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Please Note: All content on these history pages is taken directly and excerpted from the document titled "History of Shelburne House" written and compiled by Donna Fellows Estep. Additional works and references are cited within the following history excerpts.
Shelburne House has an important place in the history of the town of Shelburne, Massachusetts. The house is located on Fellows Hill, in the center of the Mohawk Orchards. Four generations of the Fellows family, from 1835 to 1918, lived on this hill and occupied the house now known as Shelburne House Bed and Breakfast.
After 1918, the residence was known as "Doc Kemp's Place," after Dr. Howard Kemp purchased the property from Leon and Harry Alvord, who had bought it in that same year from Etta Morse Fellows following the death of her husband, Allen Fellows, in 1917.
Roger Peck purchased some of the farmland from the Kemps in 1950, and later sold it to the Wiles family, who now own and operate the Mohawk Orchards, as the land surrounding Shelburne House is called. The large, white barn across the road from Shelburne House was once the Fellows' barn, but now holds all the orchard equipment for the Mohawk Orchards.
The Kemp family sold the house and some property to David Tully in 1967. In 1968, Tully sold it to Frank and Ann Kaminsky. The Kaminskys planted a row of hemlock trees in front of the house that soon hid it almost entirely from view. Stanley and Dorothy Gawle purchased the house from the Kaminskys in 1975. Elaine Hinze, the current owner, purchased the house from the Gawles in the spring of 2003.
The row of hemlock trees was felled in autumn of 2003, and the house was once again revealed in all its beauty, to the surprise of many who drove up and down the road for years and never noticed it. The windows of the house on Fellows Hill once again look toward the Pioneer Valley, as they were meant to. In the summer of 2004, Elaine Hinze opened the doors of Shelburne House Bed and Breakfast, inviting the world to see this long-hidden treasure of a home.