Homes & Gardens Tour Will Explore Newtown’s Hanover District This Year

By Shannon Hicks

“We just adore living here,” horticulturist Sydney Eddison said, gesturing across the back yard of the home in which she and husband Martin have been living for four decades. The couple had arrived on the doorstep of 65 Echo Valley Road one morning to pick up a key from their real estate agent while looking at homes in the area, and nearly moved in to the house then.

“We could never see another house after this, even though our real estate agent said she had no intention of selling,” Ms Eddison said. The property is quiet and peaceful. The back yard is very gently sloping. The home itself is adorable, a soft yellow color that works perfectly in its woodsy surroundings.

As luck would have it, the Eddisons received a phone call from that same real estate agent just two months later, wondering if the couple would still be interested in the home and property that lies just within state forest property. “We were over here almost before she could finish asking us,” laughed Sidney.

In the 40 years that she has lived in that home with Martin, Sidney Eddison has become one of the country’s most noted gardeners and authors. She frequently speaks and has taught in the past, although in the past decade she has become more focused on her writing. Her earliest books — A Passion for Daylilies: The Flowers and The People, A Patchwork Garden: Unexpected Pleasures From A Country Garden, and The Unsung Season: Gardens and Gardeners in Winter — are out of print, so even the dog-eared copies anyone has in his or her bookshelf are highly coveted.

The hard cover edition of The Self-Taught Gardener: Lessons From A County Garden, which was released in March 1998, is a special-order-only item; the book is available in paperback… if readers are lucky enough to come across a copy.

It is Sidney’s writing style and her personality that make her so appealing. She writes as if she is talking to old friends, and her readers feel as if she is indeed a friend sharing some advice over tea. Which is being sipped, of course, while sitting out in a beautiful garden.

Sidney Eddison’s gardens, in fact, are probably going to be the most coveted stop on the homes and gardens tour being sponsored by Newtown Historical Society this year. The society has decided to focus on the old Hanover School district of Newtown when it presents its annual homes and gardens tour on Saturday, July 8, and the gardens at the Eddison home mark the northernmost stop along the tour.

The event will be open to the public from 11 am to 5 pm, and will go on rain or shine. A limited number of tickets are available, for $20 per person, and advance reservations are being recommended. Call the historical society at 426-5937 for details.

“When we moved in here, there was our house and five others — all pre-1850 — along Echo Valley Road,” Mrs Eddison said last week. Two of those homes are on this year’s tour. The 1840 farmhouse at 20 Echo Valley Road and the 1710 John Glover Homestead are both on the tour.

At 1 Tamarack Road, the circa 1790 Hanover District Schoolhouse will be open, and the circa 1840 saltbox at 18 Tamarack Road will be open. And at 32 The Boulevard, the gardens of master gardener Maureen and Richard McLachlan will also be open for the public to visit.

The Hanover District

Newtown began dividing into established school districts as pioneers moved into the area and the needs for different sections arose. While the town’s first district was established by vote in October 1717, according to Ezra Johnson’s History of Newtown, it was not until 1766 that any of the districts were recognized in law. It was another 28 years, in 1794, before the districts gained corporate existence.

While Johnson’s book targets December 1755 as the date the Hanover school district was established, Newtown resident Brad Taylor believes it was a number of years before the school building was actually constructed. Mr Taylor, who lives with his wife at 1 Tamarack Road — the location of the former schoolhouse building, which has been converted into a full home — has been putting hours of research time into tracking the history of his home and the district.

“If you look at the Johnson book,” Mr Taylor said this week, “1755 is the year that is thrown around. But as far as I can tell, that was just the date from the minutes of a town meeting, when the building of a school was approved.

“In 1785, 16 men signed a subscription to pay for the cost of opening a school,” Mr Taylor continued. “That money was to pay for construction, salary, and supplies.”

The Hanover District School building was converted from its one-room existence into a residence in 1959, Mr Taylor said. At that time, a lady Mr Taylor only knows of as Mrs Taylor was the owner of the building. Mrs Taylor was also interested in the history of the schoolhouse, and did a bit of her own research, said Mr Taylor.

During the transformation of the building from the schoolhouse into a residence, Mrs Taylor spoke with the workers, who pointed out some carvings done with a pen knife of the date 1790.

“1790, as the date of the school’s construction, fits more into the timeline than 1755,” Mr Taylor says.

Hanover School operated from 1790 until the spring of 1914. It closed that year due to the lack of students in the area, but then reopened in the spring of 1919. In the spring of 1921, the school closed for good when all students began attending the then-brand-new Hawley School.

