For Sale, a Loved Old House

March 2015

Notes on 3180 Riverside Drive, Wellsville, NY 14895, Part I of III

The story of our house stretches into the foggy past with tentacles of fact and fiction lacing through the years. After talking with Joanne Allen and Jane Pinney at the Historical Society Library yesterday, I decided to record some facts and try to pin down a few of the fictions.

Stories that reached us-

            We always thought that our house was built by William Middaugh in the 1800s but a reading of the deed makes that all fuzzy. William bought the property on April 26, 1879 but the first mention of the house is in a record of his son, William C Middaugh, selling the house in 1895.The style seems more suited to 1860 or earlier but we just don’t know.

            We had been told that the house was on William Middaugh’s farm and he hoped that it would be held onto by his children and kept in the family forever. William died in August 1881, having been predeceased by two of his three wives. The first two died in childbirth.

Somewhere there is a photo of William with his shovel standing in front of the pine tree in the front yard. The photo implies that he just planted that tree, a knee-high promise that must have surpassed his goals. Darn but I’ve lost that picture.

Oldest image of the house we have. The tower is gone but
2 of those windows are in the basement still.

                We know from the deed that the house, as of 1895, was on 5 acres of land but the lot was its current size (1.25 acres) when sold in 1907. Certainly neither of those sizes would comprise a farm.

image of original house with tower

            Our house came with a copy of a page from William Middaugh’s story for his children. The story included an image of our house with who we assumed was William Middaugh standing on the porch. He can’t have been the builder. Timing just doesn’t work out so the both the date of construction and the person behind the building of our house will remain a mystery

            The photo shows some tiny pine trees. The one near the house now towers over our house with a trunk of 160 inches circumference at the base. The title of the picture is “The Last Home.”

            In the picture, the house stands proudly with the front door under a small tower. The tower's top floor has double, round-topped windows on each side. Two of those windows are still in our basement but the tower is long gone. Chopped off, cast aside, and discarded for whatever reason we have often thought it would have been fun to have it reproduced but the cost and turmoil has made that not so.

Following is the statement William left for his children.

“I have to think I can leave my children with all the property necessary to help them through this world. They have a second time been deprived of a mother’s care and counsel, my second wife being buried just twenty-five years from my first wife’s burial. I hope as my children read this over and see the trials and afflictions I have passes (sic) through in my life to secure the property I now leave for them, they will appreciate it and keep and protect it from debt and mortgage and hold it as I have done as long as they live.

            I have tried to do my duty by my children as I saw it as near as I could –although you may not realize it – and I hope they can and will make good use of it. I again entreat of you to hold and not sell these old family farms that I have cherished so much. Now children while I do not wish you to labor as I have, I do entreat of you all to be honest, industrious and straight-forward. Be true to yourselves and then you will be true to others. I say again be saving and not squander what has come to you so easily, for my experience teaches me, that it is no easy matter to accumulate property and keep it without experience and economy. When I say be economical, I do not mean be little and penurious. I would have you be benevolent when it is a duty as many cases it is, and aid worthy objects. I have always meant to practice that in both prosperity and adversity, which is the duty of all good citizens.”

            William died in this home on Riverside on August 22, 1881 and was buried at Knights Creek Cemetery in Scio, NY. One of his 9 children said, “Father was a man of kind and forgiving heart, was always ready to lend a helping hand to those in need.”

                We were told that the house was a stop for the Underground Railroad and that people fleeing slavery would have trawled the riverbed at night and climbed to the house before daylight to hide in the crawl space under the living room. This may be total fabrication. Houses in Alfred have tunnels that establish them as stops but we found no tunnel or evidence thereof and the river is on the opposite side of the road from our house though in the 1800s the road may have been elsewhere and, since there were no neighbors, a tunnel would have been of little need. Hiding from deer and raccoon would have accomplished little. Still, it's one story paving way to our house. 

            On the land that roots this house, there are the remains of the farm’s apple orchard. Most of the trees are in the neighboring yard, belonging at this time Rob and Tammy Christman. 

