In 1901, this farmstead became home to three remarkable women—Mary, Edith, and Lucy Etta Bartlett, all of whom became physicians, a highly unusual profession for women at the turn of the twentieth century. Descendants of a long line of doctors extending back to Josiah Bartlett, founder of the New Hampshire Medical Society and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, the sisters received their medical degrees from Hahnemann Medical College in Chicago and entered private practice. Before the Bartletts purchased the property, it was home to James Hanchett, a contractor and dam builder. Hanchett built the house of locally quarried, squared limestone blocks. Beaded mortar joints give the walls a rich texture. A one-and-a-half-story wing extends to the rear of the two-story house, more than doubling its depth. The east wing originally was recessed from the plane of the main block, but the resulting open space was filled with an enclosed porch, probably c. 1900. Pedimented dormers and a wooden rear wing were also added at that time. The house’s Italianate styling includes a hipped roof with a broad overhang supported by scroll-sawn brackets and a tall hipped-roof belvedere with louvered windows. The flat stone lintels over the tall narrow windows and off-center entrance reflect Greek Revival, which was waning in popularity by the late 1850s, but builders of the time often combined elements of different styles into their own creations, making this hybrid more typical than unusual.
Northeast of the house is the original smokehouse, and beyond that, the barn, an oblong block with a hipped roof. Both structures are built of limestone, randomly laid with roughly troweled mortar joints. Other buildings on the property—a schoolhouse, a log house, and a well house—were moved here after the farmstead, now a museum, became the property of the Beloit Historical Society in 1962.