‘Secrets’ Awaited House And Garden Tour Participants

By Kendra Bobowick

Ian Villamil, 11, struggled with keys to the historic barn’s locked sliding door.

Eager to open the barn’s secrets to sunlight at the circa 1750 Matthew Curtiss House Saturday, July 17, during the Newtown Historical Society’s 15th annual House and Garden Tour, he succeeded with the key and grabbed the handle. “The barns are my favorite place.”

Inside, he yanked back a tarp and took a long look at an enormous wagon wheel and its tall spokes. He noted the horse-drawn buggy kept hidden in the Main Street house’s backyard. “This is nice and should be taken out more often.”

Inside a second barn was a tool shed frozen in time. All hand-powered, the selection included sharpening tools, cutting tools, axes, saws, and other implements to help a residents cut wood or process materials for use in the home. A back wall held items used for cutting ice from its place frozen solid during the winter, then transported and stored for use in months to come.

“They would cut chunks right from the river,” Ian said.

At the main house Ian, a junior docent for the historical society, walked the rooms and yard, offering details to guests Saturday.

The Saltbox house is “typical for its chimneys,” and for its slope-roof design, he said. Fieldstone steps likely hauled from the yard and set in place led to the front, side, and back doors. Using those steps to access the front foyer, he noted the staircase immediately in front of guests who step inside, and the closets beneath. In case of raids or other attacks, residents could slip inside a second closet concealed within the first. Moving to the dining room, he noted the differences in bureaus standing side-by-side. One was ornate with brass handles. For the time period, only wealthy people could afford the brass, which was taxed. But the New Englanders “found a way around the brass,” Ian explained.

Placing his fingers into grooves to the far left and right sides of a different bureau’s top drawer, he pulled it open. By designing notched or grooved seams, the drawers could work just as well.

Guest then passed through the well-worn kitchen floor and out the back stoop. Was there anything special about the yard? “No … yes!” he said, changing his mind. Ian pointed toward a nearby garden bed, explaining, “There is a tombstone.”

Hidden behind ferns and overgrown jewelweed was an etched stone with the classic crescent top over a roughly two-foot-tall headstone. The marker is not part of the house, however. “Someone left it here. We’re not sure where it came from.”

Dated August 23, 1864, the stone notes the passing of Julia Morehouse.

Also on the day’s tour were other antique homes, including the Benjamin Curtiss house form 1748, a 1798 Federal farm house built by Zachariah Clark III, and a 1973 contemporary.

A last house on the tour belongs to Dan Holmes of Holmes Fine Gardens, which displays many native plantings surrounding a traditional and newer home with an outdoor shower. Inside the raw planks creating the stall and seated next to local artist Jesse Birden’s sculpture — one of many in the gardens — sat Emily Krasnickas, enjoying the outdoor bath space. It is a perfect place to rinse off after a swim in the pool surrounded by a fieldstone patio and gardens of perennials and shrubs in bloom. Near the sliding backdoors and surrounding a burbling fountain was an herb garden, where Mr Holmes had also trained an apple tree to grow along a small trellis.