The house in 2008

             One year a balloon’s ropes became tangled in one of those apple trees. It happened to be while Dr. Jim Edmonston had a “cherry picker” truck at his house so he drove it over and used the cherry picker to undo the ropes and set the balloon free.

            A story about our apple tree was published years ago in the Cuba Patriot, The Story Jar Column (Apples, Holes and Branches) and is included here as an appendix.

            Another remaining farm feature is the towering pear tree near the road. It is an ancient variety of pear that would have been harvested by Native Americans, we are told. These pears, dense golf-ball sized fruits that we twist our ankles on in the fall, must be cooked to be edible. That part is certainly true.

            Ethyl Richardson was our neighbor when we moved into this house in 1989 and it is her house that now shelters the Christman family. Ethyl told us that our house once was used by a doctor. This may not be true because the house that was on that property prior to the existing house was said to be owned by 2 doctors and how many doctors would there have been on this street in the late 1880s?

            (In the late 1990s, Dr. James Edmonston lived across the street from Dr. Andrew Colletta while Dr. Aziz lived down the road so one never knows.)

            When we moved into our house, it was a structure of doors. The front porch had 4 doors facing the road. Two French doors could be opened from the living room, likely to air the house in the summer and certainly to admit drafts in the winter. They were replaced with windows.

Extra doors offered at a rummage sale

            Another was the front door to the house that opened into the front hall and the fourth was the door on the side of the wrap-around porch that entered into the office.  One entered that office (I can picture a huge oak desk and a swivel chair but that is totally my imagination at work.) and then advanced to the examination room which led to a choice of doors – household kitchen or lavatory (now laundry room).

            There were 4 doorways from the dining room. Why cannot be imagined. One was an open archway to the living room. Another was a swinging door to the kitchen. Sensible, reasonable points of passage, these remain while the others are gone.

            There were 2 doors from the dining room to the doctor’s office. That office also had a door to the front hall, the living room and what we saw as the examination room. Someone must have loved doors or disdained walls. Whatever the original intent of the floor plan, the current plan has fewer doors.

            Leonard B. and Edna M. Jones bought the house on June 6, 1955 and lived at 3180 Riverside until they sold it to Robert H. and Louise H. Walpole on July 27, 1965. They left the pine tree behind our wood shed. It was planted to celebrate Leonard’s hole-in-one at the golf course down the road. Ethyl said that Leonard was the one who enclosed our back porch to enlarge the kitchen where he installed a wood burning fireplace. 

            The Jones family sold the house to Walpole family. Robert Walpole cheerfully commented that he never had to do a bit of maintenance on the building for the entire 25 years he lived there. When Rick and I bought it, there were some bits of maintenance required so we gutted and rebuilt the place.

            Gutting a house opens up pages of history. We didn't find anything valuable in the walls but we did find details.

            The following things we know from personal experience - The rear second floor bathroom was an odd shape. There was a space unaccounted for, a space about the size of a shower. Rick thought that maybe someone's Aunt Matilda was buried in the wall but when he opened it, he found a shower. It seems that there was an issue with the drain so the water was cut off and the shower was encased in drywall and eliminating further plumbing work.  

                The closet, in what is now the pottery room, had markings on the wall showing that it once was a stairway to the second floor. The wall at the kitchen end of the dining room was once the back wall of the house. When the main house was built, it was made of valuable hand cut nails. Settlers in the west would have burned their homes down and sifted through the ashes to recover such nails because they were so precious at that time.

                The kitchen and its second floor were added later. This is supported by the fact that, in the kitchen wing, the two by fours are actually two inches by four inches and are built with factory made nails. The kitchen originally ended at the stub wall location and the rear of the kitchen was an enclosed porch. The upstairs was the full length of the addition as it is now.

                The second floor over the kitchen was a three-room apartment with a space heater when we moved in. It was referred to as the “servant’s quarters” and we were told that Leonard Jones’s nephew lived there for a while.

                The laundry room gave us pause. Ethyl told us that Leonard Jones put that little room on the side of the kitchen. She didn’t tell us that he did it by recycling some other house.

