About

Short version

An old hat living in an old house, with a husband who started all this trouble with old houses, because his mother started him, and he hoped to be done with it all when he went off to college, where he met me, and then made the mistake of bringing me home to his old house, which I fell in love with and said I’m on mom’s side.  Fortunately he was resilient, pursuit of art and music would be made three dimensional, the medium would be wood, and preferably two to three hundred years old.

Long version

And so the journey began.  From helping with mom’s 1760 house with the stone ell, to the lake house that used to be the old post office, to the 1800’s house we bought while in college that sat practically in the, fortunately quiet, road, and that we lived in with no heat or plumbing, an outhouse, an outdoor well pump that froze in the winter, to the huge old (haunted) house in the country that we restored and designed and built our first “colonial” kitchen in.  I still remember ripping out all the metal cabinets and later floors, sitting on the joists, and contemplating together for some time, the best solution for fitting a “modern” kitchen into an antique house.  That was 1971.

Then, our dream house became available.  It had no heat, no plumbing, and a chemical toilet stuck into a space where the second floor fireplace should be.  It had been divvied up into many rooms – gypsies used to stay there when they came to town every summer to sell their wares.  They camped out on the farmland directly behind the house, and some of them stayed in the house.  They even painted rooms to their liking – bright colors like green and yellow and pink – all in one room.  Beaver board (before sheetrock) covered walls and ceilings, narrow tongue and groove boards covered floors.  Later partitions were added here and there to create more rooms to rent.  Half the chimney was gone and with it, half of the fireplaces.  The windows were enlarged, the house was leaning on rotted sills, the roof was asphalt, and the siding was shingles.  The original 1698 house with its 1720 ell was camouflaged by a hundred years of indifference and neglect.  The farmer who owned it wanted to let the fire department use it for practice.

Then his daughter Caroline came across a book – a very special book on Connecticut architecture.  She found that the author himself had visited the house and expounded on its virtues in that book.  She persuaded her father not to burn the house down, but to try to sell it instead.  Even this old Yankee who could turn a turnip into a wad of cash, couldn’t fathom why anyone would want such a mess.

Then the day came when my husband was caught peeking in the windows of this house. Looking down from the seat of his tractor on the front lawn of the house, the farmer sternly asked what he was doing.  My husband humbly explained our interest in old houses, and would he be interested in selling this one?

We had to prove to this skeptical old Yankee that we were sane, and that we knew what we were doing.  We were only twenty three.  We invited him to the big old house, the haunted one, to see our work.  He was, thankfully, impressed.  (He liked the kitchen.) His daughter was quick to show us the book, to prove the significance of the house, and to justify the price they were asking.  We could have bought a shiny new one for the same price.

We were smitten.  We knew what was hiding under all the camouflage and were anxious to reveal it.  It’s a long story how we got a mortgage in those days from a bank for a house that looked like it had been in a fire because of all the coal/wood stoves blackening the rooms, so to keep it short – as it turned out, on our third try, the president of a local bank who also happened to love antiques, came out personally to see the house.  We gave a tour of this ramshackle old place to a committee of well dressed gentlemen in shiny wingtips and topcoats.  While I was worrying about dirtying their shoes, the president of the bank was rubbing against dusty door casings and taking it all in.  He noted the details, the paneling, the floors.  Thinking it was the right thing to say, I offered that I’d have that bedroom floor clean and shiny in no time.  His eyes shot at me in disapproval and asked, “Shiny?”

To this day that bedroom floor is untouched.  It is still as dry and worn as the day that bank president, who ultimately gave us the mortgage, walked on it.  I could admit procrastination, or use the old adage about the shoemaker’s children going without shoes, but I’d rather think it’s homage to that wise, kind Mr. Boyce who took a leap of faith in a young couple who loved an old house.

Today we live in the most beautiful house on earth, on the most beautiful and historic street on earth, at least that’s how we feel about it.  Even John Adams was smitten, on passing through here in the 1770’s he wrote in his journal, “Today, I rode through Paradise.”  After thirty five years here, we agree.  The Great River, old houses, old trees, meadows of corn and tobacco, old tobacco barns, old paths, old legends, everything old, in the oldest town in Connecticut.  It’s perfect.

Linda Sunderland