Built on the foundation of an earlier house, Cocumscussoc was originally a fortified trading post on Mill Cove and later became the center of the eighteenth-century Updike plantation. Picturesque, but too much altered to be of firstrate architectural significance, it is nevertheless an important seventeenth-century house, interesting both as a rare seventeenth-century survivor and as the only extant trading post of the period in the state, which played a considerable role at the time in the South County economy. In 1948 the house was threatened with demolition, prompting a group of local citizens to buy and restore it for use as a museum.