Medina Twp.: Susan McKiernan can’t quite figure out where her obsession with older homes and 1840s English antiques comes from.
When she was 8, she created a drawing that showed where her laundry would hang one day. At 11, she was taking the bus from Barberton to Stagecoach Antiques in West Akron. And she once told her mother she wanted a kitchen with windows to let in light on three sides.
“I mean, who thinks like that?” she said with a smile.
Apparently, children who know what they want.
Today McKiernan and her partner, Richard Clark, share a 19th-century Gothic Revival house in Weymouth, an unincorporated burg in Medina Township. The home, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is known locally as the Gingerbread House because of the ornate trim that decorates its steep gables.
It’s a fitting home for McKiernan, an art historian who is retired from the University of Akron and is a co-author of Building a Firm Foundation: Medina County Architecture, 1811-1900.
Visitors will have a chance to tour the home Sunday during the Gingerbread House Tour, a fundraiser for the Weymouth Preservation Society. The house is the main focus of the tour, which will also include an opportunity to visit a monitor-style cottage, visit a restored cemetery and stroll the streets of the historical enclave.
McKiernan and Clark’s house was built in 1851 by William Harrison Seymour, who was among the area’s earliest settlers when he came to Weymouth in 1817 with his father and siblings. Seymour lived in the house three doors down as a youth, married the girl two doors down and built his first house next door, “so they didn’t get very far,” McKiernan said.
The house would have been modern compared with the Greek Revival houses that dominated Weymouth at the time, she said. It was further updated by a later owner, Norton Welton, who added a kitchen, a bay and the iron fence that still encloses the front garden.
Gothic Revival architecture was inspired by medieval design that was often used in churches, and the Gingerbread House bears a number of religious references. The front porch columns, for example, have a four-lobed design that represents the four Gospels. The lancet windows, with their pointed arches, are reminiscent of the windows of early cathedrals. A 1970s addition includes a stained-glass window reclaimed from a church that was built around the same time as the house, with a cloverleaf shape representative of the Trinity.
Remarkably, original features of the house such as wood floors, door hardware and the black walnut banister have survived countless changes in decorating tastes over the decades. The house needed updates such as new custom windows and upgraded wiring, but most of the decorative work has been only cosmetic. “The stuff that matters was here,” McKiernan said.
She has decorated the house with antiques that represent the kinds of things a family of that era might have owned. Those include older pieces that might have been handed down to them, as well as pieces from the mid-19th century the family might have bought new.
Among them are a collection of Staffordshire figures that were popular in the 1800s, an 1810 tabernacle wall mirror with a small painting above the looking glass, and a set of carpet balls, which are earthenware balls that were used much like bocce balls. A grandfather clock stands next to the door, an appropriate accessory in a town that had a grandfather clock maker in 1830.
The fireplace in the room that would have served as the family’s parlor is not new, but it’s surrounded by a reclaimed mantel from the era. The fire box is electric, but it’s a realistic reproduction of a 19th-century coal fireplace.
Among McKiernan’s prized pieces is a set of cottage bedroom furniture decorated by Archibald Willard, the Bedford artist who painted Spirit of ’76. She said Willard was probably in his teens or early 20s when he painted the tiny landscapes that decorate the bed, the dresser and the other pieces in the set.
English china called transferware from around 1825 is displayed in a niche in the dining room wall and might have been used by a well-off family like Seymour’s. McKiernan started with one pice, and within two years she’d built a collection of 54 pieces of the black, white and gray dinnerware.
The dining room chairs, with their horsehair seats, date to 1852 and would have been available at the time in Weymouth or Medina, she said. She especially loves the decoratively painted cornice boards over the dining room windows, which were among the artifacts she took to a taping of Antiques Roadshow in Cleveland some years ago. Leigh and Leslie Keno, the twins who are probably the show’s most recognizable appraisers, dated the cornice boards to about 1810, she said.
The newest part of the house is a family room added in the 1970s, built to address McKiernan’s need for storage space, a working fireplace and counter space for projects.
Over the fireplace hangs a farmhouse drawing by Ferdinand Brader, an itinerate artist who drew farmsteads in Pennsylvania and Ohio in the late 1800s. McKiernan said she searched 35 years for a Brader drawing and finally found one at an antiques shop in Stow. The drawing, which depicts the James C. Wilson farmhouse in Brimfield and features a likeness of Brader on horseback in the lower right corner, will be displayed in an upcoming exhibit of his work at the Canton Museum of Art.
The kitchen has one of McKiernan’s few concessions to modern life: a square, bar-height table in the middle of the room. The room, which was added in 1882, has almost no counter space, so McKiernan added the higher table to double as a work surface.
Still, the kitchen retains its original cabinets, complete with a drawer that was fashioned from a wood Procter & Gamble box and still bears the company’s logo.
And on three sides of the kitchen, there are sources of light — two from windows, and one from the doorway.
It’s just as McKiernan imagined it.
Mary Beth Breckenridge can be reached at 330-996-3756 or mbrecken@thebeaconjournal.com. You can also become a fan on Facebook at www.facebook.com/MBBreckABJ, follow her on Twitter @MBBreckABJ and read her blog at www.ohio.com/blogs/mary-beth.