Address: Vermontville, New York
Old Address:
Other names: Dyer House
Year built:
Other information:
Adirondack Daily Enterprise, June 12, 1953
100-Year-Old Home Ends It's History
One of Vermontville's old land marks is swiftly disappearing from its accustomed place just north of the Episcopal Church. It was owned and occupied for many years by the late Frank and Julia Dyer and after Mr. Dyer's death by his wife for so many years that the house came to be known as "Aunt Jule's House."
Just recently Mr. and Mrs. Frank Cass bought the property and Frank is rather regretfully, taking the house apart piece by piece, very interestedly noting the workmanship that went into the building of it.
Aunt Jule's house was built more than 100 years ago - in the days when a building was "framed", not built as in the modern way. In those days lumber was plentiful and only the best was used so the house was built entirely of spruce.
Today many house frames are built almost entirely of 2 x 4's, but not so this house. The corner posts are 4 x 8's. The overlayers are 7 x 7-inch beams and the sleepers are fully as large. The uprights are 4 x 4's and a few of those were sawed but the cornerposts and other beams were hewed with a broad-axe and the man who hewed them certainly knew his business for some of those timbers have almost as smooth a finish as though they had been sawed and planed.
One might think it would have been hard to nail such huge timbers together and that's right — but they didn't nail them. They were put together with mortise and tenons and those were fastened by wooden pins put through to hold them together.
The old-fashioned squarecut nails were used to fasten the boarding on the outside of the building. Boarding was of inch-thick spruce. The lathes were 1/2-inch thick boards, most of them about six inches wide and partially split from each end making jagged strips about 1/2 inches wide, all held together by the unsplit portions of the board. These were nailed to the uprights with the boards spread apart as far as the unsplit portions would allow, leaving cracks up to about 3/8 inches wide for the plaster to enter into.
The clap-boards were also 1/2-inch boards from six to seven inches wide. Each one lapped over the lower one about an inch.
The windows, doors and stairway were all much narrower than our modern ones. The reason for tearing down so sturdy a structure as that frame was that the sills had rotted by reason of the dirt banking, having been left up for so many years that the house really looked as though it grew out of the ground on which it stood.
The late Royal Perigo was the builder of this house. He also built the house now owned by his great-great nephew, Robert Goff, and the houses owned by Halbert Muncil, Mrs. Lulu Abbott and Hamilton Lamson. Both the Goff house and the Lamson house were built with sizeable dance halls over the kitchen and woodshed. The hall in the Lamson house still has the fiddler's platform and desk at one end.
All the houses were "framed" in the same manner with the same heavy timbers. Mr Lamson says that even the rafters in his house are good-sized logs hewed only on the upper side for the nailing of the roofboards.
