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135 Hanover Road: A House Of Many Memories And Stories

(with photos)

BY DOROTHY EVANS

A young couple buys an old house and begins fixing it up.

As time passes and remodeling proceeds, the new family may become intrigued by

certain features they find inside and outside the old place.

They may speculate about the property's history, ask the neighbors about what

they know, or even pay a visit to the assessor's office and do a little

research. But that is usually the extent of their efforts.

After remodeling the bathrooms and updating the kitchen, the new family in the

old house begins living for tomorrow, and the few facts and photos they have

gathered are stashed away in a drawer.

But the stories and memories of the children who once grew up there will never

be known to them.

This sequence of events describes a common scenario happening throughout

Newtown today, as longtime residents move away or die, and new families buy

their old homes.

Sometimes, however, circumstances favor a change in this pattern. Previous

owners may come forward who are willing to recount the stories they remember

from their childhood, happy to pass them down to new residents who appreciate

hearing them.

This is what occurred recently concerning the 1850s farmhouse at 135 Hanover

Road that was once owned by the family of Fredrick and Genevieve Rees and is

now owned by George and Nancy Dugdale.

Although the three Rees "children" who grew up on Hanover Road 50 years ago

have all moved away, they were recently persuaded to share their memories of

the house and its surroundings.

Their recollections about the house -- of its Glory Hole and giant cistern, of

a skating pond in the backyard, of a near disastrous fire, of Santa Claus and

his reindeer landing on the roof, of a "queer looking" pile of stones outside

that was touched by Indians -- should provide plenty of bedtime tales for Mr

and Mrs Dugdale to tell their own children.

"Queer Looking Stones"

No Hanover Road resident who regularly drives past this house could fail to

wonder about those huge stones out front. Piled in the front yard beneath a

big maple tree, they seem to have been there for a long time.

One particular chair-shaped rock that must weigh 300 pounds and is balanced

atop a huge slab-like rock is especially interesting.

What could have been the purpose in their placement?

When the Dugdales bought the house in 1994, they met Genevieve Clark Rees,

then in her mid-90s, who had owned the house between 1947 and 1993 when she

moved to Queen Street. Before she died in August 1995, she and Mr Dugdale

struck up a brief friendship.

"She was a beautiful woman," Mr Dugdale remembered.

He learned a little of the house's former history from "Ginny" Rees, as she

was known, and quite a bit more from her youngest son, Peter A. Rees of

Lexington, Kentucky.

He was the one who handled the sale and checked on the Dugdales every now and

then when he was in town to see his mother.

Peter Rees told the Dugdales that "the funny-shaped chair rock" had once been

used by the Indians as a pestle for grinding corn.

It seems a Yale or Harvard professor had happened by their house one day in

the late 1940s when Mr Rees was "very little," and told the family he wanted

to examine the stones more closely, since the chair rock showed definite signs

of chipping and shaping at its base.

"It has a rim where vines could have been wrapped around," allowing the giant

pestle to be moved or suspended from a tree branch and bounced up and down in

a stone bowl, Mr Rees had told Mr Dugdale.

The visiting professor speculated that the pestle had been dragged downhill

from somewhere near Butterfield Road, probably after the house was built in

the mid-1850s.

The mortar or stone bowl -- the part that held the corn and would have

accompanied the pestle -- was still "back there in the woods somewhere."

But he couldn't remember ever finding it. The Dugdales had not had any luck

either.

"We briefly looked for it, but there are three new houses going in and we

didn't find anything. Hopefully, it wasn't taken away," Mr Dugdale said.

The big flat rock it rests on might have once been used "as a carriage

platform for the ladies during the horse and buggy days," said Mrs Dugdale.

"It's quite a story but it's believable," Mr Dugdale added.

Remodeling Raises Questions

After buying the house three years ago, Mr Dugdale, who is a builder working

out of Ridgefield, wasted no time taking the walls and floor down to studs and

floorboards.

"I've been slowly refurbishing it. Trying to save as much as possible," he

said, mentioning the solid oak doors, the front door with its original glass,

and the porcelain door knobs and beautiful embossed hinges he found throughout

the house.

"It has charm and age. We've completely redone the inside but left the outside

pretty much the same."

