Fundraising Homes & Gardens Tour Returns Saturday

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Six of Newtown’s loveliest gardens and four of the town’s prettiest historic homes will be open to the public for a few hours this weekend, when Newtown Historical Society hosts its 7th Annual Historic House & Garden Tour.

Between 11 am and 5 pm on Saturday, July 7, seven properties will be open to visitors. Knowledgeable guides will be available at each location, and each location will offer a rare look into a private home and/or garden.

Tickets for the tour are $20 each, and will be limited to only 200 sold in order to avoid overcrowding at the private homes. Tickets may be purchased in advance at C.H. Booth Library, 25 Main Street in Newtown.

If available, any remaining house and garden tour tickets will also be sold at Matthew Curtiss House, 44 Main Street, on the day of the tour. All proceeds from this event will support the historical society, specifically its maintenance of the Curtiss House as a museum.

Maps with directions to each of the seven properties will also be available at Matthew Curtiss House on the day of the tour for all ticket holders beginning at 11 am.

Organizers and homeowners have requested that the tour be limited to children over the age of 12.

The tour is completely self-guided, and ticket holders can visit the homes in any order they choose. There will be members of the historical society at each location to check tickets and answer questions. Each property will be clearly marked with balloons.

Because the tour is being held rain or shine, refunds will not be given in the event of inclement weather.

This Year’s Properties

The Pleasance, a public garden at the intersection of Main Street/Route 25 and Sugar Street/Route 302, will be open from 1 to 4 pm (the remaining six properties will be open at 11 am). Picnics are welcome.

The remaining locations are all within a few miles of each other in the Sandy Hook and Botsford sections of town. The gardens of Pat Benkovich of Kris Atwood and Rob Cuchetta will be open to the public; the home of Lois and James Barner will also be open. The remaining properties – those of Sallie and Michael Meffert, Cathy and Mark Hunihan, and Gail and David Friedman – will have homes and gardens open.

Thirty-three Zoar Road, currently the home of Jim and Lois Barber, was built circa 1790 by Asa Chambers. Asa’s son Thomas, who was born there, became a notable figure in the establishment of Newtown Academy. The Chambers property was also a defining location when Newtown began dividing its land into school districts.

The “agitation” to build a second schoolhouse, wrote Ezra Johnson in his book Newtown, 1705-1918, began in 1727. Yet it would not be until the minutes of a town meeting held 43 years later that the North and Middle school districts would be defined. In the report from the annual Newtown Town Meeting held on December 10, 1770, the Chambers property is mentioned as “ye house of Thomas Chambers on ye north” as one of the boundary lines between the North and Middle District.

A special town meeting on February 7, 1784, then changed the land into part of the newly established Gray’s Plain district. Chambers’ property was again a dividing line almost 100 years later, when the Zoar school district was defined in 1878. The minutes from that meeting mention the land “between the dwellings of Thomas C. Chambers and Charles Johnson.”

Mr Chambers became directly involved in education in Newtown in 1837. With a pledge of $25 on February 8, 1837, Mr Chambers became a member of an association “formed for the purpose of purchasing a location, and building a suitable house in the borough of Newtown to be occupied as an Academy for the education of the young in the various branches of science, and to raise a sum of money sufficient for said purpose.”

Thanks to pledges of 45 additional men on that February date totaling $1,475, Newtown Academy became a feasible project. The school opened its doors for its first students in the fall of that year.

Lois and Jim Barber have lived in the pretty house just off Bennetts Bridge Road, Mr Barber said this week, for four years. The house is tan with white trim and wonderful green window boxes across its front. A gently sloping hill runs from the road to the front entrance of the home.

“Most of the other homes on this road have been on this tour already,” Mr Barber said, “so we agreed that it was our turn this year.” Wooden birdhouses of all shapes, sizes, and colors dot the front of the house, as well as hangers on the side and even a light post.

Greeting visitors as they step onto the front walkway is a small Gothic-style figure playing the panpipes. To the right of the statue is a tablet that reads, “There is / always music / amongst the trees / in the garden / but our hearts / must be very quiet / to hear / it.”

A small sign on a pole at the bottom of the front walkway announces the property as Jeremy Hill House. Jeremy Hill is the name of the hill on which the house was built, not anyone – as far as historians can discern – who was born in or lived in the early cape style house prior to the Barbers.

