Flooring by the Numbers

Restoration of an old house is an ongoing process. In 2000, as Island Housewrights restoration experts worked to finish stripping the floorboards on the second floor of the Durand-Hedden House, Don DeFillo noticed some odd markings -- invisible when covered with paint -- on the ends of several boards.

They were Roman numerals – XII and XIII. He puzzled over them until it struck him that the numerals represented the lengths of the boards – 12 and 13 feet.

“When they were building the original section of the house in about 1790, they may have stacked the boards according to length,” DeFillo explained. “The board lengths were incised with a race (or drag) knife and the marks have endured all these years. Carpenters and housewrights traditionally used Roman numerals to mark framing members because they were easier to make, mostly straight lines. It’s unusual to find them on floorboards.”

At the edges of the room, the boards revealed vertical saw marks, indicating they were cut at a sawmill with a band saw or a reciprocal saw, which moves up and down. “If they had been hand-sawn, the marks would have been at oblique angles and would have been irregular,” DeFillo said. All the boards are rough sawn and were never planed, probably because they were upstairs. The lack of foot traffic on the edges of the room allowed them to be preserved.

The marked floorboards are now added to the list of intriguing details that await the visitor on the second floor. The installation of the loom in the central area adds to the sense that whoever slept upstairs didn’t leave all that long ago.

A Brief History of The Durand-Hedden House

The Durand-Hedden House, whose original structure was built in about 1790, sits on two acres of the original plantation that was part of a 72-acre tract of land acquired by Ebenezer Hedden before 1740. His son, Obadiah Hedden, was born on the land, and after the Revolutionary War was able to take title in 1787 to the 25 acres upon which he built a modest clapboard side-hall farmhouse.

Obadiah Hedden’s original house is now the southern half of the present house. The main room is a kitchen with a large, deep red sandstone fireplace whose beehive oven was reconstructed by the Durand-Hedden Association. A smaller room adjoining has a fireplace extending diagonally across the corner of the chimney, and was probably a bedroom. This is a relatively unusual example of two fireplaces on one chimney, an earlier example of which is in the Timothy Ball House farther along Ridgewood Road (1743). Upstairs in the original section are two bedrooms, one of which also has a diagonal fireplace, and a loft area that was used for storage, and possibly spinning and other activities.

In 1804, after his wife’s death, Obadiah Hedden sold the property to Dr. Watts Bonnel. In 1812, it was sold to neighbor Henry Durand.

The Durand Family

Henry Durand was the brother of Asher Brown Durand, who later gained fame as a founder of the Hudson River School of art, and grandson of Samuel Durand, who had settled in the town of Newark in about 1740. The Durands were an artistic and creative family. Samuel, termed “a skillful and modest clockmaker of the village", was born in 1713. His son John, born in 1745, was a jewelry maker who moved to Jefferson Village in 1774 and built a house near the corner of Durand and Ridgewood Roads. In the Revolutionary War, John Durand reportedly put his jeweler’s skills to use in repairing George Washington’s field glasses.

Henry and Asher Durand were born in the house near the corner of Durand and Ridgewood, which burned to the ground in 1843. Henry, carrying on the family tradition, made jewelry, silverware and watch crystals, and played the violin. He and his wife, Electa, moved to what is now the Durand-Hedden House in 1812 and lived there until his death in 1846. Henry’s son James Madison Durand (also a skilled engraver and watchmaker who established a major jewelry-making firm in Newark) and his family continued to own the property until about 1866, when Electa died. The northern half of the house, with a high-ceilinged front room, back parlor and side porch on the main floor and two large bedrooms above, was built around the mid-19th century, probably added by James. The peaked gables with rounded-top windows were Gothic Revival features popular at the time. Other interesting decorative and stylish touches from that period include an Italianate walnut staircase and a Greek Revival style front door, with a pedimented and eared door frame, which may have been added earlier in the 19th century.

The Ripley Years

The William Chauncey Ripley family purchased the house in 1923, and may have been the owners who remodeled the back parlor into a pantry and kitchen. They also added a small room as maid’s quarters to the rear, using red sandstone on the exterior to match the early kitchen fireplace. The house remained in the caring hands of the Ripley family until 1971.

Saved from Destruction

The house fell into disrepair in the years that followed and was threatened with demolition. A campaign to save the historic property was led by Maplewood’s mayor, Robert Grasmere, and the Town of Maplewood bought it in 1977 with the help of the state Green Acres program. The Durand-Hedden House and Garden Association was established by statute in 1979, and has spent the ensuing decades restoring the property and offering historical and educational programs to schools and the community. The House now sits on almost two acres of gardens and meadows in Grasmere Park, named in honor of former Mayor Grasmere.

