Owners in proposed historic district share stories of their residence’s past

By LINDA KELLETT

C-S-E News Staff

FORT PLAIN — Ginger-bread-trimmed and nestled in a secluded pastoral setting, the 1840s Gothic Revival-style home of Kellogg Street residents Bob and Patricia Perry harks back to an earlier time — to the “golden age of homespun,” when Mohawk Valley residents worked the land, sewed their own clothes, and raised their own livestock.

Sided with its original board-and-batten finish, the pale green home is just one of around 400 historically- or architecturally-significant structures included in a proposed historic district in this community.

As noted in letters local property owners received from the village’s Preservation Committee, the village, in partnership with the Preservation League of New York, “recently completed a resource survey for the village. The survey, completed by preservation consultant, Jessie Ravage, identified buildings, homes and landscapes... These sites were photographed and catalogued and compiled into a general history of the architecture as it relates to the development of the village.”

Based on the survey, the state Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation has proposed a historic district designation for the village. Among cited benefits of the historic designation include tax credits for restoration work done by qualifying property owners and grant opportunities for the village.

According to the survey, the Perry’s home is one of three Gothic Revival-style buildings that survive in the village. The largest such structure is brick “and occupies a large open site on the west side of Canal Street at the north end of the village.”

Located on the slope opposite Herkimer Street, the residence’s “front line is marked by large, coursed ashlar limestone blocks creating a low retaining wall for the raised sweeping yard,” noted Ravage.

The third Gothic Revival structure, located at the corner of Center and Division streets, is a “larger, more stylish example with curved ‘vergeboards,’” that is, the decorative wooden “gingerbread” edging.

The Perry’s Kellogg Street dwelling was once owned by one of this community’s more successful and prominent citizens: Dr. Dayton Smith Kellogg, the area’s first dentist and a local publisher, who at one time owned all of the property on what has come to be known as Prospect Hill.

That’s according to Patricia, a local history buff and retired social studies teacher who now works with the alternative high school-GED program at the Fort Plain High School.

As a volunteer at the Fort Plain Museum, Patricia pored over historical accounts there and learned much about the family’s home and community.

One such account, gleaned from the pages of the 1892 “History of Montgomery County, New York,” notes that in 1880, Kellogg “inaugurated an enterprise which was instrumental in giving to Fort Plain a large number of its most elegant residences.”

The account continues: “By cutting a street [Clinton Avenue] along the face of Prospect Hill, at a great expenditure of labor and capital, and the bridging of Otsquago creek at the foot of Centre [sic] street, he made this beautiful eminence (which overlooks the most beautiful portion of the Mohawk Valley) accessible and very desirable for residences” (pages 78 and 79).

One of the streets in the new residential neighborhood was named after Kellogg’s wife, Hannah Waddell Kellogg.

The Harts acquired the property after the Kelloggs, Bob said.

Bob, who initially retired from a law enforcement position in St. Johnsville in the mid-1980s and later from a floral delivery business that he operated out of the family’s home, noted that Harold and Vivian Bowerman preceded them as owners of the property. At that time, it included the residence, a three-story carriage house (since razed), and about 4.3 acres from Kellogg’s original parcel. Both the current and previous owners raised sheep on the verdant knoll.

Patricia said Bowerman was the school superintendent who centralized all of the area’s one-room school houses. ‘His offices were actually in this house,” she said. “This was the district office.”

When the Perry family first moved to their new home in 1974, it featured an attached greenhouse (which has since been dismantled because of recurring snow and ice damage) and numerous flowering trees and fruit trees, planted by previous owners. Underneath the Bowerman’s wool rugs, they found widely-spaced plank floors insulated with Remington Arms cardboard boxes, 1943 newspapers, and black tarpaper.

“Wherever there was a knot-hole, they just hammered a little piece of tin; and they only varnished the edges of the wood floors,” Patricia added, noting that it wasn’t until she started wallpapering that she noticed the configuration of the house had changed over the years.

“Old houses tell stories,” she said, noting that both she and her husband support the historic district designation.

Patricia said, “This village is not the same village that I moved to in the 1970s. There were beautiful dress shops. It was phenomenal, but things change. Industry moves out.”

Bob is hopeful that the Unity Hall project at the former Universalist Church will play a role in that transformation. He is one of four members on the organization’s growing board of directors.