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The Samuel Hopkins House, set at right angles to the street with its door in the end, is known for the hero of Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Minister's Wooing, who lived here from 1770 to 1805. Even as restored, it is the kind of irregular, added-to “old manse” which attracted mid-nineteenth-century writers in search of an ancient past for American themes. By the 1860s most such houses were not only irregular but also convincingly dilapidated.