Date: Fri 27-Dec-1996

Publication: Bee

Author: ANDREA

Quick Words:

old-homes-history

Full Text:

with cut: Old Homes Speak Of Other Lives In Other Times

B Y A NDREA Z IMMERMANN

An old house is like a demanding mistress: it takes your time, your energy,

and your money, according to Judy Sims who lives in a 1771 home on Great Hill

Road. But she, like many other people who take up residence in Newtown's older

homes, find the benefits of living in a historic home far outweigh any

inconveniences.

Tracy and Stuart Hubbard looked at 30 houses in Newtown before being smitten

by a 1710 home on Church Hil Road. They had always dreamed of living in an old

home and found this one in Newtown to be affordable.

"Old homes have so much charm - there's just nothing like the little cabinets

and little spaces. They just have a history to them," said Tracy, a writer. To

be happy in an old home you need to be flexible and "appreciate that it wasn't

built ten years ago," she said.

The original chestnut floor boards in their living room, for instance, are

uneven, bumpy, and some of them creak. But the Hubbards have no intention of

sanding them down to be level; they would rather adapt themselves to the

unusual features of an old home.

"When I was working in the house and turned one of the bedrooms into my

office, I bought a chair with wheels. I'd sit in my chair which would then

wheel down the room - it was driving me nuts," she said. "But I just got a

carpet. You work with things."

Although the couple has worked to restore features by stripping the painted

wallpaper down to the original plaster walls, and re-exposing the beams by

removing ceilings, they did insulate and add storm windows. "The first year

when we moved in, our oil bill was just ridiculous. This place was just like a

huge piece of Swiss cheese," said Tracy.

"And one thing about living in an old house - nothing is straight, nothing

plumb," she said. "Do you hang pictures according to the ceiling or the floor?

We hang by the ceiling."

When New York City residents Clarence Fischer, Jr, and his sister, Anne, were

looking for a weekend home in the country, they settled in a 1709 home on

Taunton Hill Road. "Our one requirement was that it be pre-WWII - we got pre-

that by a couple of hundred years!" said Clarence, a freelance editor who now

lives in Newtown year round.

Drafts are one thing that seems common in older homes. And the doorways are

usually low. "There are things you adjust to," said Clarence, who stands just

shy of 6'1" tall. "There are certain doorways, if I don't duck, I crack my

head on them." A number of years ago his sister went so far as to buy him a

bicycle helmet to wear around the house (he never did) to help save his scalp.

"And the latches on the door are old - just great for catching on sweaters,"

said Clarence. "But you get used to that."

"We're all short, so we don't have to duck," said Sharon Cohen of Eden Hill

Road. She lives in the 306-year-old home with her husband Jean Mathurin, and

two children, Seth, 14, and Jordan, 4. "The floors - everything - slanted.

When we moved the dining room table in we put a jar of ketchup on it that

rolled off the other end. So we have blocks of wood under all the furniture to

even it."

Visiting critters are another part of life in an old home. Sharon said they

had moles, mice, and two bats. "And this year, my husband found a chipmunk

swimming around in our toilet!"

Truman Warner, a retired professor of anthropology, said spiders are

particularly prolific, creating perpetual cobwebs in his 1750 home on

Huntingtown Road. "You can remove them one day and the next day they'll be

back," he said.

"I knew it would be drafty and it is; and dusty because the floor on the first

floor never had an underflooring. Now there are places where the floor is

apart and dust comes up from the basement where there is a dirt floor," said

Truman. "We put small [sized] gravel on top to keep the dust down; we didn't

want to spoil it by putting down concrete."

Dick Davis, a teacher in New York State who, along with Mr Warner, lives in

the 246-year-old house, said that neither of them are very handy. "Our

neighbor Kirk Fraczek has been such a help to us. He is a licensed

electrician, and does plumbing and carpentry," said Dick.

Home Maintenance

"We've restored just about everything - that's why you have to be an eccentric

to live in an old house. Who else would do this?," said Judy Sims, an artist

and operator of a nursery school. She and her family live in a 1771 house on

Great Hill Road. Judy lends her artistic talent to the restoration and her

husband, Earle, draws on his engineering experience. The couple has lived in

the 1771 house for 27 years, and raised their family there.

When the Sims found out they had to restructure the center chimney (which

supports three fireplaces), they were pleased to hire a mason who set aside

some of the old bricks to put on the facade of the chimney.

"I wanted to restore it to a place where it was comfortable to live in. You

need to have certain amenities. The biggest problem with old houses is having

enough storage space and that remains," she said.

Judy said old houses are akin to money pits. Her friend, Sallie Meffert who

lives in 1725 house on Gelding Hill Road agrees, calling it "The Mushroom

Factor," a term she read in The Old House Journal .

"You say, 'I think I'll just paint the living room,'" said Sallie. When you're

done with that, you notice that upholstery on the furniture looks a little

dingy and should be replaced. And on, and on. "It mushrooms," she said. "You

can never sit down and think, `Ah - it's all done.'"

"When you do even small projects, like putting in a fawcet, it becomes a big

project - the pipe comes off in your hand," said Tracey Hubbard, who strongly

believes if things still work and are not causing a problem, then leave them

alone. "We still have some weird circuit-breakers in the basement. A lot of

times you just don't know why people put things in - there's almost 300 years

of people putting stuff in before you," she said.

"In a house there's always work to be done, but in a house like this - you

don't just go out and buy a storm window - my husband had to make the storm

window," said Sharon. "When something breaks, you don't just go down to the

store and get something to fix it with."

