The Ganong House Move

I. At a glance

In the summer of 1959, a substantial Dutch Colonial house was jacked off its foundation at the south end of Eastview Avenue, set on rollers, and moved down the street to a new lot — an operation vivid enough that the parish’s own anniversary book later printed a photograph of it. The house was the George Ganong residence, and it had to move because the ground beneath it was wanted: the parcel was being cleared for the 1959 St. Lawrence O’Toole parochial-school addition.

What makes the move more than a curiosity is the parcel itself. The same ground had, a generation earlier, held the Morehouse sash-and-blind factory. So this one small lot at the south end of Eastview carried three chapters of the street’s history in succession — a village millshop, a fine private home, and finally the Catholic school — and the 1959 house move is the hinge between the last two.

II. One parcel, three lives — the Sanborn maps and the 1926 deed

The clearest evidence that the Ganong house stood on the former factory lot is cartographic. Two Sanborn fire-insurance maps, eleven years apart, show the same parcel at the south end of Eastview Avenue change hands between uses:

In 1920 the parcel carries the Morehouse planing mill and carpenter shop. The factory relocated to the north side of the village in 1924 (its story is told in the Morehouse piece). By the 1931 Sanborn, the same ground holds a two-story dwelling — the Ganong house. The house was, per the 1959 newspaper account, “built under the direction of A. D. Townsend” — the Eastview Avenue lumber-and-paint dealer of 14 Eastview, another recurring name in this research. George Ganong took title to the lot in 1926 (below), so the dwelling was raised under Townsend sometime between the factory’s 1924 departure and the 1931 Sanborn.

A deed now fixes that acquisition and supplies a second, independent tie to the factory. On July 27, 1926, Mary Emma McQuay of the Town of Southeast conveyed the lot to George Ganong of the Village of Brewster Liber 138/135–136. The metes-and-bounds describe a parcel on the westerly side of Eastview Avenue that begins at the land of the St. Lawrence O’Toole Catholic Church and runs its full north line — 148.6 feet — along the Church; the south line abuts St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church (fixed by “a cross on a stone near the bottom of [the] wall”), with Mary E. O’Brien and Frank Ronan to the west and about 120 feet of frontage on Eastview. That is the south-end parcel of the Sanborn maps, sitting between the two churches — now deed-described, not merely map-inferred.

The grantor’s name is the telling detail. Mary Emma McQuay shares the surname of John McQuay — the interim owner who held the sash-and-blind shop between George B. Hubbell’s estate and John D. Morehouse, selling it to Morehouse in 1914 (told in the Morehouse piece). The most economical reading is that the McQuay family held the underlying land across the factory’s working life and sold the cleared lot to Ganong once the plant had relocated — which would carry the parcel from factory to house within the deed record itself, not just across the Sanborn overlay. The relationship between John and Mary Emma McQuay, and the deed by which the lot came to her, are not yet established, so this is a strong lead rather than a closed chain. (The deed’s “buildings and improvements thereon erected” is standard granting-clause language and is not, by itself, evidence that the house already stood in 1926.)

III. The move, 1959

By the late 1950s St. Lawrence O’Toole was planning the largest expansion in its history — a ten-classroom school addition and auditorium-chapel. The Ganong lot stood in the way, and the parish had taken title to it that spring. The Brewster Standard reported the plan in June 1959:

The deed behind that line has now been reviewed, and it completes the chain the Sanborn maps could only suggest. On March 24, 1959, Julia F. Ganong — widow of George Ganong, who had died intestate on November 18, 1954 — conveyed the lot “with the buildings and improvements thereon” to the Church of St. Lawrence O’Toole Liber 513/333. Its metes-and-bounds repeat the 1926 description almost word for word — the 148.6-foot north line along the Church, the south line along St. Andrew’s Episcopal fixed by the “cross on a stone near the bottom of [the] wall,” Mary E. O’Brien and Frank Ronan to the west, about 120 feet of frontage on Eastview — so the parcel the parish took in 1959 is, in deed language, the same lot George Ganong bought in 1926 and the same ground the Morehouse factory had occupied. The deed recites its own chain back to a March 1948 conveyance (Liber 344/174) by which the lot was held by George and Julia jointly; on George’s death it passed to his widow, who carried it to the parish. The deed recites only a nominal $100 and other valuable consideration, but the federal documentary stamps tell the real story: the four stamps affixed to the record total about $24 ($10 + $10 + $2 + $2), and at the 1959 rate of $1.10 per $1,000 that points to a true purchase price of roughly $22,000. So the parish bought the lot at a substantial, arm’s-length price — not a gift, and a pointed contrast with the near-cost way the Gilroys had conveyed the church lot two generations earlier.

Rather than demolish a sound and admired house, the parish had it moved — down Eastview Avenue to the Griffin plot, opposite the McDonald residence, where it stands today. The relocation was the kind of event a small town remembers: the parish’s 100th-anniversary book preserved a photograph of the house rolling down the avenue, a child on a tricycle watching from the foreground, and recorded that a tense moment came when a resident briefly refused to allow a tree limb to be cut so the house could pass.

IV. Where it came to rest — the Griffin corner

The newspaper named the destination only as “the Griffin property opposite the McDonald residence.” The deeds now identify that ground. It is the corner where Eastview Avenue meets Wells Street (also called Cornell Avenue) — the family name already written on the street the parish’s own block had grown along — and in 1959 it belonged to William Kenneth and Helen G. Griffin. A 1966 deed by which the Griffins settled the corner into a family trust Liber 662/61 recites how they had come by it: they had bought the ground on February 1, 1956 Liber 471/156 — three full years before the Ganong house arrived on it.

That sequence explains a silence in the record. A house driven onto land its owner already holds is not a sale: nothing changes hands, no deed is drawn, and the land books register the move not at all. The Griffins owned the corner before the house came and owned it after; the relocation passes through the chain of title without leaving a single mark. So the identification of the standing house as the Ganong house does not rest on a deed — there is none to find, and now we know there cannot be — but on the 1959 move photograph, the architectural match, and the two Brewster Standard notices. Here the record’s very silence is the corroboration: it is exactly what a house-move onto already-owned land leaves behind.

The corner has a longer memory than the Griffins, and it folds the move back into the larger Eastview story. The ground was Wells land. Caroline Crosby Wells — mother of Henry H. Wells, whose own house “By Ways” stood only a few lots away — had assembled this block around the turn of the century; the parcel the Griffins bought in 1956 had been carved from that holding and held by the Stephens family from 1943 before it passed to them. The corner traces back, deed by deed, through the Wells family to the nineteenth-century Brush and Brewster farms from which the village lots were first cut.

Even the landmark the newspaper used to point the way was Wells ground. Directly across the street stood the McDonald house, built in 1922 by Frank and Mary McDonald on a lot they had bought that year from Caroline C. Wells Liber 123/444; it was taken down in the later twentieth century and the ground rebuilt with new houses. So when the parish rolled the gambrel down the avenue in 1959, it set the Ganong house on old Wells land, at the Wells Street corner, opposite a house raised on a Wells lot a generation earlier — and only a few doors from the Wells family’s own “By Ways.”

V. The same house, today

The house survives at its 1959 destination, and its identity is not in doubt: the gambrel roof, the half-round lunette window set into the gable, and the tall central chimney match the move photograph point for point. What was lifted off the old factory parcel still stands a short way down the same street.

On the parcel it left behind, the 1959 school addition rose — the auditorium-chapel facing Prospect Street, joined to the school by a covered bridge — completing the parish’s long absorption of the south end of Eastview Avenue.

Research by Rob G.  ·  Eastview Avenue Series