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Constructed 1824 for Colonel Harris Hatch. Mr. Hatch was a person of considerable importance in the history of the Town. He served with the British in the American Revolution, and was educated at Windsor College in Nova Scotia, an educational institution of choice for the well-to-do in the nineteenth century. Colonel Hatch served as Member for Charlotte, was a Director of the St. Andrews and Quebec Railway, President of the Charlotte County Bank, Judge of Probates and President of the Agricultural Society. He died in 1856 after returning from the Legislature in Fredericton.The building is severly neo-classical in design, and its insistence on symmetry extends to false windows on the King Street side, inserted only for the sake of uniformity.
Hatch's home was later the location of Grace Helen Mowatt's Cottage Craft industry in the 1920s, and named "Chestnut Hall." Around the turn of the century it passed into the hands of Reverend H. P. Ross of Taunton, Mass. Ross and wife had purchased the Townsend property on Chamcook Mountain called "Mountain House" in 1902 and renamed it Rossmount, latter adding the Hatch House to their possessions in 1938. They later donated the building with period furnishings and portraits of themselves to the Town, and wsince 1980 it has served as a handsome museum.