Timothy Ball House - 1743

425 Ridgewood Road, Maplewood

The Timothy Ball House is one of the most interesting and impressive early houses in the region, both historically and structurally. It was built in 1743 by a grandson of Edward Ball, who settled in Newark in 1666 (just six years after the English took over the Island of Manhattan from the Dutch and renamed it New York) and was a signer of the Fundamental Agreement Among the Puritans. In about 1718, Edward Ball’s son Thomas acquired a 400-acre tract of land between what is now the Wyoming section of Millburn and the Hilton section of Maplewood. Thomas, a blacksmith and constable of the Colony of Newark, divided up his plantation among his seven surviving sons, including Timothy, upon his death in 1744.

A House of Distinction

Timothy and his wife Esther Bruen Ball lived in a small cabin not far from the present house when they married in 1734. Eight years later, to accommodate a growing family, they built a larger house with spacious proportions, a long roofline, massive chimneys and thick foundation walls. Although a farmhouse, it had distinction more in keeping with a man of Timothy’s standing as a prosperous farmer in the community.

The house was constructed just beyond the brook that divided Orange from Springfield, made of reddish-brown sandstone quarried on Orange Mountain (later called First Newark Mountain). Oak trees were cut down in nearby woodlands to make structural beams, the kitchen mantelpiece and other woodwork. In the front chimney, above the peak of the roof, is a stone inscribed T. & E.B. 1743. Photographs remain of the house in its original state, with dark siding and one small window beside the front door.

After Timothy Ball died in a smallpox epidemic in 1758, his widow, Esther, and her two older daughters continued to run the farm and care for three younger sons, John, Uzal and David.

The Revolutionary War Period

Timothy and Esther’s boys grew up to join the New Jersey Militia in the Revolutionary War. A short distance away, at the corner of the Road to Springfield and Old Mountain Road (now Ridgewood and Cedar Lane), was a cavalry stable for 40 horses; a watchtower on Coon Road on the mountaintop above the house was used to exchange signals with the Vaux Hall ridge regarding the movements of the British. George Washington, who may have been a cousin (his mother was Mary Ball), was a frequent visitor to the house during the war and reportedly slept in the large room over the kitchen, or a smaller room next to it. The General was said to have tied his horse to the huge walnut tree that juts into the roadway in front of the house and in one instance, for safety, to have kept his horse in the kitchen overnight. David Ball had married and moved a short way down the road, and General Washington sent his wife and baby up in the mountain at one point for safety.

The Next Generations

Esther continued to live in the house for 50 years with her children and grandchildren. Her son Uzal eventually took title to the homestead and lived there until his death in 1799. In 1802, the land was partitioned among Uzal’s five children and one grandchild, and the property remained in the Ball family until 1853. A series of other families owned the house and land over the ensuing decades, and it gradually fell into disrepair. In 1919 it was sold to the developers of Washington Park, who restored and renovated the house, adding three dormers and a columned portico, and opened it to the public as The Old Washington Inn, which it remained for more than 30 years.

Interior Features

The House is commodious and substantial, built on six different levels. The lowest, a half-story below ground level, was probably designed as a storage cellar, and is now the modern kitchen. The original kitchen, on ground level, has a huge hearth, 11 feet wide and three feet deep. The logs for it were so large that they were reportedly dragged in by horses that entered through the front door and exited through a smaller door on the other side of the room (now a window).

Originally, steep, ladder-like steps connected the kitchen with the parlor level, which has a hallway extending the width of the house, from a door to the back to an upper front entrance. On the west side of the hallway are two small rooms sharing a unique structural feature that is the earliest example of one found in several Maplewood houses: two diagonal fireplaces facing into two separate rooms, but using one chimney. (A similar arrangement is in the Durand-Hedden House.) The fireplace in the second room was closed off some years ago.

The next level up is a large room over the kitchen that shares the kitchen chimney. This room would have been quite warm because of the fire in the kitchen hearth, and was said to have been used by Washington when he was in the area. A small bedroom is off the north side of that room. A small, square window to the right of the fireplace overlooks the road.

A full flight of stairs extends up to what is now a master bedroom suite, the west part (now a sitting room) a few steps below the east. The room has lofty ceilings brightened by the 1919 dormer windows. The massive stone chimneys dominated either end of the space (now obscured by closets and a bathroom), but there were no fireplaces. This was in all likelihood a sleeping loft for the family.

As “Maplewood Past and Present” concludes, “The house was not built as a mansion for formal living but as a homestead for the comfortable and efficient carrying-on of a considerable farm of the time. It is a house of originality and integrity and says much for the character of its builders.”

Information about the house was derived in large part from Maplewood Past and Present, 1948, and from research by Beatrice Peppard Herman in 1984.