The Clara Sexton House

By Margaret B. Ingraham with Dr. Charles Stearns
According to Hazen's History of Billerica, the acreage, of which the house lot was a part, was owned by a Jacob Brown who sold his granted rights to the location to John Stearns in 1663 and then disappeared from town. Stearns died in 1668 at the age around thirty-seven. No mention is made again of the location until 1723 when three quarters of an acre of this land was sold by the above John Stearns' son John and his wife Johannah "with buildings thereon" for thirty pounds to Jacob and Rebecca (Patten) Danforth. (Jacob was the grandson of the illustrious Jonathan Danforth who had "tied the town together" by means of his expert surveying of the early land grants.)
The framing of the house indicates that at this time it was of saltbox construction. Jacob, a blacksmith, lived here most of his married life. He died at fifty-seven, in 1756, predeceasing his wife by almost twenty years. David, one of his two remaining sons, in 1763, sold his share of his father's estate to the Reverend Henry Cumings who remodeled the home. Reverend Cumings, then twenty-four years old, had just become the Pastor of the First Parish Church in which position he was to remain actively for fifty years, with eleven years in semi-retirement until his death in 1823. He was a distinguished scholar, a leading figure in American Revolutionary affairs, and the author of over twenty published sermons, some of which are preserved at our Historical House. As was typical at the time, he numbered his sermons and delivered them at intervals, using each several times. He was married three (some report four) times and was father of five children.
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