USA > Connecticut > Fairfield County > New Canaan > Landmarks of New Canaan > Part 39
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But it has charming secrets too, for those
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who know it intimately. The worn doorsill still exists with its lettering "Welcome All" at the entrance to the old "Keeping Room," and there is a hiding place wedged in around the great central chimney "in event of trouble from In- dians" even though the tribes hereabouts were known to be friendly.
There too, cut into the chimney breast, can still be seen the snug little niche that just fits a cradle. All of this spelled home, warmth, comfort; it is a happy house. Even the casual stranger crossing its threshold today is likely to remark at once upon this feeling, although certainly in the course of the two centuries of its existence, it must have seen its share of hardship and human woe.
Accepting Nehemiah, first of that name among the St. Johns, as the probable builder, and after him the various ramifications of his descendants occupying the little house for a generation or two, guesswork ends when there emerges at last from a welter of confusing dates and conflicting boundaries indicated on the yellowing land records of the period, a transaction in 1810 by which a St. John dis- poses of a parcel of land with buildings there- on whose description fits this property with satisfying exactness.
The purchaser was a certain Thaddeus Betts, doubtless a member of that family which al- ready had extensive holdings in the neighbor- hood. From Betts it passed, in 1834, to Nehem- iah Gregory, thence to Stephen Bishop, and then, apparently by mortgage foreclosure, to the Gregorys again. Ira this time, of Norwalk, and the date 1849.
In 1865 and for nearly 50 years following, it was the Buttery house, ownership beginning with Mrs. Harriet Buttcry and terminating in January, 1912, when Mrs. Sarah Bedell, her- self a Buttery, sold it to one Samuel Kuriansky, who kept it barely a year. From that time to the present there have been seven successive owners, some leaving it untouched in passing, others improving and restoring.
In any event, it is a very ancient and well- lived-in dwelling and, considering this, little enough changed in aspect from the original
cottage. Dr. David Spence, who owned it be- tween 1920 and 1927 renewed and painted the weathered clapboarding and added modern conveniences to the interior, which latter im- provement unfortunately sealed up the smaller of the two original fireplaces, that which had warmed the "best parlor," to make way for the more practical but less esthetic furnace flues.
Edward Cushing, who bought the place from Dr. Spence added a large wing in 1934 in such a way that the lines of the old building were scarcely altered, but a certain footage of the adjoining land to south was purchased at that time from the Hamilton family (the Platt house) in order to preserve the symmetry of the property. But the ancient well remained, practical to this day, right at hand where it always was, by the sheltered side doorstep.
With the passing of the years the house seems to have sunk further into the gentle rise of its own dooryard, but ever increasing its appeal for summer motorists who frequently slacken speed as they pass, leaning from car windows with exclamations of delight.
To know a little of how it looked in earlier days, New Canaanites have only to examine the large painting by a pioneer artist of the famous Silver Mine group, which hangs on the wall of the New Canaan Public Library, just to the right as one enters. This shows the little house inconspicuous and unaccented amid a whirl of autumn coloring, crouching beneath the two great elms which guarded its gate from colonial times, and the last of which, injured by the ice-storm of 1940, had to be removed the following summer, an event which dc- pressed the neighborhood like the death of an old and honored guardian-friend.
To picture the house as it was within, it is interesting to recall an incident which occurred a few weeks after the Cushings acquired the place, long before local names and legends had become sufficiently familiar to be of much significance to newcomers.
One autumn afternoon a truck drew up out- side the picket fence, and its driver, a grizzled, oldish man, cut his engine and turned to starc with great earnestness at the little housc.
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broke the silence of his contemplation to ask modestly if he might just be allowed "to look awhile," for, he said he and nine brothers and sisters and his father before him, had been born and lived happily in that house. "And I'll be 75 my next birthday!" he added. Of course, he was at once invited to come in and to inspect the old rooms he had known so well.
A fascinating half-hour followed, during which he freely described what life had been like there so many years before. He insisted that the entire social existence of the family had centered in the long, narrow kitchen (mo- dern living-room) where much of the cooking was still done on the open hearth or in the brick chimney-oven.
What was used then, in 1927, as a dining room, was formerly "the old folks chamber" or "the sick-room," and the new kitchen in the leanto had been only a milk shed or summer kitchen, with its sloping floor-contemporary trap for rolling oranges and potatoes-made that way for handy swabbing down.