Mr Taylor has been working on tracing the student lists for the 125 years the school was operating. Among the familiar names of Newtown’s past he has come across are the family names Booth and Glover. He has also come across the names of Catherine, Ella G., and Dennis Cavanaugh. Ella Cavanaugh attended Hanover District School around 1900 to 1905, and then taught at the school in 1914. Dennis Cavanaugh (1890-1965) purchased the schoolhouse at One Tamarack, presumably from the town, says Mr Taylor, in 1929 for $26.

The name John Glover was among those who signed the subscription paper drawn up in October 1785 to support the district schoolhouse. Mr Glover’s home, which dates to 1710, is now the home of Mae and Robert Schmidle, and is on the July 8 historical society tour.

The house, says Mae Schmidle, was built by “one of the very first people out here,” that being John Glover. In town records, Mr Glover was named as one of the purchasers, along with Abraham Kimberly, “for ye proprietors of Newtown” when the land that became Newtown was purchased in 1732.

By 1712 Mr Glover was serving as one of the town’s first town clerks (he is considered by many to have been the first official town clerk) and was an “extensive” land owner. He was also, in November 1713, elected during a town meeting to the committee to hire workmen, on the town’s account, “to build a meeting house to serve God in.”

 It seems being an important part of town government has carried on with some of the inhabitants of the Glover House. Mrs Schmidle, who was Newtown’s town clerk for ten years, likes to tell people she “was just carrying on [John Glover’s] tradition for a little while over there at 45 Main Street.”

A few hundred yards from the Schmidles’ home, at 20 Echo Valley Road, is a circa 1840 farmhouse that is now the home of Cheryl and William Edelen. Town records show the property was passed to someone in the Glover family in 1840, but there are no concrete records to indicate exactly when the house was first built.

The property, the location of the former Hanover Springs railroad station and rumored to have been also a stop along the historical Underground Railroad which brought slaves into the free North, will have its main home building and gardens open to the public next weekend.

The house, cottage, and barns on the property are all chestnut post and beam construction. Most of the siding is oak. “It’s difficult to get paint to stick to it, but that must be what was on the property when the house was built,” Mrs Edelen has concluded.

When the Edelens moved in back in 1981 the house had just been renovated, Mrs Edelen said recently, “so the tough stuff had been taken care of. There was nothing here but the trees.”

Since then the Edelens have created a comfortable living space for themselves, with a gently sloping back lawn that not only is extremely inviting with its carefully placed trees and chairs, but was home to the wedding of one of the Edelens’ daughters.

The Edelens have been cultivating a magnificent garden since 1982. Today the garden boasts crops of rhubarb, asparagus, blueberries, grapes, snap peas, Swiss chard, salad greens, peppers, beans, onions, cucumbers, squash, potatoes, beets, Brussels sprouts, five varieties of corn, zinnias, and sunflowers. The garden was let go for a few summers while the couple did some traveling, and the land needed to be plowed three times before it would cultivate again, but the effort was worth it. The garden is just spectacular, a work of art today.

Finally, the gardens that encircle the home of Maureen and Richard McLachlan, at 32 The Boulevard, will be open next Saturday.

Maureen McLachlan may have graduated the certified master gardener course at University of Connecticut and done design work at the Botanical Gardens, but, she says, “of all the books I’ve read and all the courses I’ve taken, it’s working the yard the makes the difference between knowing how to garden and effectively applying that talent.”

Mrs McLachlan’s talent is obvious from the moment visitors pull into the curved driveway of the McLachlan home. She and Mr McLachlan have been living at 32 The Boulevard since 1986, but Mr McLachlan grew up in the house across the street. He learned to drive in a jeep, says Maureen, on the hill that is now their back yard. The gardens that encircle the home were begun the year Mrs and Mr McLachlan moved into their home; Mrs McLachlan began working on them much more seriously in 1989 and 1990, when the couple’s daughters were off at college.

Today the house has a number of separate gardens, all very well established, even though their ages vary from those that started 20 years ago to a few that were put in within the last two or three years. There is an herb garden and an old-fashioned rose garden, a grass and shrub area with clematis and silverlace vines growing up a wooden dividing wall, and an older garden that started as an all-iris collection but has evolved into “something of a mix,” admits Maureen. In front of the mixed collection is a new garden, just three years old, that is white, gray, and blue, colored with hydrangea, catmint, conifers, bird’s-nest spruce, and weeping blue spruce.

The gardens are dotted with color year-round. In one corner of the side yard is a threaded red leaf Japanese maple that is a deep burgundy-red year-round.

“It has all evolved here,” Maureen said, “and that’s the story of gardening. They are always evolving. They don’t happen overnight. After a while, you become very relaxed with your gardens, too. You just allow things to happen. I’m a perfectionist, but also a realist.

“Gardening is like raising kids,” she continued. “You nurture them along, and you see how it goes, and as they grow it’s not as much work as it was at the beginning.”