Nestled between Bridge and King streets, Bridge House is one of the oldest and best documented locations in St George’s. The original building was a timber-framed, two-storey house that planter and shoemaker Roger Bailey built. The exact date of construction is unknown, but it certainly predates Norwood’s 1662-63 survey. Roger left the house and ‘garden plott lying before it’ to his wife Mary, in 1686. She died just three years later and after her seafaring son Moses died in 1694 her other son Aaron inherited the house. In 1702 the newly married Aaron and Miriam Bailey sold the house to John and Jane Follett, newcomers from Barbados, for the substantial sum of £110.

A sketch of the Bailey house accompanying this deed gives us a rare glimpse into Bermuda’s 17th century timber-frame architecture. The twostorey gable house had an entry porch with a chamber above, wide casement windows on the ground floor with smaller ones tucked close under the eaves, a large chimney attached to the north wall and another one, probably at the end of a room extending to the east. The building was apparently L-shaped, with a steeply pitched roof. A decorative finial graced the peak of the southern gable.

The Folletts had a turbulent past. John was an English merchant and ship captain who traded with West Indian planters. In 1685 he rose with the Duke of Monmouth against James II and was deported to Barbados after the rebellion failed. His earlier commercial connections quickly reestablished him in the West Indies and by 1698 he owned three houses in Bridgetown and a number of trading vessels. In that year he married Jane Massey, née Thorowgood, who had already been widowed twice. In 1702 they migrated to Bermuda, perhaps for health reasons.

After the couple purchased the house from Bailey, Governor Benjamin Bennett formally granted the land to them. It is clear that they contemplated a major renovation of the building, for the grant noted ‘the great costs, charges and sums . . . laid out and expended and which will be laid out and expended in the rebuilding and refitting’ of the house. But the Folletts never lived to complete the job. John died in 1704 and Jane a year later. In her will, Jane directed that ‘my house in the town of St George’s be without delay well and sufficiently repaired, built, fitted and completely finished in workmanlike manner in windows, doors’, and then rented out, with the proceeds going to an orphan boy named Thomas Newtham.

The Folletts were good friends with their neighbours at Reeve Court, minister Thomas and Elizabeth Holland. In Jane Follett’s will, she appointed Elizabeth Holland as overseer of the rebuilding of Bridge House. As it turned out, however, the Hollands did not stay in Bermuda long enough to witness the completion of the task.

The house renovations were completed by 1708 and, following the precedent set by Governor Day, the builders made use of stone originally quarried at public expense to build a gunpowder magazine to finish the job. In all likelihood, the stone house which stands today was built on the foundation of the earlier Bailey house, perhaps incorporating the same cellar. The present building bears a striking similarity to the sketch of the earlier house, with two differences. Builders added a chimney to the southern gable end and substituted a larger porch and stair tower in place of the more modest one on the timberframed structure.

By 1709 Governor Benjamin Bennett had moved into the fine new residence from a building next door to the north. A walled garden or courtyard separated the house from King’s Square and Bennett rented a detached kitchen to the rear that belonged to the Reeve Court lot to serve his household. The house was the site of many council meetings and informal courts.

Bennett continued to live in Bridge House after he was replaced as governor, perhaps until his death in 1736. By 1742 the orphan Newtham had apparently died and the house was sold by Jane Follett’s heirs. In that year John Esten, a recent immigrant to Bermuda who became a successful merchant and politician, was living in the house. He bequeathed it to his son John Jr in his 1747 will.

John Esten Jr was also a prominent St George’s merchant who lived across King’s Square in Esten House. Although Esten was considered ‘a friend to America’ according to a 1780 spy map, it did not stop him from renting Bridge House to Bridger Goodrich, a Virginia loyalist who had made a fortune as a privateer captain taking American rebel ships as prizes. Goodrich, a young man of 25 at the time, had escaped from a Baltimore gaol after he was imprisoned there as a traitor. He reached Bermuda and outfitted a fleet of privateers to wreak vengeance on American shipping. After the young dashing captain married Elizabeth Tucker, a member of the pro-American Tucker family and a cousin of Virginia patriot St George Tucker, the couple had to flee an angry mob that invaded their wedding. In 1782 Goodrich purchased Bridge House from Esten, paying £1,000 in cash gained from his many prize captures.

