The three stately Greek Revival-style houses preserved by Mystic Seaport Museum are important reminders of the community once called Greenmanville. Built within four years of each other between 1839 and 1842, the Thomas Greenman houses represent the affluence and importance of three brothers —George, Clark, and the youngest brother, Thomas Greenman — who left Westerly, Rhode Island, for Mystic, where they made their fortunes as shipbuilders, manufacturers, and men of commerce.
This house was built in 1842 for Thomas and Charlotte Greenman. The first floor of the house is open to Museum visitors, who can enter the double parlor on the south side of the house and the large dining room and sewing nook on the north. These rooms have been decorated and furnished in the manner of a prosperous Victorian home of the 1870s; they also contain exhibits on the Greenmanville Community and the Greenman family’s place in it.The cast-iron fence was put up about 1866, and the porches and ornate decorations were added to the house in the 1870s.
Thomas Greenman’s granddaughter, Mary Stillman Harkness, donated the house to the Museum in 1945, and the exhibit was opened in 1952. The kitchen wing and the upstairs rooms are used as Museum offices.
