It is a 2+1⁄2-story wood-frame structure, five bays wide, with a gambrel roof pierced by three interior chimneys.

The house was built in stages, beginning in about 1715 as a typical First Period double pile house, with a center entrance, chimney and winder staircase (two stories, two rooms wide and one deep).

This expansion was completed by the last Attorney General to King George III, who fled to Nova Scotia at the beginning of the Revolution.

The house's most prominent Colonial resident was Colonel Timothy Pickering, who leased it from 1802 to 1804, when he was serving as United States Senator.

This article about a National Register of Historic Places listing in Essex County, Massachusetts, is a stub.