Upstairs he described as a loft divided, one side for the girls and one for the boys, where they lay in rows on corn-husk mattresses or sometimes just on mounds of fresh-cut hay and straw. In one corner, where a bathroom is now installed, there was a little space boarded up into some semblance of privacy for the married children, or the maiden aunts.
The parents slept downstairs in a cubby hole just big enough for a roped spool bed, behind the parlor. Of bathrooms there were none at
all, with a longish walk down the garden path and a wooden tub before the hearth on Satur- day nights as the accepted substitutes.
And who was this visitor? If he gave his name it meant little to the newcomers and was promptly forgotten. Careful checking in later years seems to have produced no one who answers the description or the circumstances. If the ancient truck-driver was not just an evo- cation from the past, and still lives by chance to read these words, perhaps he will remember the day and make himself known, certain of an ever warmer welcome.
Like this mysterious visitor, whoever has lived in this small, low-ceilinged old cottage has fallen in love with it. No tedious research has been necessary to establish this fact. All witnesses agree. Even summer tenants have always left it reluctantly at leases' ends.
Although in some ways one of the least distinguished of New Canaan's old land- marks, with no special features or events to bring it renown, it is nonetheless among the most treasureable that remain to us. One has only to glance at its ingratiating lines and pro- portions, to pause for even the briefest moment in its sloping dooryard, to understand at once the qualities of sturdiness and honesty, indus- try and simplicity, which the early settlers brought to the founding of our community. It is now occupied by Mrs. Howard Lee and her two daughters. They purchased the house from the Cushings and apparently love the house just as much.
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THE HANFORD-STEVENS-PURDY HOUSE
BEATRICE P. GUENGERICH, Author
JULIA LANE BELL, Artist
[January 5, 1950]
One night during World War II Mrs. Ruth Purdy was called out as a member of the New Canaan Red Cross Corps. It was during one of the worst sleet storms in village history. Roads were icy, trees and electric power lines were down and telephones cut off.
As she dressed by candle light and her hus- band built fires in the fireplaces it made the people of the past who built and lived in their house seem very close. As she took her car out of the old barn and crept down the slippery road, she wondered about the early settlers, their courage in clearing this new land-cut- ting roads through the forest and building the
sturdy houses that have lasted through the years.
She thought of the men from Canaan Parish, who had fought in the Revolution for their own freedom and of their grandsons who fought in the Civil War for the preservation of the Union. How was this land settled, this little Five Mile River valley, her house built and who were the people?
If the old trees, rocks and river could talk what a story they could tell, but since they can not, let us turn to the records.
There is reason to believe that the first white man to own the land where the Purdy house
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stands was the Rev. Thomas Hanford, the first minister of Norwalk, dearly beloved by his congregation and the Indians.
In the early 1700's he acquired considerable land from the town of Norwalk in what is now New Canaan and most of it was in the section known as White Oak Shade. Then there were only paths, probably Indian trails along Five Mile River. It was surveyed around 1710 and described "as layed out to him in the bounds of Norwalk bounded on the East by Common land and on the West by the Stamford Line."
Then Thomas Hanford, Jr., in 1725, bought from his father for 110 pounds some forty- eight acres of this land with a highway going through the property.
It was Theophilus, who in 1731 bought five and one-half acres from his father, Thomas Hanford, Jr., for 100 pounds and built a house on White Oak Shade Ridge at the head of South Main Street hill opposite Lakeview Avenue, then called "Hanford Mill Path." From here he could look south for a mile over land owned by Hanfords. Relatives built on neighboring land and the cutting first of the white oaks and the chestnuts made the lum- bering business the main industry.
Katherine Morgan Schaefer tells us in an "Annual" article written for the New Canaan Historical Society, the following story:
Theophilus, Jr., decided he did not want to settle down in Canaan Parish and would not accept a house his father had built for him. The house was given to his brother Levi. Evi- dently after seeing other places Theo returned to his home. His father, still eager for his son to marry and settle down, gave a small party one night inviting the minister and his wife.
After supper, Theophilus, Sr., turned to his son and said "Theo, why don't you go over to Kezia's and fetch her? The minister is here, seems like a good time for a wedding." It evidently appealed to Theo because he sad- dled his horse and went after Kezia inviting her to the party.
