The house at 7 West End Highway in Wilton seems to have left a lasting mark on at least a few of the people who’ve lived there.
The brick home with black shutters and a historic plaque next to the front door marking the spot the Rena Lathrop House c. 1822 (although some claim the house was built in 1810) sits among a collection of old homes in West Wilton Village. It’s down the hill from the location of the original schoolhouse and a short walk to Sheldrick Forest Preserve, over 200 acres of old-growth forest containing hiking trails and paths. And it’s just a short drive from Wilton town center.
In his house search, Anthony Finehout was drawn to the old Witon home. He bought it about a year-and-a-half ago.
“My grandmother always had old houses when I was a kid and my mom loved brick houses,” he said, “It needed a ton of work, but I figured I could do it.”
Finehout has done a lot of work on the house in the time that he has owned it. He renovated two bathrooms, sanded the original pine floors and repainted walls. He poured concrete counters in the kitchen, then sanded and polished them. He did all of this while making an effort to maintain the historic elements that he felt made the house special. Finehout kept the exposed beams in the kitchen ceiling, which were transplanted from an old barn and are hundreds of years old — possibly far older than the house itself.
“You can still see pits in some of the windows,” Finehout said, referring to the wavy glass in the windows at the front of the house, a feature that dates them back more than 100 years, when that type of glass was still used.
The front door has a lock with a skeleton key. The dirt-floored basement still includes the original rock foundation. When Finehout redid the insulation in the kitchen, he found old newspapers shoved in the walls.
“I wanted to keep it as original as possible,” Finehout explained, but he realized he needed it to be livable, as well.
Finehout was given a document written by a man who had lived in the house as a child. He describes neighbors and families who lived in West Wilton Village, and he writes about the house and some of the changes his family made. One passage explains how the ell, which was added later than the original brick structure, was raised a couple feet in order to cut a doorway from the children’s bedrooms in the top part of the ell to the main bedroom in the brick part. His mother wanted to be able to access her children’s rooms without walking all the way downstairs, passing through the kitchen and climbing the second stairway in the ell. This would explain why the windows in the bedroom above the ell sit right above the baseboards, only six or so inches off the floor.
For Joan Griffith, the house holds a lot of memories. She lived there with her family from 1986 to 1997 after moving from a large Victorian home in Nashua.
“The people we bought from were very historic,” she said. They were antique dealers and were interested in the history of the home. Griffith believes they probably put the historic house marker by the front door.
Griffith said that the downstairs bathroom in the house was the first plumbing in West Wilton Village.
She also did a lot of upkeep on the aging home. She ripped off aluminum siding that had been added to the ell, renovated the den in the ell and painted the floor red and spent a lot of time landscaping, especially the front yard.
The kitchen was old and Griffith had to adapt, but there was a long counter where she would often serve buffet-style meals, and she reminisced on the well that sat under the fridge.
“Every so often I would move [the fridge], take a sample out of the water and have it tested,” she said.
Griffith taught skiing at Temple Mountain when it was an active ski mountain and started hiking Pack Monadnock regularly when she lived in the West Wilton home. She lives in Hanover now, but a few weeks ago she decided to make the trip down to the Monadnock region with a friend.
“I hadn’t hiked Pack for a long time. But I’d been wanting to hike Pack and obviously I was going to drive by the house,” she said. When they drove by after their hike, Griffith noticed the “For Sale” sign out front and took down the name of the real estate agent, Peter Foster. She reached out to Foster to talk about the house and share information about the Sheldrick Forest and some of the special features of the area that she wanted potential buyers to know about.
Foster’s son is a friend of Finehout and he helped Finehout find the home a year-and-a-half ago. Foster has seen the work Finehout has done on the home and he knows how special it has been to him.
“Obviously you would want to maintain what you can,” Foster said of the historic features. He has been in correspondence with Griffith, sharing photos and filling her in on what has happened to the house in the years since she moved out. He held an open house a couple weeks ago.
Finehout is selling the house, and is going to miss it.
“It’s really bittersweet,” he said, but he and his girlfriend are planning to move closer to their parents as they think about starting a family.
People interested viewing the home can contact Foster at ptrfstr@gmail.com or 603-657-4390.
Do you have a historic, interesting or unique home in the region that you’d like to share with our readers? We want to hear about it. Send email to rwilson@ledgertranscript.com.