The owner
Perry Chaffee
A message from the owner
Welcome. I bought this house in 2011, while I was serving on active duty in the Air Force. It had been through foreclosure and stood empty and boarded up, stripped of its fixtures, and no one could legally live in it until it was repaired. It needed far more than I knew. Restoring it has been the work of fifteen years, and it’s still going.
From the start I wanted it to be more than a house: a home for a chosen family of people who serve, including military, emergency responders, healthcare workers and teachers, where nobody has to come home alone at the end of a hard shift. That hasn’t changed.
This website is the other half of the work. The house has had nearly a century and a half of owners, families and residents, and most of their story was scattered or forgotten. With a lot of help, I’ve been gathering it back. I’ve tried to publish only what the records support, and to label the legends as legends.
If you lived here, worked at the Battles Home, knew the Bonneys, the Lilleys, the Stevenses or the Murphys, or have an old photograph of the house, I’d love to hear from you. And on Halloween night, come up the driveway and say hello.
— Perry
About Perry
Perry graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 2006 with a degree in legal studies. As an Air Force officer he led a communications flight and served as executive officer of a munitions maintenance group at Spangdahlem Air Base in Germany, then managed radar and command-and-control acquisition programs at Hanscom Air Force Base. From 2016 to 2020 he was vice president of strategy at WWPass, a Boston cybersecurity company, where he led the creation of the PassHub password manager. From 2020 he supported the Air Force’s international radar programs at Hanscom, and since spring 2026 he has supported the E-7A Wedgetail program there. He was named to AFCEA’s 40 Under 40 in 2018, and from 2010 to 2014 he served with the Patriot Honor Guard, performing military funeral honors for veterans.
Off duty, on the dance floor
Away from radar and acquisition programs, Perry is a ballroom dancer, socially and in competition at New England events with his dance partner, Sherri. Dance turned out to have the same problem he spends his working life on: a vast amount of information scattered across books, films, recordings and archives, with no single map of it. So in 2026, from his office in this house, he founded LODance, an online guide to dance. Its Library of Dance indexes dance from 1450 to today, covering books, films, performances, music and art, and links to where you can read, watch or hear each one.
