961 for an Historic American Buildings Survey. As you can tell from my 2013 updated shots, the Yeaton-end of the Winn-Yeaton Connected Houses has not been restored. The Winn House, however, looks good as new, but the presence of trees and beehives have forced me to take my picture from a different angle.