Column: 'Time Travelers' Visit Historic Homes

Sometime shortly after I agreed to have my home included on the Washington Township Historic House Tour this year, scheduled for Dec. 10, 2011, someone asked me, why, why would you open your home to hundreds of strangers?

At first I answered simply, because my home is more than 250 years old and therefore it plays a role in the history of the town. But during the week spent in preparation, I began to ask myself the same question.

Was I insane? What was I thinking? I don’t have time for this, I have articles to write, a dog to walk, and now I have a very large dusty home to whip into shape before friends, neighbors and strangers meander through my home in the stark light of day.

A sense of panic began to course through my body when a woman I met in told me that one year 700 people signed up for the tour. I practically choked on my coffee, and ran out of place so fast the wreaths were spinning on the doors.

Only two days before the tour and I still hadn’t put up a Christmas tree. But I had been cleaning and reorganizing for four days.

My good friend Susan Miniman, a professional interior designer, who has decorated the historic Jacobus Vanderveer House in Bedminster for the holidays for many years, offered to help. 

Like an angel sent from Better Homes & Gardens, she appeared everyday with glass lanterns and globes, candles and ribbons, an array of greens, pointsettias, and roses, and angels, cherubs and hand made ornaments for the tree–oh my God, the tree I hadn’t picked up yet.

But on Thursday night, I ventured out. The air was icy and the sky, especially dark. I made my way down to , and somehow, under very dim lights, I managed to pick a beauty and for only $50.

Of course the sap dripped all over my eighty dollar pants while I was trying to wrestle it into the stand, but I still felt like I got a great deal. 

Working until almost midnight, for most of the final stretch, Susan drew upon her decades of design experience and elegant taste to transform my home into something wondrous. 

Visitors on the tour were delighted and inspired by the vignettes that she had created especially on the mantels and the staircase in the main foyer.   

The responsibility for preparing my home for the tour weighed heavily upon me at various times throughout the final week, but not as heavily as my lovely six foot tree that fell on top of my friend as she was attempting to straighten it in its crooked stand on a not so level floor. 

Actually the tree fell three times before we finally found a spot on the floor that it liked.  

Though it was a grueling and tiresome process, when we stepped back to look at the canvas that was this old home, we were thrilled with what we saw, as were the many visitors who flowed through my home on Saturday.

When I saw the looks on their faces, I realized that I was not insane for opening my home to them, I was welcoming time travelers. 

These were people who wanted to step back and learn about those intrepid souls who journeyed here before us. They wanted to peer into the rooms where these settlers found comfort and dreamed and hoped just like all of us for a better future, for a happy life.

My home was built in the early to mid-1700s by a man named John Colver who fled Connecticut with 22 members of his family for religious freedom. It is said that they were persecuted by the Puritans because of their odd ways. The Colvers, who followed the church of John Rogers, were also known as Rogerenes.

They didn’t believe in medicine or doctors, or spoken prayer, and they didn’t believe that Sunday was a special day, so they worked everyday.

And for one day in mid-December, visitors from the year 2011 were able to step back and get a glimpse of the fireplaces where the Colvers cooked their meals and found warmth, the bones of the house comprised of massive beams, its skin of horse hair plaster and the steep Jersey Winder staircase that reaches up into the attic and back to the beginning of life here on Schooleys Mountain.