History Buffs Tour Westport's Five Oldest Homes

A Westport home bore witness as the British marched by on their way to sack Danbury on April 25, 1777 and, 233 years later, it's just survived a threatened foreclosure and possible demolition.

Another home was on the route General Lafayette traveled on his celebrated Farewell Tour through southern New England in 1824.

A third house is undergoing a major facelift at the age of 279.

A fourth home has such low doorways that its 6-foot-4-inch tall occupant took to wearing a football helmet inside.

And another home is so old that its features include a trap door believed to have secured the safety of its occupants from Indian attack as they slumbered 327 years ago.

A school bus full of historic preservation buffs got a peek at Westport's five oldest houses on Saturday and it was like meeting a new acquaintance at each stop.

Bob Weingarten, the Westport Historical Society's House Research Director, led the tour in the first of its kind on behalf of the society.

It began at the stately 46 Kings Highway South home of David and Andrea Cross and ended with a visit to the newly-declared oldest surviving house at 187 Long Lots Road, built between 1683 and 1687.

House-proud owners were on hand at each stop to show off their historic treasures.

The Cross house, the first stop on the tour, is also known as the John Platt house for its first owner who was born in 1664 and lived to be 99 years old.

The two-story house with an attic has a framed overhang at the gable ends, the only known such example in Westport.

When it was built in c. 1700, Kings Highway South was the Post Road, the "highway" linking New York to Boston and thus it was on the route of the Lafayette Farewell Tour.

The house was built with a massive central chimney with openings on the first and second levels, but previous owners scaled it back by several feet.

"I'm glad it fell upon prior owners to do it," said Andrea Cross, a dedicated historic preservationist. "The silver lining is ample closet space in the upstairs rooms."

Other than that, the house is largely historically intact, including exposed original tapered beams, with a modern addition.

The tour proceeded to 41 Kings Highway North to pay a call to the circa 1731 saltbox built by John Norris and now being extensively restored by a specialist in the field, Christopher Wuerth.

Wuerth explained that highly skilled housewrights built most of the homes of that era with just a few hand tools. Each house took about a year to build, he said.

Low exposed beams show a distinctive feature found in other houses of that era in Westport: cross-hatching marks created to make plaster adhere better.

The house was confiscated by the revolutionary government in 1777 because the owners had "gone and joined themselves with the enemy" and they fled to Long Island, according to Weingarten.

The venerable John Green house, a red 1 ½ story cape at 38 Compo Road North facing Winslow Park, was purchased in December by Darienites Kevin and Catherine Huelster when it was days away from a threatened bank foreclosure.

The interior of the circa 1710 cottage has been extensively altered over time and when Kevin Huelster told the tour of his plans to restore it, the tourgoers gave him a round of hearty applause.

He is a Westport architect and his wife Patricia is a landscape designer.

They were particularly attracted to the exterior "presence" of the house and its surrounding beautiful grounds, now covered in wild violets.

Huelster pointed out original features, including wide chestnut flooring and low exposed beams. The house is on the route the British took after landing at Compo Beach for their invasion.

Charles and Judith Reid have made the circa 1727 cape at 81 Clapboard Hill Road their home since 1963, when their son Peter was six weeks old.

He grew to be 6-feet-4-inches tall - and thereby outgrew the miniature house with its low ceilings and doorways.

"He took to wearing a football helmet inside," Judith Reid said.

She related a favorite family anecdote involving Peter and a stray cat he brought home one day.

The cat disappeared as Peter was trying to cajole his parents to let him keep it. A frantic search round and round the house failed to turn him up; eventually, the cat was noticed napping in the deep oven built into the massive stone hearth. (He was named Brutus and spent many happy years with the Reids.)

The tour ended at 187 Long Lots Road, owned by Dutch and Susan Wynkoop and Dutch's family since 1971.

Applying "some facts, some intuition and some guessing," Weingarten said, the date of the house has been put at circa 1683-1687, making it Westport's oldest home.

It has white pine flooring, a distinctive summer beam and an unusual feature, by today's standards: a collapsible door closing over the narrow stairs.

Once the early occupants retired to the small quarters upstairs, they would close the heavy door over the staircase to secure their safety from marauding Indians, Dutch Wynkoop speculated.

The Wynkoops have applied to have their home listed as a landmark with the Westport Historic District Commission, which will consider the matter today before it goes to a vote of the RTM. The designation will impose restrictions on future owners intended to preserve the historic features of the home as viewed from a public road.