The Dugdales want to put a porch on the front because there had once been one

running the length of the house, as they saw in an old photograph.

"I'm dying to have it be all done," said Mrs Dugdale, who is anxious to have

her kitchen back before the birth of her fourth child next year.

The Dugdales have three boys, Nicholas, age 5, Sam, age 3, and Jack, age 2.

The youngest naps in the mornings and the oldest, Nicholas, catches the bus

for St Rose School in front of his house, sometimes after waiting on the big

flat rock or sitting on the chair-shaped pestle stone.

Eleanor Mayer, a longtime Newtown real estate agent who sold the house to the

Dugdales, knew Genevieve and Fredrick Rees, Sr, well.

"Ginny lived there alone for many years. After she moved out, it was kind of a

spooky house but it sold very quickly and the Dugdales have fixed it up

beautifully," Miss Mayer said.

M. Fredrick Rees, Sr, had been very active in Newtown politics, she said. He

was a two-term member of the Board of Selectmen and one-time chairman of the

Board of Education before he died in 1970.

"I served on the Republican Town Committee with him," Miss Mayer said.

Before the Reeses bought the house, it was owned by Paul Pierce.

Cistern In The Attic

A phone call in early November to Peter Rees, Fredrick's youngest son, yielded

more details.

"We came to this house when I was a couple of months old," Mr Rees said.

"Growing up on Hanover Road, it used to be a lot more quiet. The Berkemanns

lived there, and Madeleine McQuillan, who used to drive us to school. There

were a lot fewer cars. You knew every one that went by. It was a dirt road

with grass growing down the middle," Mr Rees recalled.

Then he described the huge oak cistern that can still be seen today in the

attic.

"That was put in before our time. We never used it. It really was neat because

it still had the stenciling on it: Platt's Lumber Yard in Hawleyville. We used

to go over to Platt's when I was a child," he said, adding that Hawleyville

used to be a major train center.

"More than 200 trains went through in a day, 90 years ago," he said.

A call to town historian Dan Cruson revealed that an oak cistern as big as the

one sitting in the Dugdales' attic might have been built on the spot by a

local cooper, and the residents would have pumped water out of their well to

fill it.

"There would have been a drainage hole in the bottom" to feed the downstairs

bathroom or kitchen, Mr Cruson explained. Indeed, the hole is still there,

though the cistern is empty.

"It was an impressive piece of cooperage," Mr Rees said.

"And for it to hold so much water and not wind up in the cellar -- that showed

how well-built the house was. When it was filled it must have weighed as much

as five or six waterbeds," he said.

Another memory from 40 years back came to mind.

"The top part of Butterfield Road used to be impassable. Now there's like ten

houses on it. We used to go by a pond that had wood duck nests up in the

trees."

Moonlight Skating

Peter Rees, now 52, was only a toddler in the late 1940s, but his older sister

and brother, Nancy Rees Gaffney and M. Fredrick Rees, Jr, now aged 56 and 57,

were old enough to recall even more.

Mrs Gaffney, who married a Sandy Hook boy and lives today in Pittsboro, N.C.,

a town south of Chapel Hill, said she finally left the area seven years ago,

first moving to Bridgewater when Newtown got "too big."

"We remember when it was barely 6,000 people including Fairfield Hills, which

had a couple of thousand," Mrs Gaffney said during a recent phone interview.

She thought the big flat rocks in front of the house had been brought in by ox

and came from the river across the way, and she clearly remembered the

afternoon when the wandering professor stopped by to look at the "little chair

rock."

"We sat out there and talked to him for hours. I was maybe 12 at the time and

the story was absolutely fascinating to me because I always wanted to be an

Indian anyway," Mrs Gaffney said.

She also thought his name might have been Nickerson and that he actually did

find the mortar stone back in the woods.

At any rate, it was a "wonderful place to sit out on a hot summer day and

drink lemonade," she said.

"I was born in Bridgeport before we moved to Newtown and I remember I had just

learned how to whistle. I was four and a half when we moved," she added.

Then Mrs Gaffney mentioned the "Glory Hole," or trap door, in the attic.

"When you opened it, the hot air went right up and out," toward heaven, she

remarked, to cool the house down.

