How are Sweden, a Lynn-based contracting company, and a beer-brewing company connected?
The answer is a house at 11 Grant Road.
Let’s peel the layers back.
First: Sweden.
The story of 11 Grant Road circles around Knut and Anna Swanson. The husband and wife were both Swedish. According to a document from the Massachusetts Cultural Resource Information System, Knut was born in 1888 in Sweden and immigrated to the U.S. in 1906. Anna was born to Swedish immigrant parents in Waltham.
In 1933, according to archives from the Southern Essex Registry of Deeds, Sterling Realty Company sold Anna a piece of land at the corner of Grant and Adams. This would become 11 Grant Road.
Second: A Lynn-based contracting company.
Before the Swansons settled down in Marblehead, they lived in Lynn. The 1920 census lists the Swansons as residents of 133 Euclid Ave. In 1920, the Swanson household included 31-year-old Knut and 26-year-old Anna, their children 5-year-old Helen and nearly 3-year-old Kenneth, and Knut’s 25-year-old brother Eric.
In the profession section of the census, Knut is listed as a “contractor and builder” who performs “mason and stone work” and is an employer. His brother Eric is listed as a “stone mason” and “contractor” who is a wage laborer.
Knut started his own contracting business in Lynn while he and his family lived there, aptly named Knut Swanson Inc. Even after moving to Marblehead, the family business continued to operate in the city through 1960.
By the time of the 1930 census, the Swanson family had moved to the newly built, unnumbered house on Grant Road. The household, as listed in the census, included Knut, Anna, Helen, and Kenneth. Eric is no longer listed as part of the household.
A domestic servant named Amorella MacKenna is included in the household. She was born in Massachusetts to a Canadian-English father and a Massachusetts-based mother. At the time of the census, she was 22 years old and unschooled but literate.
Third: A beer-brewing company.
On Dec. 17, 1937, Anna Swanson deeded the Grant Road house to her unmarried daughter Helen. However, according to the MACRIS document, she eventually married John Joseph Blaine, redeeded 11 Grant Road back to her parents, and moved with her husband across the street to 10 Grant Road.
Blaine was born in Philadelphia. At 15 years old, he worked as an errand boy at a sporting goods store. When he married Helen, though, he was the district sales manager for the Pabst Brewing Company.
The fact that such disparate things such as those above can find themselves united by one house in Marblehead is part of the reason why researching homes and who lived in them is so exciting.