“We thought the same thing. Our house had a plaque that had the name Jeremy Hill House on it, so we thought it was named after someone, but we talked to Dan Cruson and he researched it for us,” Mrs Barber said this week.

“He was the one who found out that it was the name of the hill,” she said.

Traveling off Zoar Road, onto Bennetts Bridge, and then making a right-turn onto Gelding Hill, tourists will eventually come across 32 Gelding Hill Road. The home of Sallie and Michael Meffert, “Three Chimneys” was built circa 1720 by Theophilous Nettleton, whose descendents lived in the home for nearly 150 years. The property was originally part of a 1,000-acre land grant dating from the reign of Queen Anne.

Sallie and Michael Meffert have lived at Three Chimneys for nearly 20 years. Inside the main building are wide-plank wooden floors and rooms filled with signs announcing everything from admission fees to Pig Butcher. The master bedroom is home to a fern garden (look in the fireplace).

Theophilous Nettleton was the original owner of what was probably a cape style home; later additions make it now look like a saltbox. The rooms in the house are unusually large, and a mother-in-law suite makes up one wing.

“Back in the mid-1760s when [Theophilous] died, the son inherited his father’s farm and farmstead. But the mother was still alive. The will deeds her one-third use of the barn, a pathway out to the orchard, and use of the well,” Sallie Meffert told The Bee in December 1996. The mother-in-law suite was added with no access to the main house, which accounts for the two front doors.

“It was protection for her as a widow that was legally binding,” Mrs Meffert explained. “And reading old wills was one of the ways you could figure out what furniture was in what rooms, and how the rooms were arranged.”

Outside, the Mefferts have transformed areas of the property into gardens, including one section Mrs Meffert calls “the Joanne Zang Memorial Hosta Garden.” Mrs Zang was the one, Mrs Meffert said this week, who encouraged the young gardener to put hosta in one section of her backyard; it has since taken off.

(It should be noted here that Mrs Zang, who is credited with starting the C.H. Booth Library Book Sale, is very much alive and well. The denotation of the Meffert garden as a “memorial” space is a running joke between Mrs Meffert and Mrs Zang.

It was Mrs Zang’s idea a quarter of a century ago to set up a card table with some used paperbacks for sale on the front lawn of the library during the annual Labor Day parade. The event, which will celebrate its 26th anniversary in September, is now a weekend-long, $80,000-netting fundraiser.)

While wandering through the Mefferts’ gardens, visitors will also encounter an old mill stone that was given to the couple years ago by Kris Atwood, another participant on this year’s tour. Ms Atwood and Rob Cuchetto, who live on Botsford Hill Road, have been working for nearly eight years to create a unique and beautiful landscape dotted with rare and specimen conifers.

A few miles away at 1 Chestnut Knoll, the gardens of Pat Benkovich will be open. The first thing visitors will notice when they turn onto Chestnut Knoll is the wonderful patch of what appears to be tall wildflowers on the corner of Chestnut Knoll and Chestnut Hill Road.

In fact, Mrs Benkovich, who is an award-winning member of Garden Club of Newtown, very carefully created the little patch of bright flowers. The “meadow patch” was an idea of Mrs Benkovich’s three years ago, and careful tending has created an area that is now a low-maintenance yet beautiful area.

Also at the Benkovich home is a perennial garden area, a perennial and vegetable garden area, a decorated walkway, a sunflower nursery area, and an unidentified vine growing up one side of the house that Mrs Benkovich has nicknamed “the Vine that Ate Sandy Hook.”

The Old Bailey Homestead, at 47 Great Ring Road, is now the home of Mark and Cathy Hunihan. The circa 1715 building, which is surrounded by gardens and a pond, has undergone extensive restoration since the Hunihans purchased the property.

“The place was nearly falling down,” historical society member and fellow tour homeowner Sallie Meffert remembers. “But they went in there and completely renovated everything. It’s beautiful again. With its silo, its huge pond… it looks like it would have 300 years ago.”

At 39 Button Shop Road, Gail and David Friedman will also be welcoming tour participants into their home and garden. Built over 200 years ago by Leon Bourguenez, the 1790 Colonial stayed in the builder’s family until 1938, when it was sold to the Hastings-Morse family.

Visitors on Saturday will be able to read circa late 1930s-early 1940s journals left behind by Elizabeth Hastings-Morse and then stroll the cottage gardens described in detail inside the diaries, which the current homeowners have painstakingly re-created.