Hidden House

Greg started working on the house and I started driving up to Dover, to the Delaware Public Archives, to find out more about it. We slowly realized that that there was a hidden house inside the house -- what's now the dining room. We discovered a beam in the cellar with the date1767 carved into its center, the date surrounded by an incised frame. The cellar is the foundation of the original house, and then there was a loft above, likely for sleeping. Next to the huge fireplace in the now-dining room you can make out the shadow of a winder stair going up to the loft above. The door to the stair is still there, and there's the shadow of a first stair on the floor. The original floor was underneath a late nineteenth century parquet upgrade. The story is that after the decline of the shipbuilding industry in Milton the ships carpenters got hired on to make inlaid parquet floors in the fancy houses around town. We kept the parquet in the entryway and the upstairs hall and the parlor, but took it out in the dining room to show what we could of the earliest house.

The house -- this little house -- shows up in the Archives when the daughter of Samuel Ratcliffe sold it to Robert McFerran in 1837, a few years after her father died. Samuel Ratcliffe had inherited the house from his second wife, Sally Conwell, who had inherited it from her mother in 1804. Sally's mother Eunice Conwell inherited it from her husband. The Conwells had acquired the land when the Osbourne family had sold it -- a vast plot that comprised all of what is now Milton on the south side of the Broadkill River. Matthew Osbourne had gotten it in the 1730's, and people think he then sold some land he owned in nearby Cool Spring and settled here, at the head of the Broadkill.

From earliest times the river was a natural place for settlement and trade and industry. Roads were poor if there were any roads at all, and river travel was cheaper, safer, and faster. You could sail down the Broadkill to Lewes and from Lewes up the Delaware Bay to Philadelphia or Wilmington. White oak and shingles and charcoal and bog iron, the earliest produce of the woods and swamps of Sussex County, were hauled here, to the headwaters of the Broadkill, and then shipped down the river.

Robert McFerren bought the original house in 1837 from Rachael Ratcliffe Draper, Samuel Ratcliffe's daughter, and set about enlarging it. Robert was an Irishman and a cabinetmaker who had immigrated to the United States in time to serve in the defense of Lewes against the British in 1814. He became a naturalized citizen in 1826, and he must have done well. Between 1837 and his death in 1843, Robert built an imposing Greek Revival house fronting right on Federal Street. That's the house as it is today. It's designed to impress. You enter a hall that opens up to a two story stairway with a sweeping balustrade. Two symmetrical spacious rooms open off the entry hall; and above them, two more identical rooms. On the third floor is an airy attic of two full rooms. The house Robert McFerren built is made of wood, one room deep and three stories high. It sits high on a hill, commanding the town. Hidden behind it, unseen unless you know to look for it, is the original house.