Helene Huffer couldn’t stop tearing up. She was about to leave a home that had taken hold of her the moment she saw it in person. She dabbed repeatedly at her eyes with the paper towel clutched in her hand, her voice fragile as she apologized for her tears.
“I love the house so much,” she said. “It’s very hard to leave.”
Huffer apparently is not the only one enamored with the colonial stone house whose history dates to an African American family living in the 18th century. In a third-floor child’s bedroom, on the inside of a door leading to the eaves, a girl wrote her own message of endearment.
“To me, it’s just precious,” said Huffer. “I didn’t know her when I first saw that.” The girl is now a woman living in Texas who returns to the house for visits.
Last weekend, Huffer opened up the house at 312 Limekiln Pike in Glenside, PA, to several guests and descendants of the original owners. She is selling it because the stairways in the three-story house (it also has a basement) are no longer kind to her knees. She has lived in the four-bedroom, 3½-bath house for the last 13 years.
The home sits back from the street behind a row of evergreens that hides it from passing cars. The oldest part of the house – two rooms on the first and second floors – and a barn were built in the 1700s.
What sets the house apart from others on the street is its lineage. It holds the history of a family whose African American descendants through blood and marriage include actor/singer/activist Paul Robeson; abolitionist/educator Sarah Mapps Douglass, artist David Bustill Bowser and Cyrus Bustill, who baked bread for George Washington’s troops at Valley Forge (according to the family’s documentation) and helped founded the Free African Society. Some members were trained at Camp William Penn near Philadelphia to fight in the Civil War, and others were involved in the Underground Railroad.
“We have a history of contributing and we’ve done a lot of that,” said family historian Joyce Mosley.
Two of the ancestors – Hiram and Elizabeth Montier – were recognized several years ago when their individual portraits were discovered and loaned to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for public display. These are the earliest surviving portraits of an African American couple, painted in 1841 when they were newlyweds.
The portraits were the subject of a WHYY documentary titled “The Montiers – An American Story” produced by Karen Smyles and nominated for a Mid-Atlantic Emmy in 2018.
“We knew we had these portraits but no one in the family knew what happened to them,” said Mosley. “Then Uncle Joe was like 90 and we were moving him out of his house to assisted living. Under his mattress were the two portraits.”
William Pickens III, great-grandson of the couple, had the portraits restored. They will be placed back in their original frames, which are also being rebuilt, Mosley told the gathering at the house. Pickens, who lives in Sag Harbor, NY, was unable to attend the open house.
Hiram Montier descended from Philadelphia’s first appointed mayor, Humphrey Morrey, a white Quaker who immigrated from England and was appointed in 1691 to the position by William Penn, according to Smyles’ account of the family’s history. At that time, Quakers owned enslaved Africans (a practice they later abolished). One of them was a woman named Cremona Satterthwaite.
After Morrey died, his son Richard inherited the estate and freed the enslaved Africans. Cremona and Richard became a couple and had five children (their daughter Elizabeth married baker Cyrus Bustill. Elizabeth was the sister of Mosley’s sixth great-grandmother.) They lived together as man and wife and were accepted as a couple in Cheltenham, although they could not legally get married in this country.
When Richard died, he left 198 acres of land in Glenside, Cheltenham Township, to Cremona. Their youngest daughter Cremona Jr. and her husband John Montier built a barn on the property where they were said to have lived until a house was built in front of it. (Hiram was their grandson). The original house was a two-story structure built in the late 1700s and is now part of the current home, which was expanded in the 19th century. The barn was eventually expanded into a private residence.
The home is no longer in the family. It has changed hands numerous times over the last two centuries.
Huffer wasn’t looking for a new home when she saw an ad for the house in a local newspaper and thought it was pretty. Out of curiosity, she decided to take a look at the house, arriving there with a real estate agent she knew.
“I wasn’t even in the door and I knew it was my house,” she said, tearing up as she spoke. “It was a feeling I’ve only had twice in my life about anything else. It was just an unbelievable feeling. I cannot articulate it. I can’t explain it.
“I wasn’t in the door. I was just on the front step and it was just like I knew it was my house. I hadn’t even seen it inside. I knew it was my house.”
She returned later for an open house, and the feeling was still there. “I thought it was ridiculous. I thought it was silly. I didn’t need a big house like this. It was just so overwhelming.”
Huffer says she did not know the history of the house. Shortly after buying it, she found a bin of old newspapers about its original owners.
“One night and it was dark, it was around 6 o’clock. A knock came at the door and I hollered through the door, ‘May I help you?,'” she said. “And he said, ‘I’m William Pickens III.’ He started to tell me who he was and I said, ‘Mr. Pickens, I know who you are.'” He had been to the house in the past but didn’t know who currently owned it. “He came to see his house and hoped that whoever was living here at the time would let him in.”
Huffer went about returning the house to its original style as much as possible while modernizing it for contemporary living.
“I joke that it had three acres of purple paisley wallpaper,” said Huffer, a designer. “It was so ugly. The front door was purple. I did most of the painting myself. It took me three coats of Benjamin Moore’s best paint to cover the purple bedroom.
“When I say purple, I don’t mean lavender. I mean dark midnight purple. It was hideous. I tried very hard to take it back to something that would have been appropriate. The wallpaper – I hope to heaven that whoever buys it doesn’t get rid of it – it’s a Winterthur paper … which would have been contemporary to the house.”
Winterthur is the estate of collector Henry Francis du Pont that is now a Delaware museum displaying decorative arts in buildings on truly magnificent grounds. Huffer’s wallpaper is in the entrance hallway and up the stairs on the first floor.
Also on hand for the recent house opening was Jeff Blumenthal, whose parents lived in the house for 45 years and where he grew up. He hadn’t been back since 1968. When Huffer redesigned it, she made his old bedroom into a master bathroom with a huge three-sided glass shower to accommodate her then-aging Doberman Pinscher.
Blumenthal recalled playing hide and seek in the barn and king of the mountain atop a 15-foot pile of manure, mucking manure (the family had sheep and a donkey), and being amused as trick-or-treaters stayed away because they thought the people who lived there turned kids into sheep.
“Many good memories,” said Blumenthal, who said his father told him about the history of the house.
Huffer hopes the new owners will retain the integrity of the house and respect its history.
“I said, ‘Mr. Pickens, I hope we can find someone who’s going to love the house as much as you and I.’ He said, ‘Helene, that’s never going to happen.'”
Thank you for continuously sharing our heritage and roots, we have been in the dark to long we are America I wish I could afford to buy this house.