"You wouldn't believe the rush of air you could feel if you stood at the

bottom of those attic stairs," she said.

She also remembered measuring the big maple tree once.

"It was 24 feet around and we used to swing up and sit in the middle and have

picnics," Mrs Gaffney said.

There was a pond in the backyard that the family kept filled by building a

stone wall around it. But the wall "kept falling down and we'd have to rebuild

it."

"It was fabulous for skating in the winter. I remember seeing the moon. And my

father hosed down a sled run in the back. You can still see where it was today

from the top of the hill, sort of carved out of the ground. It used to terrify

my mother to see us coming down. `Idiot children' she would call us.

"Then there was the giant sand pile south of the house, a huge sand pit. We

took our cars and trucks and made big sink holes with clay," Mrs Gaffney said.

There was a sawmill across the road that belonged to the original farm.

"When we first moved, there was a pile of sawdust 50 feet wide and 30 feet

deep and we found the sawmill engine was in the barn [that once stood across

the street]. It had a ten-inch wheel."

That old barn had held an amazing collection of "stuff," she said, and there

were 32 cow stanchions.

"Finally it had to be bulldozed because the town said it was a nuisance."

Fire Upstairs

The oldest of the three Rees siblings, M. Fredrick Rees, is a retired engineer

who lives with his wife Elaine in Cave Creek, Ariz.

During a recent visit to Newtown, Mr Rees visited his old Hanover Road home

and talked about the past.

He, too, remembered the fabled professor's visit under the maple tree.

"He questioned us about where the stones came from and he was the first person

we'd ever come across that corroborated what we'd always heard. I must have

been ten or 12 at the time so I remember it quite well," Fred Rees said.

He also remembered the attic with its "Glory Hole" and a pair of flying

squirrels that he had found there and kept as pets.

"They were so tame, I took them to school in my shorts' pocket."

Another story concerned a near-disastrous fire that occurred in the upstairs

bathroom, caused by careless smoking.

"A cigarette had been left in an ash tray near the bath tub. My mother must

have been drying off Peter and she laid the towel on this low table right over

the cigarette. We children had all gone to bed.

"Half an hour later we began to smell the smoke. My dad managed to douse the

fire, which hadn't amounted to anything yet. We were very lucky and my parents

were very scared," he said.

Mr Rees said there had been an earlier kitchen remodeling project undertaken

exactly 50 years before the Dugdales' current one.

"The first thing my Dad did when we moved in was completely rip out the

kitchen and downstairs bathroom and redo them," Mr Rees said.

"The dining area was originally painted a horrible pea green -- even on the

embossed tin ceiling. That color was so bad that he ripped it all out."

As for the skating pond, "My Dad built it. The old soapstone wash tub for a

spillway is still there."

Memories of riding to school in cars driven by Hanover Road residents still

amused Mr Rees in the telling.

"Mrs McQuillan was our first driver, then it was Mrs Beardsley who drove us.

She was a character and her husband was even better. He would put the chains

on and drive for her on snowy mornings when it was slippery. He smoked a pipe

and I can tell you, he stank up the inside of that wagon something terrible."

Santa Claus

"When we bought the house, my father's brother was living with us.

At first, he helped with the re-roofing and plumbing work, but he got married

and that's why the remodeling never got finished," Mr Rees said.

The year that his father and uncle were re-shingling the roof, Mr Rees

remembered a funny story.

"There's a little trap door that flops open in the attic. You can go out on

the roof -- maybe to clean chimneys, I'm guessing.

"When Christmas came we were all excited to open presents and have a good

time, but my Dad or uncle said, `Boy, did you hear Santa Claus last night on

the roof? He sure made a racket.'

"`Yeah sure!' we all answered.

"Then they made us go up the attic stairs and look out the trap door at the

roof where sleigh marks and hoof prints were plain to see in the snow," Mr

Rees said.

"My crazy uncle and father, after staying up until 2 or 3 in the morning and

drinking beer, had gone up on that steep pitched roof with a long 2x4 and made

runner marks and hoof prints everywhere," he said.

"After that, I think I believed in Santa Claus until I was about 30. Years

later, my uncle didn't remember doing it, but my Dad told us."