The Merrill Lot - The Leverette Merrill House at 4522 N. Main Street Hemlock NY

A Historical review by Joy Lewis, the Richmond NY Historian.

1

The Leverette Merrill Homestead

at 4522 N. Main St. in Hemlock NY.

Photo courtesy of Douglas Morgan in 2006.

Fanny (Branch) Merrill came to Hemlock in her late thirties. The year was 1850. Married for twenty years to Leverette Merrill, she was the mother of seven children: Charles was seventeen; Leverette, Jr., fifteen; George, eleven; Peter, ten; Fanny, seven; Ann, five; and Mary, four. The youngest of her children, Frances, would be born two years later. Over a span of twelve years three of the Merrill children would be lost; as each of the three eldest boys reached their early twenties, each succumbed to death. All lie at rest in the Hemlock Cemetery. (George served three years in the Union Army during the Civil War. Discharged in mid-January 1864 for “disability,” he returned home where he died two weeks later. The cause of death for Charles and Leverette, Jr. is unknown.)

Leverette and Fanny bought a tiny lot (less than half-an-acre) on Main Street and moved into the tidy frame house that stood in the center of the lot. Father and sons worked as day laborers on various neighborhood farms. Here the Merrill family lived for nearly a quarter of a century. The children grew up and established homes of their own. Fanny and Leverette sold their house and went to live with a daughter. At their deaths they joined their older boys in Hemlock Cemetery. Though the family no longer resided in Hemlock, their legacy lived on for many a year, as the property was long known as “the Merrill Lot.”

George A. Thurston bought the Merrill Lot in 1873. A young man newly-married and about to become a father, he was a son of Silas and Nancy Thurston, and a distant cousin of George G. Thurston. The large extended Thurston family were early settlers of Hemlock and Livonia Center, and there continued to be Thurston descendants in Hemlock well into the nineteen-forties. George Albert Thurston and his wife Margaret (“Ella”) Austin lived in their Main Street home for over fifty years, and after them their daughter Bessie lived there.

In the spring of 1921 George and Ella celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary at their home. Present were their five children George T., Kittie Short, Frank, Bessie Colegrove, and Charlotte Crout, with their spouses and children, for a total of twelve grandkids. A lengthy story in the Livonia Gazette detailing the party and the guests concluded, “The bride and groom of fifty years are remarkably well and do not exhibit any indication of the long lapse of years. They enjoyed the dinner as well as any of the children and grandchildren and did it full justice. Mr. and Mrs. Thurston have the hearty good wishes of their many friends here.”

George and Ella’s daughter Bessie lived with her parents. She’d been married in her mid-twenties and had a son, Myron. The marriage, however, was not a success, and she was divorced before Myron was of school-age. In 1931, a couple years after their parents died, Bessie’s siblings deeded the house solely to Bessie. She lived there for most of the rest of her life.

Bessie Thurston Colegrove worked as housekeeper/cook for the Sayre Beam family who lived just up the hill a-ways. For nine years (1938-1946) Mr. Beam served as Livingston County Sheriff. In those years he and his family lived in Geneseo, at the jailhouse, and Bessie went with them. Her son Myron and his wife Hilda and young son Lester lived in Bessie’s house during that time.

When the Beam family returned to their home in Hemlock in the mid-1940s, Bessie returned to hers as well. She lived there alone for some years after Myron and Hilda moved to Florida. When Bessie died in 1968 Myron inherited the house. He sold it to Reed Lemon a year later.

On A Personal Note

I did not know Mrs. Colegrove well, though she was a near neighbor. We knew she lived alone in her little house, and about the only time we saw her was at Halloween. It was near the end of her life I came to know her better. As the years passed she grew more and more feeble, until finally she was unable to continue on her own. In the fall of 1967 she hired a live-in companion, Priscilla Arnold Smith.

Cilla was the older sister of my best friend Ellen. Growing up I spent so much time at the Arnold house that Cilla was almost like an older sister to me as well. She was divorced with a four-year-old daughter, Karen. (The fact that Cilla’s married name was the same as my own was an odd coincidence. “Smith” after all, is quite a common surname.) Both Cilla and Karen lived with Mrs. Colegrove and Cilla cared for her needs.

Sometimes Cilla needed to go out and I would be asked to babysit Karen and to look after Mrs. Colegrove. Both the younger and the elder were easy to mind. Though Karen was active and required much of my attention, Mrs. Colegrove, who was bed ridden, was usually sleeping while I was with her. When she was awake, her needs were minimal and her requests quietly whispered.

On the evening of April 4, 1968, I was at Mrs. Colegrove’s house looking after Karen. Both my charges had long since fallen asleep and I was watching television when the show was interrupted by a special news bulletin from Memphis, Tennessee, announcing the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. That was a night I’ll long remember.