This antique home on Lindsay Road, owned by Richard Cutts, is being painstakingly restored. Cutts and his brother, Robert Cutts, are among those local residents who prefer an old house with a history all its own to new construction. And while there is no guarantee that an owner will preserve the integrity of a home such as this, the Cutts brothers and others, including Selectwoman Kinley Gregg, are among those who are willing to do just that.
Photo by Virginia Woodwell
For some private owners of antique properties, there is a strong desire to incorporate the old with the new, as evidenced in this photograph of a mural added to a hallway at Coventry Hall in York Village by the historic home's former owners between 2000 and 2001 to emulate French wallpaper of an earlier time. The mural shows a scene outside the Old York Historical Society's John Hancock Wharf on the York River.
Photo by Tori Rasche
This 18th-century home on Lindsay Road was once the site of a tannery. Now owned by York Selectwoman Kinley Gregg, the view shown here was actually the rear entry of the property when it was built, as the house was situated to face in the direction of the York River.
Photo by Virginia Woodwell
YORK - Living in an old house is like living smack in the middle of an endlessly unfolding mystery story.
It's not that murder or ghosts are always involved - though they may be - but that clues to a lost past are lying all about, and, if a dweller is clever enough to perceive them imaginatively, they can bring a dull history tantalizingly back to life.
Old houses can also present modern dwellers with troublesome challenges.
At her home on Clark Road in Cape Neddick, Faith Webster gestured to a new window, one of several that she and her late husband, Jim, had installed in their 18th-century home. The wall surrounding the window, Webster pointed out, was exceptionally thick, and only the window installation had revealed why. When the building, originally a cape, was expanded in 1815, the new house, she and Jim discovered, had been built right around the shell of the old.
Out in the carriage house, attached as an el to the main structure, Webster pointed to some carrying beams in the rough-hewn ceiling. Tom Johnson, curator for the Old York Historical Society, Webster reported, had seen them and pronounced them "old, very old," older, certainly, than the floor joists resting upon them. At the time, Webster said, she didn't know why.
It was left to her cousin, Dexter Spiller of York, to track the beams' origin, and that came from some historical paper-sleuthing. Spiller explained that a garrison house belonging to one Samuel Clark once stood on the rise opposite what is now the intersection of Clark and River Roads. About 1836, one Jonathan Talpey bought the property on which stood both the garrison house and another home. But less than four or five months later, records indicate that the garrison house was no longer on the property. Spiller speculates that the garrison house was torn down and, because nothing, in those days, was thrown away, its beams were incorporated into what became Webster's carriage house, nearby.
Both Faith Webster and Dexter Spiller have special reason for being interested in this story because Jonathan Talpey was a forbear of both, and the Webster home and farm have been in Talpey family hands for almost 250 years.
Such continuity of ownership in an old home breeds a special interest in its history, and often makes those connected with it especially knowledgeable not only about the home, but about community matters inevitably related to it.
Spiller, for example, told us that the Talpey who first bought the Webster place in about 1765 was Richard Talpey, who'd been a selectman on the Isles of Shoals. But records reveal that he transferred his membership from the Gosport Village church there to York's First Parish Church by 1769 - and that he divided his substantial holdings in Cape Neddick in two when he gave property to his son, Henry. The building that is now the property of Cranberry Hill Custom Lighting and Antiques on Route 1 was the house serving the "upper" Talpey farm, while Webster's home served the "lower" one. Route 1 split the upper farm in two, Spiller said, about 1810 or 1812, but a sawmill and a gristmill, just below the Route 1 bridge, remained in operation there until 1906, when it was washed out by a freshet. Spiller's great-grandfather, Appleton Talpey, was operating it at the time.
Clearly, the historical threads leading out from these house connections can be almost endless.
People who buy old homes rather than inherit them are no less zealous about their history - and sometimes they're more so.
When York Selectwoman Kinley Gregg was house-shopping in York in 1992, the first of three criteria she set for purchase was that whatever she chose be a pure example of the architecture of its period. She'd always been interested in New England architecture, and, as it happened, was already living in one of the very old and very small houses floated to York from the Isles of Shoals, so she dubs herself "an old-house person from way back."
The other two criteria she set for herself were that the house be within walking distance of village conveniences, and that it come with storage space for her rowing shell.
What she found was the "colonial" built in 1715 or 1716 on what is now Lindsay Road, near the Old Burying Ground.