Not until he had her on the horse in back of him did he announce his intention to marry her that night. She, too, must have been an
adventurous soul and it appealed to her be- cause married they were that night.
They had eight children, one by the name of Ebenezer, 2nd, born in 1757. By the time Ebenezer was a young man, the Revolution was upon them and he was first a private, then a corporal and finally a sergeant in the Con- tinental Line.
Ebenezer inherited considerable property and bought more. He had a son George, born in 1798, and in 1821, when George was 23, there is this record:
"Know ye, That I Ebenezer Hanford 2nd of New Canaan in Fairfield County and State of Connecti- cut. For the consideration of the Parental Love and affection which I have and do bare towards my son George Hanford Do give, Grant, Bargain and Confirm unto the said George Hanford a certain tract of land lying at a place called White Oak Shade in New Canaan in quantity one acre be the same more or less and is bounded South by land of Samuel Raymond, West by Highway, Twenty- five Rods North by my own land to bounds set up and East by Five Mile River."
It may be assumed that George Hanford married Eveline and built his home about this time, which is now the Purdy house.
First came the clearing of the land to build the house leaving some maples for shade-one still standing to the south of the house is con- sidered one of the oldest in New Canaan. The little house was built close to the road with a beautiful view of Five Mile River in the rear.
Then entrance from a side porch was into what was no doubt the old kitchen with a large fireplace where they did their cooking. There is the usual center chimney which probably had three fireplaces. Two of these still remain and there is a hearthstone in a small hall at the front of the house that connects the two main rooms that lead one to believe that there may have been a fireplace there and possibly a central entrance at one time.
The stairs at the rear of what was the old kitchen lead to two large bedrooms with slop- ing ceilings and small windows. There are two other smaller rooms downstairs. The wide old
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floorboards, the large fireplaces and the small window panes have a charm all their own.
George purchased other adjacent land from his father and in February, 1834 at the time of his father's death, inherited more property. He apparently moved into his father's house and in March, 1835, sold to Seymour Com- stock for $650 about two acres with the build- ings.
This property was bounded "to the North by my own land, to the Northeast corner of the garden from thence on the North fence of said garden to the Highway."
Although George Hanford had owned the land and lived in the house for only 17 years the little house and the two acres passed out of Hanford hands where the land had been held for at least 125 years.
George Hanford died three years later on January 9th, 1838, at the age of forty and left all of his property to his "beloved wife Eve- line." There evidently were no children and later Eveline became Eveline Seely.
Seymour Comstock had a great deal of pro- perty and probably bought the house for spec- ulation, since he sold the house to Nehemiah Stevens in 1839. The Stevens family, up to this time, had been on the Stamford side of the Perambulation line and the Hanfords on the Norwalk side.
Nehemiah Stevens was evidently married to Anna Bouton and they had a son Rufus. In the Rev. William Christy Craig's Memorial Year Book of 1948 their names were mentioned as members of the Methodist Church from 1819 to 1832. At that time the services were held at the house of Holly Seymour in White Oak Shade and at the residence of Captain Crofoot in Silver Mine.
Some time after Anna Stevens' death in 1845, Nehemiah apparently married Cleopatria, as at his death in 1859 there was a will leaving his house to his wife Cleopatria.
The will was probated in Norwalk and the judge of the probate court appointed three ap- praisers to appraise the property. He also or- dered that the sum of $25 be allowed out of the estate for the support of the widow during
the six months wait for the creditors of the estate to exhibit their claims.
The appraisers' value of the contents of the house would make all antique lovers wish they had been around in those days. A bed was valued at 25 cents and the bedding also at 25 cents. A mirror was considered more valuable and was appraised at $1.50. The bed could be built at home but the mirror could not.
The entire contents of the house came to a little over $60. Lest these figures deceive you- the Stevens family were not considered im- poverished but well to do. When Cleopatria moved to Brooklyn she frequently sent lovely presents to relatives in New Canaan and on New Year's Day always gave a large party which residents of New Canaan attended.
In 1860 Rufus Stevens bought the house from his step-mother, Cleopatria, for $900. He and his wife Martha lived there for fifty years. They had three children, Julia, who became Julia Ritch; Charlotte, who married a man by the name of Platt, and a son, Theodore.
