“Oldest House” ?
A postcard from around 1910. [Scrapbooks of Althea Boxell 1:5 / Dowd Collection / Provincetown History Preservation Project Page 773]
Updated on 18 March 2026 | Among the several houses with an “Oldest” claim older than the “Oldest House” (72 Commercial Street), there once stood an especially picturesque half Cape on Montello Street. Althea Boxell (1910-1988), that obsessive chronicler of Provincetown, refers to it at least three times in her Scrapbooks.1 I don’t know that the house shown above actually stood at No. 10 — and Boxell doesn’t say — but I have a reason for guessing that it may have.
10 Montello, highlighted in the 1919 Sanborn map. [Library of Congress Geography and Map Division / Digital ID g3764pm.g038261919]
Plate 3 of the 1919 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map shows a property at 10 Montello that seems to conform to the building in the postcard: a 1½-story dwelling with a kitchen ell. If the map is rotated 291 degrees, the proportions of the structure can be mapped very closely on the structure depicted in the postcard, as seen below. (This doesn’t account for the assertion in The Provincetown Book by Nancy W. Paine Smith that the oldest house in town was built by Squire Rich on Pleasant Street — unless 10 Montello once had a Pleasant Street address, as might have been the case, since it’s only one lot away.)
1 Book 1, Page 5; Book 1, Page 68; and Book 2, Page 133.