She said that records show no structure on the lot in 1714, when that land was conveyed by the First Parish Church to one Nicholas Sewall, from Newbury, for the purpose of establishing a tannery. Records then show that the tannery was established there first, near the site of the town's original meetinghouse, and that the house came after. The land was wet, Gregg said, and that was bad for house-building but good for the tannery business, and tanning was continued there by Sewall and his heirs until the early 19th century.
The house itself, though large even for its time, was that of a tradesman, Gregg reported, and so was relatively unpretentious. It had - and has - a big central chimney with six fireplaces, in contrast, Gregg explained, to more expensive homes of comparable size having a chimney at either end or, as in the case of Hamilton House in South Berwick, a chimney at all four corners. But only one of its eight rooms - four up and four down - has raised paneling and fluted pilasters on either side of its "parlor" fireplace.
The house was also, Gregg said, built in "halves," a practice not uncommon in its time, with the section closest to the street built in the mid 1700s, something like, at a guess, 50 years after the first.
Moreover, its architectural front, Gregg added, is actually not that seen from the street but the façade facing the river - from a time when the river meant transportation - and it's symmetrical, as the back is not.
For many reasons, Gregg noted, "It takes someone a little out of the mainstream to live here."
For starters, the house actually is, for her, "at least two times, and maybe four times, bigger than is needed."
More significantly: that central chimney with its six fireplaces means that the house has no hallways, which, in turn, means that one enters bedrooms upstairs only through other bedrooms. For the whole house, as Gregg put it, "Basically, it means that you have to do laps around the house."
The house is also "largely uninsulated," Gregg said, and, although it now has an oil-fired furnace, it remains tough to heat. Come winter, however, Gregg warms it throughout but compromises by setting thermostats at 50, mindful of the diarist from another time who recorded, from a house like hers, "I'm sorry I didn't write in my diary yesterday, but the ink was frozen and I couldn't."
The house also faces some special challenges because of its location. Ringed about by Old York Historical Society properties, it's often mistaken for one, so Gregg often gets strangers knocking on her door, showing her their tickets. And development pressures increase as both Old York and the York Hospital, also nearby, expand.
And, of course, it's needed maintenance and repairs.
Gregg was fortunate in the fact that the home's previous owner was Tom Hinkle, knowledgeable about historic preservation issues as a former president of the Old York Historical Society. The house had been turned into a duplex, and he restored its unity. He also moved the furnace from what became a kitchen out onto a concrete slab on a sun porch.
In her first two years there, Gregg tended to other maintenance and improvement matters so much that she began to think that she had a house, as she put it, "that needed someone playing with it all the time." But eventually she would come to feel essentially caught up, and over the years since, she says now, warmly, "It's grown on me. I do enjoy it."
Out on Route 91, on a rise where fields sweep down to the marshland and forests that edge the upper reaches of the York River, Julia Clough, a committed antique house-lover, bought a 1707 cape with 90 acres in 1982.
And she did so almost sight-unseen, because she'd been dreaming about finding just such a spot for years.
She sold the Cumberland Foreside house she was living in to do so, and, armed with experience at buying and fixing up old houses elsewhere, she began the process on this one.
"Every person who's ever done that," she says now, "swears that they'll never do it again," and she quickly lists some of the major disadvantages in owning - let alone restoring - an old house: ever-present dust, and the fact that old houses "never get really clean;" difficulty in finding craftsmen interested in restoration work; ever-recurring patches needing repairs, and the fact that repairs often expose rot leading to more repair, with the result that "it all sort of goes on and on."
Clough's work on her York home was made somewhat easier by the facts that the previous owner had been a professor of architecture at Princeton, and that he'd used the house only as a summer home, and so, as Clough put it, "most of it was not ruined."
Clough, moreover, is not entirely a purist herself when it comes to restoration. She's just finished a kitchen in an addition with a room to the side, and, she reports, "We worked within the period as best we could."
The advantages of living in an antique home?
"The charm, the warmth, the history!" Clough exclaimed emphatically. "The history is in the walls, it's in the woodwork, it's in everything. ... I'm not sure," she added, "that I could ever live in a new house."
Her next project will be turning her barn into living quarters, and she's engaged local barn specialist Richard Bartlett for that work, and for a new home going up on a lower field on her property, the design/build team of Bob Raeside and Ken Dame. That house "will look like a 1700 cape."
In the end, restoration and reclamation make history present and, in her word, "ongoing."