In 1787 Goodrich transferred ownership to his brother Edward but continued to live there. This was probably a legal sleight of hand to protect the property in case he was sued or went bankrupt.

When war with France broke out in 1793, Bridger Goodrich once again assembled a fleet of privateers and had great success capturing French and US vessels in the West Indies. By 1795 his personal assets had risen from £5,410 to £18,775, and his company assets from £500 to £6,300. Goodrich’s home is thought to be the setting for Haitian Revolution refugee planter Felix Carteau’s Soirées Bermudiennes, published in 1802, relating the history of Saint Domingue’s slave uprising. One of Goodrich’s privateers had captured Carteau’s ship enroute to France and he housed the unfortunate planter until he got passage home.

The British Admiralty reversed itself in 1785 by declaring that US vessels were not liable to capture and Goodrich was faced with having to compensate American shipowners to the tune of over £100,000. He died suddenly in June 1795 at the age of 38, probably from the stress of impending financial disaster. Bridge House was in his brother’s name, along with most of his other Bermudian assets, so his creditors got little. He was buried in St Peter’s Church, where a white marble memorial was placed in his honour.

Soon after his death, Goodrich’s widow Elizabeth departed for England with her children, never to return to Bermuda. She advertised the house for rent in the Bermuda Gazette and sold the household furniture which included a silver-mounted harpsichord, a sideboard with pedestals and vases, carpets, a very fine library, mirrors and a genteel assortment of china, glass and queensware, all the trappings of one of St George’s finest residences.

Edward Goodrich lived in the house until his death in 1817. In his will, he gave his wife life tenancy in Bridge House, but when his accounts were settled she found that his estate was insolvent. Their son John slowly sold off his late father’s properties to keep creditors at bay. Bridge House was one of the last to go, sold at auction in 1822. A sketch by Thomas Driver in 1824 shows Bridge House much as it looks today, with a wooden verandah on the front of the porch.

Silversmith George Samuel Rankin purchased the house for £1,800 and it remained in the Rankin family for more than a century. The property by then consisted of the entire block, except for a coach house or stable in the southeastern corner which belonged to Reeve Court. This was the same building or a replacement of the earlier kitchen that Governor Bennett had rented in the 1710s. It was added to the Bridge House property in 1887.

Most or all of the outbuildings standing today were built by the mid 19th century and included a detached kitchen to the east of the house and a multi-unit privy to the northeast. One of these buildings, perhaps the store to the south, served as Rankin’s silversmith shop where he worked and displayed items for sale. When George Samuel Rankin died in 1876 at the age of 82, he gave his unmarried daughter Henrietta life tenure in Bridge House before it passed to his many heirs.

Henrietta took full advantage of her father’s bequest by living to be 98 years old. She died in 1921 and while various Rankin heirs decided what to do with the house, Frank Gurr and his wife rented it. Three years later Gurr purchased the house. During Gurr’s tenure, the house acquired the name Bridge House, perhaps christened by Gurr himself after some preliminary research into the history of the building.

Roadwork on Duke of York Street to the north of the house revealed what Gurr took to be the footing of a bridge, which he conjectured must have crossed a stream that flowed from Somers Garden down to the harbour past the front of his house. Recent research places the bridge on the other side of King’s Square, near the intersection with Water Street west, and argues against the existence of a stream since Daniel Tucker created the ‘pond’ in Somers Garden in 1617. ‘Bridge House’ is thus a misnomer, since there was never a bridge nearby.

The Gurrs lived in Bridge House until 1968 when the house was sold to Hereward Watlington. He undertook a major renovation and altered the building’s internal layout by removing a staircase and sealing up several doors and passages. In 1971 he sold the building to the Bermuda National Trust.

In 1993 the Trust’s Archaeological Research Committee dug a number of test excavations to help date the various buildings on the site, and the following year the Trust completed another major renovation.