Isaiah Stillwell Homestead at 4567 N. Main St. in Hemlock NY

My Best Friend’s House - The Isaiah Stillwell House at 4567 N. Main St. in Hemlock NY

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The Isaiah Stillwell Homestead

at 4567 N. Main St. in Hemlock NY.

Photo courtesy of Joy Lewis in 2020.

The Stillwell family came to Hemlock in 1836. The patriarch, Isaiah Bishop Stillwell, was born in Massachusetts in 1782. When he arrived in Hemlock (having lived for some time in Monroe County), he was in his mid-fifties and the father of a large family: seven sons and four daughters. Bishop was a master carpenter, an accomplished builder of houses. After the family had lived in the village for more than a decade he was finally in a position to build his own home. He bought a good-sized lot on the east side of Main Street, kitty-corner from the intersection with Adams Road and within the year had put up an imposing structure.

It was a practical house, two stories tall and three rooms deep: the parlor (or “front room” as it was sometimes called) faced the road, beyond that the sitting room, and beyond that a large kitchen. There were narrow porches on both sides of the kitchen — north and south — and a third porch on the south side of the parlor. Off the sitting room, on the north side of the house, were two small bedrooms. Between the sitting room and the kitchen was a very steep, narrow, enclosed staircase. Upstairs were several bedrooms. The house was heated by cast-iron stoves in the main rooms downstairs; water was supplied by a well just steps from the back door; and the Stillwells were able to move in before winter.

Still living at home were the three youngest children: Isaiah, 22; John, 20; and Miranda, seventeen. Over the course of the next twelve years both boys married and started families of their own. Some of the older Stillwell children had moved west, but Isaiah and John lived in Hemlock not far from their parents’ home. Miranda was still unmarried when her parents died in the winter of 1861-62. Both were buried in the Hemlock Cemetery.

The Stillwell heirs sold the house in the summer to Mrs. Mary St. John, a widow then living in Richmond Mills.

Mary (Sweet) St. John was born in Ontario, Canada, in 1793 of parents who had immigrated from Vermont. In 1830 she became the second wife of Aruna St. John of Henrietta, and step-mother to his four children: Fanny, Daniel, Hiram, and Cornelius. Mary and Aruna’s first son, George, was born in Henrietta in 1833. He was still an infant when the family moved to Cleveland, Ohio. There two more sons were born: Charles in 1835 and Edwin in 1837. Young Charles died shortly after his seventh birthday.

Aruna St. John was a skillful millwright. He’d fashioned mills throughout Monroe Countyand spent several years working in Cleveland. When the family returned to New York in the autumn of 1849, they settled in Richmond Mills where Aruna expected to be once more involved with mill work.Unfortunately he died early in 1850 and Mary and her boys, aged seventeen and thirteen, were left to fend for themselves. George, following in his father’s footsteps, found work at the several mills on the Honeoye Outlet and the family remained in Richmond for another decade.

Both of Mary’s sons were married in 1862; that may have been the impetus for her to purchase a home in Hemlock. Sadly George’s young wife died within a few months of her marriage. George came to live with his mother and remained in Hemlcok for ten years until he remarried.When Mary died in December of 1878, George and Edwin inherited the house. They sold it in the spring of the following year to George and Lydia Smith.

George Alonzo Smith, the youngest of three children born to Ezra and Sally Smith, was in his early teens when the family moved from West Bloomfield to a farm at the south end of Hemlock village. Here he finished his schooling and occupied himself as hired man on area farms from year to year.

In 1872 he married twenty-five-year-old Lydia Jenkins, daughter of John and Esther Jenkins.The newlyweds resided with the Backus Gibbs family in Hemlock where George worked as hired man. Before long the children began to arrive: Carrie was born in the winter of 1874, followed by young George the next year and Charles two years after that.

From the available records it appears that George and Lydia were frugal and careful planners. In the spring of 1879 they bought from George and Edwin St. John the house on Main Street that had been built by Bishop Stillwell thirty years earlier. In her girlhood Lydia had lived in the house next door (4575) with her widowed mother and younger siblings.The Smiths also bought their first parcel of farmland — acreage behind the house extending eastward nearly to Clay Street. Over the years the Smiths added bit by bit to their holdings until George farmed a substantial property. He built a barn out back and planted several elm trees and currant bushes around the house.

They been in their new house only two months when baby Inez was born; they called her “Ina.” And after Ina there arrived Frank (1882), Jettie (1883), and Delta (1886). The house was teeming with youngsters.

