Our History

The roots of Brackett House reach back to 17th-century Massachusetts. In 1630, Captain Richard Brackett, a prominent Puritan with the Massachusetts Bay Company, emigrated from England to the Boston area.

His great-great-great-great-grandson, William A. Brackett, was born January 14, 1825, in Pittstown, New York. He migrated to Iowa as a carpenter to help in the construction of bridges for the railroad. His family soon followed and settled in Mount Vernon in the fall of 1860. William Brackett continued to live in Mount Vernon until his death on June 15, 1891.

All three of Brackett's children were graduated from Cornell College. In 1877, when his daughter Clara was 18, William Brackett built the house that now bears his name. He never lived in the house but apparently intended it for Clara, then a student at Cornell. She and her family lived there, she until her death in 1927, when the house passed to her daughter Elizabeth.  Clara and her second husband, Armstrong Spear, remodeled and enlarged the house form 1915-1919.  One of Clara’s most famous guests was former U.S. President William Howard Taft, who came for three days to lecture at Cornell in November 1916.

In 1952, Cornell College gained possession of the house according to the terms of Elizabeth's will.  It was then that the house was converted into an office for the Alumni Association with guest rooms on the second floor.  In 1977, Bess H. Medary, a 1915 Cornell graduate and classmate of Elizabeth, made a major gift to Cornell. This money, along with funds contributed by other alumni and friends, financed a major renovation of Brackett House in 1978.