                We were teaching all day and working on the house nights and weekends and so exhausted all the time that we didn’t think well. Rick said it first. “The wall has plaster over lath on both sides

                The plaster “dripped” upward. Odd things happen in old houses but it is rare that gravity would reverse but with a little reasoning it was clear that the exterior walls were once interior walls.  Those walls were built somewhere else, carted to this location and installed upside down to create a bathroom.  Waste not, want not.

            The house underwent major renovations in 1912, the date stamped on the drywall. Two things surprised me about that. First that drywall was dated and the other that drywall was in use that long ago when real plasters were common folk. We think that’s when central heading was installed. Clearly there were chimneys in most rooms at some point and we removed more leaving only 2 – living room and kitchen.

            In 1989 the furnace was a huge metal monster designed to burn coal but converted to natural gas. The pilot light was a 2-foot pipe with holes the length of it so that it burned significant amounts of fuel just to keep a flame at the ready. We replaced the furnace and the radiators with a hot water baseboard system, cutting fuel consumption considerably and then replaced it all again 2013. Our new system constantly measures temperatures inside and out and keeps the house cozy for 1/3 less fuel.

            Those interior walls taken from another house, brought to this house and flipped upside down and then used to construct the exterior walls of a full bathroom which now is remade into a nicely insulated laundry room.

house 2018

           The front of our house holds the living room, dining room and 2 offices on the first floor as well as 3 bedrooms (originally 4) and 2 baths upstairs. The rooms on the first floor are 11 feet tall but, thankfully, shorter on second floor. This part is held together with hand forged, cut nails.

            The back of our house holds the kitchen and laundry on the first floor and a large bedroom on the second floor. It is held together with machine made nails and the ceilings are only 8 feet from the floors.

            We reworked the upstairs floor plan to use the floor space of the small central bedroom. What was the bedroom door became a linen closet door and the rest of the room was divided to give the bedrooms on either side of it large closets and to make the master bedroom much larger.

            The closets hold some Wellsville history. When the Rockwell Department Store closed, they sold shelves and drawers. We bought several of them. Some are freestanding storage in the basement but some are built into the closets.

            We also reconstructed the front hall. The space under the stairs was wasted. It is now a front hall closet. The closet is wonderful but I reserve 3 cheers for the stair aprons. We admired some in a building in Christchurch New Zealand and when we returned home, Rick outfitted the front stairs.

             For most of the time that we lived here the front hall opened into the living room but after the children left that was just a drafty area so Rick built French doors between the hall and the living room.

            He made a leaded glass window to fill in the round arch above the doorway. This carries through the house. There is a rounded window over the front door, the one Rick made between the hall and living room, a stained glass window he made between the living and dining rooms and a fourth rounded window in the kitchen.

            The window in the kitchen is a half round window and we bought it from the Wellsville Central School System for $1.50. It allows an open passage of light through the kitchen.

            Schools change and toss out the old. Thankfully I was at hand to save this and that. There are two cupboards that were part of the Andover Central School. These are now our pantry. One side of each has a long door that had a coat rack and was used for the teacher’s coat and boots. There are holes drilled at the top and bottom so the coat could dry if it had rained.

            The other side as a medium and short door and was designed for book storage. The books cupboards already has shelves so that was great but the coat cupboard side needed shelves and that was where the Rockwell Department Store helped solve the need. We have 2 of these cupboards, back to back, as our pantry.

            There is one story that begs addition. When Emilie and Jay were in elementary school, I was a Girl Scout leader and Rick and I were both adult Boy Scouts. There were times when we would have the entire scout troops for an overnight at our house.

            On one such occasion, the kids were running and screaming in the back yard when a NY State Trooper rang the bell. Rather politely, he asked what was going on.

            “Going on how?” I asked.

            Someone in the neighborhood, we never knew who, had called to report that they heard someone screaming that they were being killed.

            We went out to the yard and called everyone together. They were playing a rousing game of He’s Going to Kill Me. There didn’t seem to be any agreement on the rules other than running and screaming about being killed.

            The trooper left. The game continued. Home sweet home.