Located where York Street and Water Street meet at the town’s eastern edge, Samaritans’ Cottages date back at least to 1704. The eastern cottage was standing when carpenter William Pearman was granted the lot in that year and may be the same building he purchased from John Briggs in 1676 – the survival of several interior timber-framed walls suggests that it is so. It is a hall and parlour house with a porch projecting to the south. The western house was built by Pearman’s daughter Martha and son-in-law Thomas Handy in 1719 and is also a hall and parlour structure, much like Pearman’s but without a porch chamber.

The land for the Handy house was originally granted to the widow Margery Potter, one of the last women accused of witchcraft in Bermuda. She was indicted at a July 1693 assize court, charged with using diabolical means to make John Middleton ill. A jury trial in December returned a verdict of Ignoramus, meaning there was not enough evidence to convict her, and she was acquitted. Potter gave the land to her daughter, widow Honora Harding, who gave part of it to her niece Martha Handy.

Alexander White, a tailor, occupied the eastern cottage from the late 1750s until his death in 1786. Benjamin Fox then acquired both cottages, but they were sold upon his death to John Trott in 1806. John Davenport had purchased them from Trott by 1820 and then merged them with his other properties next door and across the street to the south.

In 1900 the eastern cottage and the storehouse to the east were sold to the Independent Order of Good Samaritans and its sister order, from which its modern name, Samaritans’ Cottage, derives. It is a Bermuda National Trust property rented on a long lease. These two houses are excellent examples of the architecture prevalent when St George’s was rebuilt in stone and have survived with very little external modification.