Mimi Wight and her family have spent 50 years at their home in Francestown, including the memorable day Wight’s husband, Nelson, bought the house.
“I was at Brigham Lying-In Hospital, delivering our second son by c-section , when my husband bought this house,” Wight said.
Joe Brenner of The Petersons was the Wight’s real estate agent back in 1976.
“Joe had been leading us around for my entire pregnancy, and he finally called us and said, ‘I found your house,'” Wight said. “Our desire was to get an old house that had not been Victorianized, which was hard to find in the 1970s. “
Wight said when the family bought the house, it had not been lived in “for quite a while.”
“Prior to that, however, it had been lived in by a family with 11 children,” Wight said.
The role of all 11 children became evident when the Wights began to renovate the house.
“Every time we went to pull out a nail, there were 11 nails. We went to pull the old porch off the end of the house, and was just about impossible, because each board was held with 11 nails where there should just be one nail. We heard that the grandfather would put in a nail, and each of the 11 children would add their own nail,” Wight said.
After her husband purchased the home, Wight didn’t see the house for a few more months, until the family, including a toddler and a newborn, finally walked in the door of the home off of Bible Hill Road.
“It was a complete disaster,” Wight recalled with a laugh. “My mother cried when she saw it, and when she started crying, it upset their poodle so much it jumped into the front of the car and got injured, and they had to take it to the vet in Peterborough.”
The Wights estimate the Cape house was built in 1804, which makes it one of the oldest houses in Francestown. The Wights set about making the house their own, and “continued to renovate for 50 years.”
Wight recalled that the kitchen originally included had a large incinerator “right in the middle of the room.”
Wight’s favorite room is the dining room, which is lined with original beams and wood paneling. The family believes the dining room was once used as a birthing room.
“Because of the arrangement of the beams in the corner, we know there was originally a kitchen and a fireplace in here. We couldn’t figure out why the beams in the corner were different, so Nelson and I decided that it’s where the babies were born,” Wight said.
A study in the back of the house was originally two small bedrooms.
“When we first came, Nelson and I slept on this side, in one little bedroom, and the children slept in the other room,” Wight said.
The Wights, both artists and graphic designers, did the heaviest renovations in the kitchen, which now looks out through a sunroom facing the hillside. In the sunroom, a round stained-glass window designed day Nelson Wight depicts mistletoe.
“It’s a kaleidoscopic view of mistletoe. So you have to kiss under it,” Wight said with a laugh.
The Wights also added three bedrooms in what used to be the attic. A large bedroom and full bath were added later to the first floor.
“We did a lot of work ourselves. We built the patio, we cleared the fields. One Christmas, my husband got me a carpenter’s belt with all the tools, and I used it,” Wight said. “I laid the stones in the terrace myself.”
The property includes a barn, a garage and an original Sears and Roebuck mail-order guest house.
The Wights’ favorite addition to the property is a spring-fed pond the family calls “Lake Mimi.”
“We had such a wonderful time in the pond–swimming, boating, fishing. ” Wight said. “Our children loved it, and now our grandchildren love it.”
Wight said the family drank water from the Lake Mimi during the 2008 ice storm, when the house had no power for 13 days.
The Wights brought master stone carver Hans Kaufhold from Peterborough to carve “LAKE MIMI” on a large boulder on the edge of the spring-fed pond.
The guest house, a short walk up the hill on a spur of the driveway, was built to house lumber workers who came to clean up after the Hurricane of 1936.
“It’s an original Sears and Roebuck cottage, and we added on over the years,” Wight said.
The grounds also include gardens, pastures, fields and remnants of an orchard.
Wight and her family have endless memories from decades in the home: celebrations, dinner parties, board games, holidays, even family bouts of flu. But after 50 years, the Wights are downsizing and hoping another family will make this house their home.
For information about the 1804 Cape house, contact Peg Walsh of Sotheby’s International Realty at peg.walsh@fourseasonssir.com or 603-801-3361.