Although their house is centuries old, it continues to settle. Sharon believes

this is because we live in a way other than that which the house was designed

for. "[The original owners] didn't have kids running up and down stairs, and

bookshelves and lots of furniture on the second floor," she said. And one

recent owner of her house was said to have used the enormous fireplace as an

indoor parking space for his Harley Davidson motorcycle; the hearth is big

enough to do that, added Sharon.

There is a positive side to maintaining an old home, however. "My husband

loves this house - when something goes wrong, everything is already so uneven

he doesn't have to worry about getting it [exactly right]," laughed Sharon.

Surprising Features

It did not dawn on Sharon and Jean that the narrow stairways and lower

ceilings in their home would cause such a problem when they moved in. "We had

to cut our box spring in half because we couldn't get it up the stairs because

of the angle," said Sharon. "And we had to put a lot of our furniture in the

basement [because it wouldn't fit]."

Homes built in the 1700s often had a huge central chimney which narrowed as it

travelled from the basement through two stories, supporting three or more

fireplaces. The main hearth sometimes had a dutch or other type of oven built

into it. As those in day long gone, current residents tend to have the hearth

and chimney as focus of their homes.

Sallie Meffert, who is president of Newtown Historical Society, enjoys cooking

meals on the hearth in her home. She said she doesn't do "real elaborate

things," or cook in the fireplace every night. But when they have company for

dinner she likes to cook meat in the reflector oven, bake pies, squash or

sweet potatoes in the dutch oven, or make a chowder or stew in a kettle over

the fire. "It's not that hard to do," she said. "It's timing."

Those who live in old homes occasionally are rewarded with a great surprise.

Truman said the people who had lived in the house before him had found a

couple of American coins there which dated back to the 1790s. "They left them

for us with the understanding if we sold the house, we would pass them on to

the next people," he said.

When restoring the kitchen, Judy Sims said they found a message written on

some of the original wood behind a cabinet. It read: "Twelve dollars to build

the pantry. Just think about it - ain't it nice to be rich."

Clarence has two interesting doors in his home. One is a "coffin door" where

the three last steps in the stairway make a 90 degree turn into a hallway.

When opened, the door permitted family members to bring a coffin down a

staircase they would otherwise not be able to negotiate. Another part of the

original house includes a "hatchet door." Built of two layers of wood - one

side with panels running horizontally and the other vertically - it would be

impossible for a hatchet to break through the door.

"The Indians were friendly around here," said Sallie, who has three hatchet

doors in her home. She said although that style door probably earned its name

elsewhere, it was still used in this area because it provided double

insulation ("an early storm door").

In the Hubbards home, the hand-hewn beams in the attic are clearly marked with

Roman numerals. Tracey believes the beams were labelled on the ground, and

then assembled by matching numbers.

Most of the doors in Sharon and Jean's home have bars that slide into place to

lock them. Their front door, however, is locked with a skelton key that is

about four inches long.

"There is history to be discovered here in the beam with a no-use notch in the

middle - a sign that it had an earlier life in another structure," said Dot

Wenblad, who lives in a 1788 home on Blackman Road. "[There are] doors that go

nowhere, a window hidden in an interior wall, a bedroom floor that goes

downhill because it was built on top of the woodshed roof, and the fancy

woodwork in the parlor... [added] by an itinerant woodworker.

"My life is different because I live in an old house," said Dot. "It is

tempered by those who came before. And, hopefully, I'll leave some of my

spirit here for the next residents."

History

If you own a historic home, you may also find you are living with ghosts of

homeowners past. Sharon said she didn't want to live in a haunted house and

have something be scary for her young son, so she made certain her house

wasn't on "the list of haunted houses" in Newtown.

Sallie, on the other hand, was so disappointed to detect no ghosts in her

home, she resurrected one from her childhood. "Any self-respecting old house

should have one, so we made one up to explain the unexplained," said Sallie.

"I'd like to think I'll be around here after 300 years and have them say,

`That Meffert let the cat out.'" She also thinks it would be fun to join

not-completely-departed members of the Nettleton clan who owned the house for

200 years.

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, use of the well,"

said Sallie. The 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... 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."

Wills had a detailed inventory of kitchen utensils, furniture, blankets, all

articles of clothing, tools, animals, and beehives. It gave a historical

perspective of what a farm would look like in the 1700s, said Sallie.

"It's been a great experience living in an old house, and I wouldn't have

traded it for anything," she said. It is really amazing to think that the

house was built before George Washington was born, she said.

And, as the cliche goes, people who live in old houses are just the

custodians, adding a bit of their own history, said Sallie. Among the things

those interviewed will leave as evidence of their existence are built-in book

shelves, laundry rooms, added baths, a wood-burning stove, a wall-mural, and

modern plumbing and electricity. But, for the most part, the current owners

have attempted to preserved and accentuated the historical features of their

homes.

"It has the feeling of home," said Judy, explaining the appeal of her home

built by Wheeler Fairchild. "Nobody wants to leave here. People came to tea

for an hour, and ended up staying five."

When Sharon's parents came to visit from the Midwest, they suggested it would

be interesting to go to Sturbridge Village. Sharon responded, "Why would you

want to go to Sturbridge. We are living Sturbridge."

For more information on historic homes in Newtown, see Touring Newtown's Past:

The Settlement and Architecture of an Old Connecticut Town, by Mary Mitchell

and Albert Goodrich, available through the Newtown Historical Society.