Richfield: It’s not blood that connects Roberta Kobys to Richfield’s Newton-Carter House. It’s passion.
Kobys is the first person outside the Newton and Carter families to own the white clapboard house on Brecksville Road. But that doesn’t diminish her sense of stewardship toward the place.
She has been working for about a year to restore the 1820 house and turn it into a bed and breakfast, taking pains to leave the wallpaper, the light fixtures and even the rugs that decorated the home during the lifetime of its previous owner, Virginia Carter. She’ll share her progress when the house is featured next Saturday on the Richfield Town Trust’s eighth annual Historic Home & Garden Tour.
Kobys, who lives elsewhere in Richfield, wasn’t in the market for a property to turn into an inn, but she was troubled by rumors a few years ago that the Newton-Carter house might be torn down. “I thought, something’s got to be done,” she said.
“Something” turned out to be her purchasing the house in May 2013 from Wesley Carter, one of Virginia Carter’s nephews. He had fond memories of visiting his grandparents there and had always wanted to own the house, Kobys said, but living in Wisconsin made that impractical.
The first time she stepped through the door, she envisioned a bed and breakfast. Never mind that the ceilings were deteriorating, the wallpaper was dingy with age and a front wall bore stains from a water leak.
“I had more guts than brains,” she said with a smile.
Nevertheless, Kobys is committed to bringing the house back to its former state, working most weekends and even some evenings with the help of energetic friends. They’ve patched and painted, revived wood floors and even cleaned the wallpaper through the time-consuming process of rolling it with a sticky cylindrical lint remover.
The original section of the house was built in 1820 by one of Richfield’s early settlers, John Newton. He had bought the land from Owen Brown, father of abolitionist John Brown.
Some years later, a meeting house dating to 1816 was moved to the property and connected to the house. The addition houses a sun room, an office and an attic storage area where hand-hewn timbers are still evident.
Newton was the great-great-grandfather of Virginia Carter, the last family member to occupy the house. A civic activist, she had helped to start the first Richfield library and belonged to the Richfield Historical Society, which inherited much of the home’s contents when she died in 2007 at age 87. The organization sold most of those items to raise money for its operations, and a few of the pieces it kept are on loan to Kobys to help furnish the still-unfinished house for the tour.
Kobys treasures those kinds of connections to the past. She can point to the spot where Virginia Carter’s father, Homer Carter, used to sit in his favorite chair, and she enjoys pointing out the firebox where he kept his important papers. She was delighted when an old photo given to her by Wesley Carter showed the family used to display its Christmas tree in the same spot in the sun room where she put one up last year.
Homer Carter was manager of the old West Richfield Telephone Co., and Kobys said it’s believed the house had the first telephone in Richfield.
She is striving to restore features of the house that existed during Virginia Carter’s time there, features like vintage wallpaper and the oak china cabinets with leaded-glass doors that flank the dining room window. She is gradually decorating the house in period style, furnishing one of the bedrooms with a Jenny Lind bed and an antique dresser that belonged to her great-uncle, and outfitting the dining room with a table, chairs and dishes that once belonged to the mother of her significant other, Stephen Petronick.
Her restoration is purposely restrained. She cleaned the wood floors rather than refinishing them and left some small cracks in a ceiling she repaired, because “I didn’t want it to look brand new,” she said.
Kobys learned many of her skills from her father, a woodworker who built his own house and helped her maintain her rental properties.
The restoration has been a group project. Kobys’ constant helper and cheerleader is her best friend, Catherene Cassinger, whose 10-year-old daughter, Gabriella, also pitches in on chores like cleaning wallpaper and scrubbing the old, green-painted kitchen cabinets. Cassinger’s brother-in-law, Shawn Cassinger, has helped, too. Petronick cuts the grass and plows the snow.
Kobys hopes to have the house ready to open as a bed and breakfast within a year. She might rent the large front room for events like bridal showers, she said, and perhaps turn the sun room into a shop offering Ohio-made products.
“But that’s just thoughts right now,” she said.
Her aspirations in restoring the Newton-Carter House are even longer term.
The house has stood for nearly 200 years, she said. “And it’s going to be here another 200, I’m sure.”
Mary Beth Breckenridge can be reached at 330-996-3756 or mbrecken@thebeaconjournal.com. You can also become a fan on Facebook at http://tinyurl.com/mbbreck, follow her on Twitter @MBBreckABJ and read her blog at www.ohio.com/blogs/mary-beth.