The historic house at 10 High Street is set to be demolished after its restoration proved impossible, current owner Caleb Niemela said last week.
“We wanted to save it,” Niemela said in an interview on Thursday. “I feel bad that it’s going down.”
Niemela said he is working with an architect to build a new single-family home on the site that maintains a similar traditional-style frame to the standing building.
“I just got the plans today,” Niemela said.
The proposed structure is more conforming to the zoning code and better utilizes the slope on the property, and the brick from the original structure would be recycled into the facade of the new design’s concrete foundation, he said.
The original structure served as the District 1 schoolhouse for the town for twenty years in the early 1800s, according to Michelle Stahl of the Monadnock Center for History and Culture.
Stahl said she knew that the building had not been constructed in 1790 as indicated on its tax card.
After some people mentioned the building’s demolition to her, she investigated the Monadnock Center’s archives to set the record straight.
“With old tax cards, the age is just a stab in the dark,” she said.
Although there is a record of schoolhouses built in the town in 1790, none of them were situated on High Street, and schoolhouses would have been built from wood or logs in the 1790s, she said, rather than the brick within the High Street home.
The original structure on 10 High Street was “almost certainly” built in 1824, she said, when other brick schoolhouses were constructed. She said the school would have been used until 1844, when a new school was constructed in Depot Square.
Niemela’s application for a demolition permit from the town has saddened some residents.
“It was one of the nicest looking houses on the street,” High Street resident L. Phillips Runyon III said, adding that it was a shame the building fell into disrepair. “It was very beautifully maintained by Vernon Harris and his wife … who was born in that house and lived there her entire life.”
Niemela said that his company, Timber Home Properties, had been trying to purchase the property for more than a decade before they ultimately bought it from the town a year and a half ago.
He said they had every intention of saving the building and took steps to prevent further disrepair, but they soon discovered that only two standing walls of the original brick structure remained in the house, and those are cracked beyond repair.
Restoring the building would have involved replacing almost every component.
“Is it really original anymore?” he asked.
Niemela and his wife Karen Niemela came before the Heritage Commission’s Demolition Review Committee on Thursday to discuss their ideas for the site.
On Friday, Niemela said a number of High Street residents attended the public meeting Thursday night and some suggested that a plaque go on the property commemorating the site of the old schoolhouse, he said, he told them he would be happy to do.
“That’s the least I can do,” he said.
Douglas Ward of the Demolition Committee said there’s interest in photographing the existing building prior to demolition to add to the information about the building in the Monadnock Center’s archive.
Niemela said he is in the process of obtaining a building permit for the site. There is no date scheduled for the demolition.