The children attended school at the Block Schoolhouse — District #4 — at the top of the hill and one by one they grew into young adults. Carrie was the first to marry, in the winter of 1893; she was nineteen. She went with her husband James Fogarty to live in Rochester where he worked as a watchman for the Lehigh Valley Railroad. Four years later Ina, too, was married. The Livonia Gazette reported on November 10, 1897: “A quiet wedding took place at the residence of Mr. and Mrs. George A. Smith this afternoon, when their daughter, Miss Inez, was united in marriage to Mr. Gideon Harder by the Rev. Mr. Blowers.” George’s recently-widowed mother came to live with the family and still at home were Young George, Charles, Frank, Jettie, and Delta. It would be yet a decade before another of the children left home.

Twenty-year-old Delta was married in 1906 to Leslie Griffin; they made their home in West Bloomfield. And around this time George and Lydia also moved to West Bloomfield. Charles, age thirty; Frank, twenty-eight; and Jettie, twenty-six; went with them, as well as George’s bachelor brother James.

The house in Hemlock was rented for about eight years to daughter Carrie and her husband. In 1895 the Lehigh Valley Railroad had come to Hemlock and James Fogarty was able to secure a position at the Hemlock Depot; he and Carrie returned to their hometown. The Fogartys had no children.

The Smiths’ son George died in 1912 in West Bloomfield; a couple years later George and Lydia moved back to Hemlock. One son and a daughter remained with them: Charles was in his early forties; Jettie, a spinster in her late thirties. George’s brother James lived with them yet. Jettie was the principal care-giver for her uncle, now in his seventies and much enfeebled. Son Frank had remained in Bloomfield where he worked as a farm hand for various farmers.

Lydia died at home the last day of November 1922 and nearly six years later George also died. The Livonia Gazette reported on July 22, 1928: “George A. Smith died early on Tuesday morning at his home in Hemlock, at the age of 79. He was in his usual health, but was taken ill during the night and passed away in the early morning hours ... Mr. Smith had been a member of the Methodist church for a great many years. The funeral was held from his late home Thursday at 3 p.m. The Rev. Ernest Sanderson of Pavilion, a former pastor, officiated. Interment was made in the family lot in Union cemetery, Livonia.”

George and Lydia’s unmarried children — Charles, Frank, and Jettie — inherited the house. When in the spring of 1929 Charles died, Frank came home to live with Jettie. Then in November of that year, at age forty-six, Jettie was married. Her groom was widower Alva Reed of Richmond. They married at her home and for the next couple of years she and Alva, with Alva’s grown son Wheeler, lived in Jettie’s home. Much change was initiated in those years as electricity and indoor plumbing were installed in the house and the kitchen was updated.

Downstairs there was a little room opening off the sitting room that for years had been used as a bedroom. This was to be the new bathroom. A door was cut into the room from the kitchen and the necessary facilities were installed: a claw foot porcelain tub, a stand-alone sink, and an up-to-date toilet. Upstairs, directly at the top of the stairs, a sliver of one bedroom was walled off to create a narrow space with just room enough for a toilet and a galvanized sink not much bigger than a cigar box. The cavernous kitchen at the back of the house was partitioned with a half-wall to create a kitchen and pantry on the north side and a dedicated dining area on the south side and the north-facing porch was enclosedto make a “mud room.”

In the early summer of 1932 Jettie moved with her husband and step-son to Alva’s farmhouse on County Road 15 in Richmond. One event of note in that year was the inauguration of the Fiddlers’ Picnic, held at the Richmond home of Alva and Jettie Reed on August 26, 1932. The Gazettedescribed the occasion: “Between 300 and 400 were registered at the old fiddlers’ picnic held at Alva Reed’s last Sunday. At 5 o’clock a picnic supper was served. Before and after supper music was furnished by musicians from far and near.” By 1950 the event had grown so large that it could no longer be hosted at the Reeds’ home and was held at the Hemlock Park, where upwards of three thousand gathered annually to celebrate Alva Reed’s musical heritage.

After Jettie moved away, Frank lived alone in the Smiths’ house for the next fifteen years. When his sister Delta’s husband died in 1947, she moved back to Hemlock to join Frank at the homestead. Within a decade Frank had died, and Delta remained in the house alone. The Gazette reported her death on April 25, 1960, when she “suffered a heart attack while mowing her lawn.” She was seventy-three. The home occupied by the George Smith family for the past five decades now stood empty.

Leah (Griffin) Banzer, Delta’s daughter, inherited the house and farm. On July 21 she sold the entire property to Mrs. Hazel Trott. Mrs. Trott divided the farm into various lots and on August 18 she sold the house and its half-acre to Mr. and Mrs. Howard Arnold. Their family, which included six children ranging in age from four-year-old Beth to fifteen-year-old Priscilla, moved in before the start of school. Four years earlier Howard and Winnie had come from Massachusetts to live in Hemlock. Mr. Arnold, at that time, was a teacher at Elohim Baptist Bible Institute in Castile. Some years later he operated a business in downtown Hemlock selling water softener equipment.