Rufus Stevens was a veteran of the Civil War and was employed in the big shoe factory in New Canaan, later taking the train to Stam- ford and working in a factory there. He is still remembered by New Canaan residents as a very erect, distinguished gentleman with white hair, walking up the long hill early each morn- ing to the factory or to the station.
In 1910 Rufus died and his wife Martha sold the house in 1912 and moved to Bridgeport.
For many years the little house had its ups and downs. There were foreclosures and at- tachments as if people loved the house and bought it but did not have the money to keep it up. The Morse family had to foreclose and Mrs. R. B. Morse lived in the little house for two years. Then she sold it to the M. M. Purdys in 1941.
Mr. and Mrs. Purdy are from New England families. Mrs. Purdy comes from Boston and Mr. Purdy from New Hampshire. They have two children, a daughter by the name of Dor- cas who is married to Kirk Munroe and a son by the name of Richard. He was in the Signal Corps and stationed in Burma during World
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War II and now is in the lumber business with his father in New York.
The Purdys have restored and modernized the little house with warm affection and ap-
preciation of its age and dignity. Its genealogy weaving through the old Canaan Parish fam- ilies, Hanfords, Comstocks, Stevens now reaches into the Purdys, its present owners.
BY
JOHN M JOHANSEN '49
THE MATHER-McPHERSON HOUSE
JOHN G. PENNYPACKER, Author
JOHN M. JOHANSEN, Artist [January 12, 1950]
The owner of this charming and beautifully preserved house could make the unique state- ment that "Our land is in three towns, New Canaan, Darien and Norwalk. The house has never been out of my family since it was built by my great, great grandfather in 1778 be- tween his periods of service in the Revolution.
Our children are the sixth generation to live in the house and the eleventh generation of my family in New England."
The house itself is just across the New Ca- naan line in Darien-or Middlesex, as it was until 1820-at the corner of Brookside Road (which prolongs New Canaan's Main Street)
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and Stephen Mather Road. The owner is Mrs. Edward R. McPherson, Jr., nee Mather. Fine as the house is, what compels our first atten- tion is the distinction of so many members of the Mather family, from a long list of out- standing New England divines, to the late Stephen Tyng Mather, the organizer and first director of the National Park Service.
The first of these Mathers was the Rev. Richard, who came from England to Dorches- ter, Mass. in 1635. He had five sons, of whom four were clergymen and a fifth, Timothy, was a farmer, known in the family ever since as "Farmer Mather," or "The Farmer Son." Two of the clergymen sons returned to England; a third, the Rev. Eleazer, was the first minister in Northampton, Mass., and the youngest was the Rev. Dr. Increase Mather, the first Amer- ican-born President of Harvard College and the father of the Rev. Dr. Cotton Mather, one of the most famous of the Puritan divines. The last Mather descendants of Eleazer and In- crease Mather died a hundred years or more ago, so that Timothy or "Farmer" Mather was not only the ancestor of the Middlesex Mathers but of all the American Mathers of today who have early New England origins. So, it is not correct, as one sometimes hears it said, that this is a "Cotton Mather" house.
One of "Farmer" Timothy Mather's sons, Richard, moved to Lyme, Conn. and became the ancestor of the most numerous branch of the family. One of Richard's grandsons, in turn was the Rev. Dr. Moses Mather, who gradu- ated from Yale College in 1739 and in 1742 began to preach to the newly formed Middle- sex Society, of which he remained the minister for sixty-four years, until his death in 1806, at the age of eighty-seven! It was his son Joseph- "Deacon Joseph" as he is always known-who built the present McPherson house and lived there until his death in 1840-like his father, aged eighty-seven.
The first citizen of Middlesex during the major part of his lifetime and one of the most highly respected persons in this part of Con- necticut, Moses Mather was not only pious and learned and of exemplary life, but an ardent
patriot and a man with a rich vein of humor- and the father of ten children. It was Moses Mather, incidentally, who in 1777 was called to Canaan Parish to preside at the trial of the Rev. William Drummond on charges brought by some of his parishioners that resulted in his being removed as the minister of Canaan Par- ish.
