Resetting The (Stone) Table On Hanover Road

By Dottie Evans

Once again, the 1850s farmhouse at 135 Hanover Road has got its signature chair and table back together again. One imagines that Father Bear might now come striding out of the forest and sit down there to enjoy his bowl of porridge.

For many years, people driving along Hanover Road have wondered at the sight of the large, slab-like stone balanced atop a rock pile and guarded by an ancient maple tree. Another odd looking stone with a handle-shaped projection standing nearby drew speculation.

Was the smaller stone carved on purpose to look like a chair?

Or was this a giant pestle used to grind corn?

Was there a companion stone –– a bowl-shaped mortar –– long since broken or taken away?

Who put those stones there in the first place?

The old house boasts a rich history, inside and out, that has generated colorful tales.

Several of these were recounted by the three children of Fredrick and Genevieve “Ginny” Rees who lived there from 1947 to 1994, in a Newtown Bee article that was published November 21, 1997. A favorite legend was that the pestle-shaped stone was used by Native Americans. One story claimed that during the horse and buggy days, the table stone was used as a convenient platform from which the ladies of the house, dressed in cumbersome long gowns, could climb onto a high-wheeled buckboard.

Before the Rees family lived there, a man named Paul Pierce owned the old farmhouse. And since the Reeses, two other families have owned it. The current owners are Page Waller and Frank McEneaney, who bought it from George and Nancy Dugdale.

 

A Tree Limb Falls,    Breaking The Stone Table

“We bought the house in March 2002,” said Ms Waller, “and we loved the look of the old stones.”

“Then in July, this big limb came off the old maple and fell on the rock, cracking it. We were upset and wanted to repair it but never seemed to get around to it. One problem was finding someone to do the work,” she said.

No wonder they didn’t “get around to it,” since two children were born during their first two years in the house. Their daughter is 2 years old now, and their son is just 8 weeks.

“We got CL&P to cut down the other branches because the tree was overhanging the road and we were afraid of it falling on someone. But they left the big trunk, which stuck straight up about 12 feet,” she added.

Several false starts were made taking down the big stump, “but no one wanted to do it because of all the metal objects that were embedded in it –– old horseshoes and nails –– breaking their chain saws,” Ms Waller said.

Finally, they found three Guatemalan men who agreed to the job. They cut the tree into pieces, hauling the chunks off into the woods. What remained was a pile of rocks, the queer-shaped stone, and the broken table stone.

Ms Waller and Mr McEneaney knew they were not done with this project. They wanted to make further reparations, but how would they go about fixing the stones? The answer came when the telephone rang.

Along Comes A Craftsman

Ethan Currier of Sticks and Stones Farm on Huntingtown Road had driven by 135 Hanover Road several times and noticed the broken table stone. He had read The Bee story and he remembered how the stones used to look when the maple was still standing.

“I found out the name of the people living there now, and decided to ask them if they wanted me to put the stones back the way they had been,” Mr Currier said.

Ms Waller was struck by the timing of his call.

“Here we’d been thinking about putting the stones to right, and wondering how to go about it, and then he called us.”

When Mr Currier offered a price for doing the work, Ms Waller and Mr McEneaney suggested he might like to have other stones in payment. They were thinking specifically of two half-ton slabs that had once supported an old porch in front of the house that burned down long ago. The slabs were lying unused on the front lawn.

It turned out Mr Currier had been looking for stones just like those to use as accents in a Japanese garden he was refurbishing in Westport. The result of these negotiations was that on Tuesday, November 2, on Election Day, Mr Currier arrived with his truck and crane to raise and repair the table rock.

“It probably weighed 3,500 pounds when it was all in one piece. I was barely able to lift the broken half,” he noted, adding he would have to put the two porch stones on his truck to act as ballast in raising and lowering the repaired table stone.

After drilling three holes along each of the broken sides, he made stainless steel pins to set the two pieces together with cement glue. Dropping the top piece onto the bottom piece involved a very tricky maneuver where, at the last minute, the supporting blocks had to be removed and the rock dropped down.

“Luckily, I heard this little chinking sound, and I knew we’d managed to line it up,” Mr Currier said.

Later in the day his father, Tim Currier, a longtime stone mason and owner of Sticks and Stones Farm, stopped by to watch.

“In the old days they used stone boats and oxen to move rocks like that. All you needed was to raise the slab a little bit, then lever it up and you could move it,” Tim Currier said.

He noted that the table rock was “typical of what you find around here.”

“It’s got a lot of iron in it. But it’s not very strong and breaks easily. There are slabs just like this along Currituck Road where it crosses the highway that are always sliding down on the road,” Mr Currier added.

At the end of the day, the repaired table rock was back in its former place and the chair stone was anchored on top so it would not roll off.

Like the Dugdales before them, Ms Waller and Mr McEneaney were glad to assume responsibility over Hanover Road’s “queer looking stones.” They were doing their best to maintain the old house and its historic setting.

Some change, however, could not be helped. The old maple is gone. And a huge oak cistern in the attic that once provided water to the home had been taken apart, according to Ms Wallace.

“But we’re planning to rebuild the front porch. We’ve got an old photograph and we know how it once looked.”