Furnished with antiques and paintings from the late 18th century, Tucker House Tucker House, on west Water Street, is a Bermuda National Trust museum which gives visitors a glimpse into the home of well-to-do President Henry Tucker, a prominent politician at the time of the American Revolution.

The house lot, along with a water lot across the street, was granted to Sarah Tucker in 1699 and again in 1713 because she had failed to build upon it within three years of the firstgrant. She outlived two husbands, mariner Nicholas Hinson and silversmith Daniel Hubbard, and gave the property to her two daughters, Jane and Rebecca, both of whom had also been widowed by 1749. In 1752 they sold the unimproved northern lot to merchant and mariner Thomas Smith, while Jane continued to live in an earlier, now demolished, house to the south, built on the water lot. Smith built Tucker House much as it stands today.

In layout it is like The Casino (see chapter 5) in that it has living space for the family above and cellars below for storing the merchandise which Smith carried in his sloops. The Flemish gable end of the northern extension may have been inspired by decorated houses of Curaçao, St Eustatius, St Maarten and other Dutch colonies where Smith traded.

In 1760 Thomas Smith acquired the water lot from Rebecca Outerbridge, Sarah’s daughter, and built a wharf, storehouse and fishpond to further support his shipping business. In 1771 disaster struck in the form of an adverse decision in a lawsuit, and Smith was forced to sell his house and move in with his wife’s aunt, Mary Mitchell, who lived in Mitchell House. The Honourable Thomas Smith, owner of Verdmont in Smith’s Parish, another Bermuda National Trust museum, purchased the house and owned it for three years before Henry Tucker purchased it in 1775.

Henry Tucker was the son of Colonel Henry Tucker of The Grove in Southampton, the ancestral Tucker seat at the Overplus laid out by Governor Daniel Tucker in 1618. His father sent him to St George’s in the late 1760s to act as his commercial agent in the capital. There, he successfully courted Governor George James Bruere’s daughter, Frances, and married her in 1770. Later that same year, his new father-in-law appointed Tucker to be colonial treasurer and added him to the governor’s council in 1771. When Henry and Frances ‘went housekeeping’ in 1775, they already had a sizeable family which eventually grew to include 11 sons and one daughter.

While serving as the colony’s agent in London in 1782, Colonel Henry secured for his son the lucrative posts of secretary and provost marshal, which came with an annual salary of £800. Henry and Frances used some of this money to expand their house to accommodate their growing family. They built a long addition extending to the north on the western side of the house, only half of which survives today, as well as several detached outbuildings. They also remodelled the hall and dining room to accommodate the genteel entertainments which the Tuckers hosted as befitting his elevated station in government. In the 1790s and early 1800s Tucker was president of the Council and served as acting governor on no fewer than four occasions. By 1807, however, all his children were grown and had left home, and his wife, in poor health, wanted to return to England.

The Tuckers made preparations to depart Bermuda by selling their household furniture and offering to lease their house, but before they left Henry died suddenly of influenza in February 1808. The following year, Frances Tucker sold the property for £3,000 to be paid in installments to John Till, a former East India Company purser and by then agent for Gosling & Co of London.

When that firm went bankrupt in 1811, Till could not pay the mortgage on the house and Frances Tucker foreclosed. She offered the lot and its buildings for sale and found a buyer in Liverpool merchant James Richardson, whose brother George lived in the house from 1813 until 1825. Richardson extended the wharf another 40 feet into the harbour in 1815 to better accommodate his merchant fleet when his ships called at Bermuda.

In 1825 Benjamin Dickinson Harvey bought the property for £1,110. He lived in Hamilton Parish, but some of his 11 sons and daughters lived in Tucker House. Harvey was a ship owner and lawyer noted as a champion of American causes in Bermudian courts in the 1780s and 1790s, for which he was branded by one critic ‘a most determined democrat’. He had been an assemblyman for nearly 40 years when he died suddenly in 1833. His daughter Althea, and perhaps other children, continued to live in the house after his death.

In 1860 the property was briefly transferred to William Tudor and Richard Thomas Tucker, who sold the house back to Althea but retained the water lot and land to the north of the house fronting on Duke of York Street.

Althea Harvey died unmarried in 1876 and the house was sold to Irishman Robert Boggs, keeper of the new prison built at the foot of Rose Hill. Buildings to the north of Tucker House obscure the once clear view of the north side of the house. In 1939 the Bermuda Historical Monuments Trust purchased the house from Boggs’ heirs, the first of a long list of important historic properties in St George’s that the group acquired.

Tradition has it that during the American Civil War Joseph Rainey, a free Black man from South Carolina, rented the detached kitchen to the northeast of the main house and operated a barber shop while his wife made dresses. The couple returned to the US in 1866 after thanking their many St George’s customers for their support. In 1870 Rainey became the first Black man elected to the US House of Representatives, a post he held until 1879.

In 1953 the Bermuda Historical Monuments Trust opened the President Henry Tucker House Museum, filled with original 18th century furnishings, paintings and pieces owned by the Tucker family which had been generously donated by a family descendant in Baltimore. From the walls of Tucker House, paintings of President Henry’s parents, brothers and sisters look down upon visitors.

Archaeological excavations carried out between 1988 and 1994 shed light on the diet, trade, wealth and taste of the Smith and Tucker families, and many of the recovered artefacts are on display in the cellar area.