The construction of the Samuel Day mansion, more commonly known as the Globe Hotel or Globe Museum on York Street opposite St Peter’s Church, has already been discussed in chapter 2. Using public funds, labour and material, Governor Samuel Day built the house in 1700 and then kept it for himself after he was ousted from office. After a lengthy court challenge, it was granted in 1714 to Day’s brother Thomas, a merchant originally from Bristol, England, who had moved to New York City by then. Thomas Day apparently sold it to a Tucker in the 1720s or 1730s. At the time it was the largest and most ambitious stone building constructed in the colony, a finely proportioned residence which contrasted sharply with smaller traditional Bermudian homes nearby.

The Day house was unique in having a large gable roof spanning two rooms, an ambitious feat made possible by the use of an elaborate internal system of braces. The house is also the earliest firmly documented structure to have Flemish gables. The four chimneys buttressing the north and south sides may not all be original – only the more pyramidal northeast chimney firmly dates to 1699. All four had been built by the late 18th century in order to achieve the symmetry so characteristic of Georgian architecture, but the internal layout of the house retains its original irregular form.

Although the two-storey porch on the east may look original, a probate inventory of Day’s goods shows that it is a later addition. An archaeology excavation in 2023 revealed that the porch foundation differs from that of the house core and abuts the eastern wall. Although an addition, it is still probably quite old, possibly dating to the first half of the 18th century.

From the 1760s onward this was the home of Captain Henry Tucker, a successful merchant and mariner. His mother, Elizabeth Jacobs, is thought to have kept a tavern in the house where members of the governor’s council sometimes met.

In 1800 Henry Tucker’s house and garden were worth £600 and home to 11 enslaved men, women and children, as well as Tucker’s considerable family. In his 1801 will, he gave the house to his unmarried daughter Aletta for life and then to his three sons. One of these, John James (already mentioned in chapter 4 as the owner of the Perry Building), seems to have bought his siblings out but lost most of his property in a marshal’s sale in 1836. His eldest son John Brownlow purchased the house to keep it within the Tucker family. It passed through a succession of Tucker heirs for another 63 years but after 1860 none of them appear to have lived there.

In 1996 an archaeological excavation sponsored by the Bermuda National Trust uncovered a rich array of artefacts, including musket balls, gun parts and a collection of fine ceramics, as well as a five foot-deep quarry dug in the 1760s, apparently to obtain stone to repair the house or porch chamber. Other artefacts date to the mid 17th century – probably trash deposited by enslaved families that the Somers Islands Company owned and who occupied the site before Day’s house was built.

For much of the 20th century, local tradition held that during the American Civil War Confederate shipping agent Major Norman Walker used the upper floor as his office, from where he coordinated the flow of guns, ammunition, uniforms and other war matériel from Great Britain to Bermuda and then westward through the Union blockade. Until recently, the Bermuda National Trust’s Globe Museum presented Bermuda’s role as a blockade-running base in the 1860s but new research has cast doubt on Walker’s association with the building.

Two years after the war’s end, proprietor Ralph Foster opened the Globe Hotel in 1867 to provide food and lodging to mostly American visitors at the beginning of Bermuda’s rise as a tourist destination. Although Foster died the following year at the relatively young age of 33, his widow continued to run the hotel and bar with billiard room for another 14 years.

In 1884 Black St Georgian entrepreneur Aubrey James Richardson remodelled the Globe Hotel and installed an elevator, long since removed. Proprietorship had passed to George Clinton by 1892, and he added a horse and livery service by erecting a wooden stable and coach house in the yard to the west.

Samuel Crofts Rankin purchased the Globe Hotel from the Tucker family in 1899 and soon afterwards the operation went to one of his grandsons.

The Bermuda Historical Monuments Trust bought the house from Rankin’s estate in 1951 and opened the Confederate Museum ten years later to highlight Bermuda’s role in the American Civil War. The exhibit featured a reconstruction of Major Walker’s office. During a major restoration of the building in 1995 the Bermuda National Trust created a new museum exhibit, ‘Rogues and Runners’. In 2023 the Bermuda National Trust archaeology laboratory opened in the building’s cellar while excavations in several rooms shed light on the building’s construction and evolution.