"Russell House" in Chestertown

This house was offered by the property owner, but apparently she received no calls on it. I looked it over a few days ago and it seems someone is scavenging flooring and whatever else. The house was rather nastily modified when converted into apartments some decades ago.

I can put people in touch with the owner.

August 24, 2006
Kent County News
By Craig O’Donnell

CHESTERTOWN – House to go. One way or another: elsewhere for a new lease on life, or in pieces to the dump.

A 100-year-old High Street house with a small claim to fame could escape the wrecker’s claw if someone will haul it away.

Behind big maple trees, on a slight rise, and inside old cement shingles like a suit of armor is a 2½-story frame house built about 1909 by J. Waters Russell.

Russell was, said the May 29, 1909 Kent News, "the largest real estate broker of Kent."

Its original form, with two front dormers, is akin to older houses closer to the river. Over the years many additions – more like blisters than wings – were added. This is typical of Eastern Shore houses that had to get indoor plumbing somehow. The front porch was enclosed.

Some decades ago, it became apartments with 70’s-style grooved paneling and floor coverings. How much original interior is under the wall paneling is not clear.

The Russell house also has a mudroom-rear hallway connecting to a trailer in back. That architectural feature can only be called "unique."

If the main section is moved, the rest can be demolished. Either way, it has to make way for a new 3-story physical therapy and rehabilitation center.

At the Planning Commission meeting Aug. 16, the town board praised architect Ed Dunning for the new structure Chestertown Wellness Center will build.

Among various preliminary site plan recommendations on landscaping, lighting, walks and access from High Street, Chairman Jim Gatto also requested that the Russell house get moved, if possible, not torn down.

That depends on an interested person stepping forward to contact the new owners.

Gatto said in an e-mail last Friday that he thinks overhead wires pose the main obstacle to a would-be mover. He said his preference as planning commission chairman is to see old buildings recycled.

Dunning, of Media, Pa., said Tuesday that a structural engineer has looked the house over and it can stand up to the stresses of relocation.

Planners call rehabbing, converting and possibly adding to an old building, "adaptive reuse." In this case, it isn’t possible to incorporate the old structure into the new wellness center.

Moving a building to another spot is sometimes the only fix. Planted elsewhere, it could become a home, apartments or offices.

For example, Chestertown’s police department once was part of the stables at the long-gone county jail. The small brick building was moved about three blocks and remodeled.

Size is not an obstacle. According to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, some elaborate Victorian houses have been sawed into one-story sections and, once reassembled, given new life.

Vickers Estate

The Russell house is on land once owned by Sen. George Vickers, who donated the lot for next-door Chester Cemetery in 1862.

In 1844, he bought two lots plus another two acres "adjoining the upper end of Chestertown" at a sheriff’s sale: the lots "on the East side of the Main road leading from Chestertown to ‘Whalland’s Mill’ " came to "three acres, three roods, and one perch, more or less." They had been owned by Samuel Mansfield, a relative of Vickers' wife.

After Mansfield’s death they were sold to Rev. Samuel L. Rawleigh (or Rawley), who apparently died soon after.

Two small plat maps are in the dusty 1844 court papers. One shows a tiny "house lot," on the side closest to Chestertown. Rawleigh’s widow was allowed to live there for life. Today the site is either under Dixon Valve, or the cemetery.

The 1860 Martenet map of Kent indicates a house in the general location. It may have been widow Rawleigh’s home, abandoned, since there is no owner’s name next to it. Had Vickers built a barn, shop or factory there, his name would have been next to the tiny dot.

The 1877 Lake, Griffing and Stevenson map shows the cemetery; no houses at all line the east side of High Street as far as the mill. John L. Stam owned a building across High Street from the cemetery. Chestertown ended at College Avenue.

The 1907 Bird’s-Eye Map still shows no house. By 1908 the land was about to leave the Vickers family.

Sen. Vickers had accumulated dozens of properties. While the largest were in Quaker Neck, land records show holdings in Locust Grove and Georgetown Cross Roads, and half a dozen Chestertown properties.

The county building at 400 High Street stands where Vickers’ mansion and "pleasure garden" once stood.

The senator died in 1879. He willed 818 High St. to his wife Mary. After she died sixteen years later, it was among properties left in trust to her three children. After a lawsuit the lands – two in town and a 350-acre Quaker Neck farm – were sold by Harrison Vickers, trustee, to wind up the trust.

When advertised in 1908, 818 High St. was called "a desirable building lot … next to Chester Cemetery" on the "N.E. Side of the public road or High Street extending to Whaland’s or Toppings Mill."

Broker Russell bought it for $500. He paid $1,200 for a second "building lot" at "High and College on the N.E. Side," a neighborhood still called by some Vickers Park.

So it seems Russell built the house. His 1910 deed to the Rouse family calls the property "improved" (meaning there were buildings).

Kent News bound volumes from 1908, 1909 and 1910 take no notice of the new home on upper High Street, but almost every edition had a ¼-page ad listing the farms and houses Russell was selling throughout the county.

Yet it was certainly the most substantial house between downtown Chestertown and the Vickers family’s Victorian manse, Lauretum.

In 1927, Ida Rouse, widow, and heirs sold it to the Stauffers. In 1938, Esther Stauffer, widow, sold it to Alfred and Winifred Hodgson. The Lee family bought it in 1944; in 1995 it passed from the Hallie Joiner Lee estate to Thomas Mench, who sold it last December.

Julia Bainbridge, of owner J&B Land LLC, said Tuesday that anyone interested in moving the house should contact her.