Located at the northern end of the Agawam Center Historic District, the Captain Charles Leonard House is at once one of the town’s most recognizable landmarks and one of its best-kept secrets. Situated at 663 Main Main Street, the Leonard House has been connected with the social events of Agawam for over two hundred years. (The house celebrated its bicentennial in 2005.)

Distinguished by its stately size and excellent condition, the Captain Charles Leonard House is set back from the street behind a towering two hundred year old ash tree. Attributed to noted New England architect Asher Benjamin, “the old Leonard dwelling” is easily Agawam’s finest Federal building. The white, two story, hip-roofed building boasts an impressive facade featuring two-story Doric columns, Palladian window and elliptical fanlight. The Captain Charles Leonard House was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975 and became what the Agawam Historical Commission considers the “crown jewel” of the town’s first historic district when Agawam Center was placed on the National Register in 2001.

Charles Leonard was born in 1764 and married Mercy Remington in 1789. One year later, he purchased twenty-five acres of land on the eastern side of Main Street. According to historian Ernest Newton Bagg, Leonard was a graduate of Harvard University who later turned to farming. He attained the rank of Captain while serving in the local militia, and was known by that title thereafter. It was in 1805 that Leonard constructed Agawam’s fourth tavern on the western end of his property to serve travelers as the first stop on the Hartford to Boston stage run.

The Captain Charles Leonard House passed through a succession of owners, including the George Fowler family, who owned it at the turn of the twentieth century. Serving as multifamily rental property in the early decades of the 1900s, the house had fallen into disrepair by 1938, when prominent Agawam citizen Mrs. Minerva Davis purchased the house and proceeded to have it fully restored. Mrs. Davis then created a board of trustees to operate the building as Agawam’s Community House.

• • Featured in/photographed for The White Pine Series, Vol. XI, No. 4 (1925)
• • Recorded by the Historic American Buildings Survey (1934)
• • Featured in Some Old Homes of the Lower Connecticut Valley (1988)