By Victor Greto
Mary-Brent Whipple and James Schwaber’s 250-year-old home is haunted.
Not by ghosts, but by stories and a trail of three major renovations that have made the home a stony centerpiece of history and Federalist-style architecture in Ardencroft.
“It’s not like it’s my house,” Schwaber says, reflecting on both the rich history of the home and the philosophy embodied in the founding and development of Arden, which technically leases its land to would-be owners. “It stretches back so long, and will be here long after I’m gone.”
Just take a gander at the painting of how the home looked nearly six decades ago. It hangs over the fireplace in the oldest room of the home, the one with floors made out of chestnut planks. The picture was painted by Judith Blam shortly after Ardencroft – the third and final Arden community – was founded in 1950.
From the oldest room in the house – now culturally cluttered with a piano and shelves of books and a chandelier – the painting reveals the front room as a dark brown mess of peeling plaster ceilings and walls, debris on a neglected, splintered floor, and broken shutters clinging to the front window. The loneliness of the home is reinforced by the presence of one piece of furniture, a solitary chair, its back facing the viewer.
“When we have to leave this house,” Whipple says, “this will stay. It’s part of the history, part of the home.”
The warm Federalist colors of the home – a historic green, trimmed with chestnut and pine floors and white walls – are reinforced by a newer, spacious kitchen with glass-paned cabinets and a huge family room. The last major renovation was done by Bobbie and Richard Ubersax, who owned the home for nearly three decades before Schwaber and Whipple claimed it. The house is enveloped in a mass of stone that no Big Bad Wolf could think he could blow down.
A house this old inevitably breeds stories.
Here’s one about life in the home only 20 years before Blam painted the picture.
Once upon a time during the Great Depression, the home was owned by a rich industrialist from New York.
The man reportedly had a woman chained in the basement.
“It wasn’t modernized back in the 1930s,” says Schwaber of the home built by an unknown colonist during the middle of the 18th century, a generation before the Declaration of Independence was written.
Schwaber and Whipple bought the home in 2000, after it had been renovated at least three times.
Soon after the couple bought the home, an elderly neighbor who had grown up in the area told them the woman-in-the-basement story.
“It was a mysterious place when eccentric rich people lived here,” Schwaber says.
Like something out of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Schwaber and Whipple say that a neighbor told the couple that the rich man used to come from the train station with his wife in a horse and carriage.
Why the mysterious woman had been chained in the basement has been lost to history and rumor.
Or perhaps it never was. Only the house can tell us – and it’s not talking.
Maybe the neighborhood kids made it up because the house looked so old and lonely and scary-looking.
But it wasn’t always that way.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, if you were standing at the front window of the newly-built stone house on an early fall morning, you would have seen a series of gently sloping hills and a rising mist from the Delaware River.
The first house was small, but rose two stories high with an attic.
There’s not much left of the first incarnation: round beams in the basement and the outline of a beehive oven that may be seen between the old wall of the old house and a huge addition constructed in the 1980s.
“They kept the wall this way when they added on to it,” Whipple says of the Ubersaxes, who added a huge family room, in which Schwaber has been sleeping and watching television while recovering from a broken leg.
Just outside her dining room, whose centerpiece is a pre-Civil War Georgia pine kitchen table owned by her grandmother and surrounded by Thomas Moser-designed chairs, Whipple points to the stony former outside wall of the original home, and the ghostly outline of the old oven.
Whipple, a licensed clinical social worker at Charter School of Wilmington and Cab Calloway School, has decorated the downstairs to her own taste: that old front parlor room that Blam had painted now holds an Asian theme – modern and traditional – as well as a model-sized Bel-Air Chevrolet automobile that occasionally appears on the mantle of the fireplace, just below the Chinese screens hanging on the wall.
“That’s an ongoing battle with my wife,” Schwaber says of the model.
“I’ve lost the battle,” she says.
The house was enlarged in 1780. Back rooms were added, which included corner fireplaces on the first and second floors in the back western corner. Windows were shifted, and the plaster walls inside included oyster shells and horsehair to hold it together.
An 1813 renovation included the addition of the entire front of the current house – “They must have been quite wealthy,” says Bobbie Ubersax in an e-mail from Hawaii where she and her husband now live.
By the mid-19th century, records show that the home was stuccoed, and owned by George Veale, a farmer, after whom the road in front of the house is named. The stucco remained until the Ubersaxes, who bought the house in the early 1970s, chipped it all away to reveal the original stone.
After a series of renters took possession during the early part of the 20th century, the Ardencroft Association bought the property in the hopes that it might become the community center of the development.
Instead, it was soon sold to a DuPont electrician named Andrew Vattilana, who began restoring it by installing plumbing and electricity and heat on the first floor.
When the Ubersaxes bought the home from him in 1971, “There was a wall across the hallway to keep heat from going up the stairs, and the second and third floors had broken out windows with birds and squirrels as residents,” Bobbie Ubersax says. “The back yard was a jungle with an open cesspool in the middle. We spent the first week in the house shoveling out the plaster from the second and third floor ceilings, which had covered the floors.”
In the mid-1980s, the Ubersaxes demolished the old summer kitchen and porch, and added a garage, laundry room, half-bath and the large family room, built a brick patio behind the family room, and redid the kitchen.
Whipple and Schwaber have added their own personal touches, from Whipple’s collection of primitive arts and crafts that include Yananomi baskets, Peruvian hangings and pottery to local artists and a sketch of Whipple done by local artist Steve Tanis that hangs near the stairway to the second floor.
The greatest aspect of the home, Whipple and Schwaber say, is the seamless integration of the old with the new.
“In this country, we usually just tear down old structures, or make them precious” like museum pieces, Schwaber says.
In Europe, they blend old and new. Just like their Ardencroft home.
“They don’t tear it down, but make it modern, the lighting, electricity, plumbing and that is so cool,” he says. “You get a tremendous sense of the history and tradition and place, not as something to toss out, but something to embody with the latest technology.
“That’s what we’re doing here.”