STOKE ST. MARY DWELLINGS - A brief History.

Internet link to TDBC Listed Buildings - Stoke St. Mary

Stoke St. Mary now bears the obvious signs of recent development, but contains as well much evidence of earlier building and rebuilding. Fyrse Cottage, a fine thatched house, stands at the heart of the village and is probably Stoke St. Mary's oldest domestic building: it rose in the sixteenth century and was evidently enlarged in 1658 by Thomas Furse, a lime-burner. He left his name carved over his door and was once heard to speak disloyal words of Oliver Cromwell. The seventeenth century saw numerous other houses enlarged or rebuilt near the centre of the village, among them Higher Broughton Farm (originally called Stoke Farm), the Orchard, Tuckers, and Aplens, while at a greater distance rose Broughton Farm - a rarity in locally-made brick - and Stoke Court. The present Stoke Farm was built in about 1774 as the first married home of Philip and Elizabeth Burridge, and retains a fine threshing barn which later served as Capel Drewe's slaughter house. Of similar date is Stoke Cottage, replacement for a house built a century earlier on a piece of hillside waste. The striking Regency mansion called Stoke House is a more conspicuous feature of the hill. It was finished in about 1810 and owned sucessively by the Weaver, Harman and Patton families, local tradition recording that the horse chestnuts which line its former carriage drive commemorate the many children of Captain Thomas Patton. His grandson, Henry Walsh, spent his childhood at Stoke House, and later gained distinction in the Zulu Wars, being the first to greet Major John Chard after the defence of Rorke's Drift. From the very top of the hill another early nineteenth century house looks out, built by the mildly eccentric Samuel Stodgell, a prosperous limeburner. he called his new home Stoke Castle but generations of disrespectful locals thought 'Jack Straw's Castle' a better name. The character of Stoke St. Mary itself changed rapidly in the early nineteenth century. As roads leading to the village were improved so it's 'picturesque' attractions were discovered by some prosperous tradesmen in the town. Among them were John Stephens, a linen-draper, who retired to a new-built gentleman's residence later called the White House, and John Poole, a well-known local printer, who transformed a much older building into the house now known as Woodfordes. Notable among Victorian houses in the village is the Cedars, for long a property of the Maine family. It had been built by 1886 and replaced a seventeenth century house whose kitchen survives as Meadow Cottage. The Half Moon, sole survivor of the three pubs which Stoke St. Mary possessed 80 years ago, reached its present form in the village street at the very end of the nineteenth century, evidently following a destructive fire: traces of an elegant brick-built predecessor are still visible in the present structure. When Colonel Patton died in 1915, the villagers half recognised the end of an era, watching from their doorways one January dawn as the last squire of Stoke was carried to his grave. The effects of the Second World War had an immediate effect. On 28 June 1941 three parachute mines fell over Stoke St Mary and Thurlbear causing considerable damage to several buildings, including Stoke House, Greenway Farm, and Thurlbear Church. Renewed self-confidence and the beginning of modest expansion marked the community during the 1950's. A group of houses, appropriately called 'Pattons' was built near the church in 1950, and in the same period several new houses were completed on the Thurlbear Road. A public meeting in May 1961 voted to rebuild the village hall, the work being completed soon after to the strikingly successful designs of Kenneth Steel and Hadley Coleman; and in 1968 the first old people's bungalows appeared in the newly-created Church Close.

Source: Tom W. Mayberry and M. V. McArthur 1988

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