Restoration effort preserving history in Newfield

Randy Brown has been involved in his latest passion project for almost four years, preserving a piece of history in the heart of Newfield.

When he purchased the home at 1 Shaffer Rd., Brown found it in disrepair, not updated and with no insulation in the walls.

“I didn’t want to see it become just another house someone owned that they rented out without doing anything to it,” Brown said. “It is in the primary corner of the town, and I wanted to see the atmosphere or culture or just what we have here right now with the Covered Bridge maintained. I didn’t want to see it knocked down and become a dollar store — not that we couldn’t use a dollar store, just not here.”

Newfield Town Historian Alan Chaffee, who is also president of the Newfield Historical Society, said he has been through Brown’s project a handful of times.

“It’s a very historic place in Newfield,” he said.

The house was built by George Dudley, Chaffee said, in 1830, according to Dudley’s great-granddaughter, Edith Horton. Chaffee said she was Newfield’s town historian in the 1950s and 1960s and shared her family’s history with him.

“George Dudley started the first store in Newfield, around 1825, right where the present Masonic Temple is,” Chaffee said. “His son was a big businessman in town, too, P.S. Dudley.”

As someone interested in preserving the town’s history, Chaffee is happy Brown has undertaken the project.

“It’s good,” Chaffee said. “Those people were real people, and it’s nice to preserve things in their honor and memory. I just think it’s tremendous what Randy is doing for that house.”

To improve the building’s condition, Brown got to work with the help of family and friends and others he hired from around Newfield and Enfield.

They removed asbestos shingles and lead paint — done with appropriate remediation measures — and stripped it down, careful to preserve what they could from the original materials. Now, Brown said, most of the work is complete, other than putting in the doors and floors and finishing the circular staircase in the house.

“We saved a lot of it,” he said. “It was very ornate.”

To ensure he was maintaining as much of the history as possible, Brown said had someone come through to make recommendations about what could be saved and what couldn’t. One aspect that could not be preserved, he said, was an addition that was put on in the 1890s that had “pulled the whole house about six inches to the right” and had a pool of water in the foundation leading to its deterioration.

“So, we took it down and saved all the lumber,” Brown said. “We got lots of lumber, and I’ve been using that for all the window trim. It’s all red pine — the whole house is 95% red pine — and you can see the redness of the wood we stripped. Because red pine was native here, we think they cut it all here and had it milled someplace.”

Among other items he saved were French doors and a lot of the original floors.

Chaffee happily noted Brown’s reuse of materials taken from the home, especially lumber, and said wood like that isn’t easily found these days. He said it is “virgin wood” with a very tight grain, which means there are more rings per inch, that comes from trees that were part of old-growth forest.

“In [the] original forest, trees grew very little in a year, so the grain is very tight,” Chaffee said. “If you go down to Home Depot or Lowe’s right now, you’ll see wood that has maybe 10 years’ worth of growth in an inch. In Randy’s house, you’ll see wood that has 30 or 40 years’ worth of growth per inch. So, it’s old. You can’t go out in the woods now and find trees with that grain in them.”

Brown estimated he has invested about 10,000 hours of labor into renovating the house, and all the money spent on the project has been his own.

“My wife has been very patient with me,” Brown said. “But she has told me this is my last project like this.”

He hopes to rent the downstairs, which has a large common area, for commercial or municipal office space. Upstairs, Brown said, there are three apartments he’s also planning to rent. The parking area at the house, he said, he has offered for municipal parking.

“I think parking is a big deal for any downtown,” Brown said. “If we’re going to have any commercial activity, which we have little here, parking is important.”

No matter who occupies the building when it is completed, he is pleased with the effect it has had on the area and what it means for downtown Newfield.

“I wanted to kind of set a stamp on the area,” Brown said. “It has been interesting to watch, since I started the project, a number of houses in the area have started to do the same thing. We’re trying to create some kind of center for our community, and this is my contribution.”

Brown is running for county legislator for the town of Newfield and part of Enfield (District 8) in the November 2021 election.