The experiences of Moses Mather and his son Joseph during the Revolution illustrate a bitter phase of life in the Middlesex of those days that Canaan Parish, farther from the coast, seems to have largely escaped. During the early years of the Revolution some forty Tory members of the parish fled to Long Island where, with a considerable group of kindred spirits, they fortified themselves on Lloyd's Neck, whence they frequently raided the Con- necticut shore. Moses Mather, vigorously de- nouncing from his pulpit the tyrannies of King George, was a particular object of their hatred. Deacon Joseph, then in his early and mid- twenties, spent a total of twenty-eight months in military service-largely in the militia, guarding the coast against these depredations, although in 1775 he spent seven months on the unsuccessful expedition against Montreal un- der General Montgomery. He served first as private, later as sergeant and finally in 1781 with a commission as Ensign. In 1777 he mar- ried Sarah Scott of Ridgefield and in 1778, be- tween his "hitches" in the militia, he built his ยท house. Being nearly five miles from the shore, it was less exposed to raids than other houses, and neighbors brought silverware and other valuables to it for safekeeping. Meanwhile, in August, 1779, eight Tories, including five former members of his own parish, surrounded Moses Mather's house and seized him and four of his sons and carried them to New York as prisoners. Moses and two of his sons were re- leased in about a month-and the other two, presumably, still later.
Until 1781 Deacon Joseph's house and its treasures remained safe but in that year, only a few months before Yorktown put an end to the truly military phase of the Revolution, the raids from Long Island increased in intensity
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and bitterness. That spring a Tory party suc- ceeded in reaching Deacon Mather's house, where they forced Mrs. Mather at bayonet point to reveal the hiding places of silver and other valuables-the former in the top of a high- boy that still stands in the McPherson dining room. They took the Deacon prisoner to pre- vent his giving the alarm but for some reason released him at the shore.
On Sunday, July 22, 1781, a party of about forty British from Long Island, who had hid- den the previous night in a swamp nearby, surrounded the church building during the singing of the first hymn at the afternoon serv- ice. Deacon Mather and three or four other young men saw the raiders in time to make their escape-one of them, another son of Moses Mather's, with a bullet in his heel. The others received orders to surrender, in the well- known voice of a former neighbor, Captain Frost. The men of the congregation were tied together, two by two, and with the minister at their head, were marched to the Sound, to- gether with forty horses, numerous cattle, and the valuables of the entire congregation. On arrival on Long Island about half the captives were paroled but Mather and twenty-five others were taken to New York and confined in prison ships in the harbor and later in the notorious Provost prison, standing in what is now City Hall Park. There, under the infamous Provost Cunningham, they suffered privations, indignities and disease, which only nineteen survived. While in prison, Moses Mather con- tinued to preach regularly and to lead and en- courage his imprisoned flock. Finally, on De- cember 27, the survivors were exchanged and made their way back to Middlesex, where, for another twenty-five years the pastor carried on his vigorous ministry, until he died in 1806, venerated by all who knew him.
In 1878, at the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Deacon Joseph's homestead, it was still occupied by three of his daughters (one of whom, at that time over ninety, still col- lected her father's Revolutionary pension). In due course the house was inherited by Mrs. McPherson's father, Stephen Tyng Mather,
whose home was then in Chicago but who for many years occupied the homestead as his summer home.
Stephen T. Mather, a great grandson of Deacon Joseph, was born in San Francisco in 1867 and graduated from the University of California at the age of nineteen. After a brief apprenticeship on Dana's New York Sun he returned to the west and went to work for the Pacific Coast Borax Company and in 1895 opened its Chicago office. It was he who orig- inated the famous "Twenty Mule Team Borax" trade mark and made it a household byword. Subsequently he started his own borax com- pany which he built up into a financial success. Always a mountaineer at heart, he visited several national parks in the course of his vaca- tion travels. He became displeased with the way in which the wilderness was being ex- ploited and on his return from a western trip in 1914 he wrote a letter to the Federal au- thorities registering his protest in emphatic terms. The next thing he knew, he found him- self assistant to the Secretary of the Interior, who was his college friend, Franklin K. Lane. He had the salary of a stenographer but ample authority to reform the administration of the national parks, which were at that time the orphans of the government. No one in partic- ular looked after them. Troops were loaned in the summertime but in the winter they were virtually without protection and poachers were rapidly exterminating their wild life. Mather determined to preserve their virgin wilderness, while making them accessible to the people of the cities. He tackled the task of marshaling public sentiment in support of an act of Congress creating a National Park Serv- ice, of whom he eventually became the direc- tor.
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