A Lovely Home - The George Thayer House at 4484 N. Main Street Hemlock NY

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

From the 1840s onward George Thayer purchased several tracts of land in Hemlock, primarily on the west side of Route 15A, south of Big Tree Road. The property at 4484 is about half a mile south of Big Tree. The house that Mr. Thayer built here in 1855 was a lovely dwelling, set back from the road with an expansive lawn in front and ringed with stately elms and oaks.

In 1844 the Thayer family moved from the neighboring township of Richmond to Hemlock, to a property on the southwest corner of Big Tree Road and Main Street. In a grove of oak and hickory George built a stately house for his family (4406) and they lived there for twenty years. He built a second house (4484) around 1855 and for a time he rented it to various tenants. In 1861 he sold the house and the surrounding acreage to Caroline Backus.

The widow of Riley Backus, Caroline was thirty-seven years old and the mother of twelve-year-old Mary. Mary had been an infant when Riley and Caroline moved to Hemlock. But Riley died before Mary was five, and mother and daughter moved in with Caroline’s sister Sarah Stocking and her family, who lived on Main Street in Hemlock. A few years later Caroline bought the Thayer house; she and Mary lived there for only a few years. When Caroline sold the house, she and her daughter stayed in Hemlock. It is not known when Caroline died, but she is not counted on the census of 1900. Mary never married. In adulthood she lived in a house on Adams Road. On January 13, 1934, Mary died and was buried in the Hemlock Cemetery. (Perhaps her parents were buried there as well, the graves being unmarked or having lost their headstones.)

In the spring of 1863 the house at 4484 Main was sold to Joseph and Catherine Gardner. Joseph was from Canada. He came to Hemlock in his youth and in the 1850s married Kate, the daughter of Joseph and Catherine King, a few years later. (The house neighboring this property on the south belonged to Kate’s brother George.)

Joseph and Kate stayed in Hemlock only about two-and-a-half years. On the 1865 New York Census are listed several residents of their home: Joseph was thirty-six, his wife twenty-eight. Living with them as “boarders” were John Hall (21), a clerk; Dr. William Durrah (45), his wife Amie (23), and their infant son Edward; and William Patterson (30), a merchant, and his wife Amelia. To manage this household they employed two young women: Margaret Cusick and Theresa Doyle. When the Gardners sold the house in November of 1865 to James Curran, they moved to Hammonton, New Jersey. There, two daughters were born: Katie and Minnie.

James Curran, who bought the house from the Gardners, was born in Ireland in 1810. About thirty years later he came to New York, where he settled in Albany. He married Catherine Farrell there and their first two daughters were born: Anne in 1847 and Mary in 1849. By 1851, when daughter Julia was born, the family was living in Hemlock in a tenant house. Another daughter, Kittie, arrived a year later. James worked all his life as a farm laborer, but he provided well for his family. He bought the house at 4484 Main Street in 1865, when Kittie was thirteen.

James died May 1, 1871 in Hemlock and was buried in the Hemlock Cemetery. His wife lived another quarter century. In later life Catherine took in lodgers. For several years her elderly neighbor, Emily McMaster and Emily’s daughter Emma, boarded with Catherine. Catherine Curran died January 17, 1896 and was buried beside her husband.

The next residents of the home were James and Catherine’s daughter Julia and her husband Charles Allen. They had no children. Around 1905 the Allens moved to Canandaigua to be near Julia’s sisters. Julia died in the early part of 1923 and was buried in Hemlock Cemetery.

Julia’s oldest sister Anne had married Horton McMillan early in 1870. She had two sons: Peter and Roy. She died in Canandaigua and is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, alongside her sister Mary. Mary Curran married Jesse Hawley and they moved to Michigan. Shortly before Julia’s death Mary returned to Canandaigua following the death of her husband. They had no children. The youngest Curran daughter, Catherine, was called “Kittie.” In her mid-twenties Kittie married Joseph Hyde and went with him to Owyhee County, Idaho, where he was one of several hands on the cattle ranch of James McLaffarty. Two children were born to them in Idaho: George in 1883 and Mary in 1888. By 1900 the Hyde family had returned to live in Canandaigua.

The Curran daughters inherited the house in Hemlock at the death of their mother. They did not choose to sell it, however, for some years. Instead, they let it to various tenants. In 1910 the Glenn Crout family was living here. Glenn was married to Charlotte (“Lottie”) Thurston; they were both in their late twenties and had two little girls: Pauline was two and Genevieve a newborn. Ten years later Earl Collins and his wife Ruth rented the house. Earl, a twenty-five-year-old farm worker, enumerated the 1920 Livonia Census. In January, when he listed his own family on the form, he included his three-month-old son Donald.

In the summer of 1923 Daniel Sayer Beam bought the house from Anne, Mary, and Kittie. Known by his middle name, Sayre was twenty-five years old and newly married to Gertrude Stevens. He was the son of Otis Beam and Daisy Short — and the grandson of Daniel S. Beam an important miller in Hemlock. Sayer worked for his family’s business, the Beam Milling Company, most of his life. In the late 1920s he and Gertrude had two children: Daniel and Barbara.

From January 1938 until December of 1946 Sayre was Sheriff of Livingston County. During that time he and his family lived in Geneseo, at the jail, while renting out their Hemlock house. Mr. Beam remained active in the milling business, not retiring until age sixty-five. When he died the following year, June 23, 1964, his obituary made note of his many community activities: he served on the Livonia Town Board, was a member of the Hemlock chapter of the I.O.O.F (and a past Noble Grand Master), a member of the Masonic Lodge of Livonia, and a member and a trustee of the Hemlock Methodist Church.

Widowed, Mrs. Beam lived in her home until 1982, when she sold it to Don and Sally Collins. She moved to Livonia Center where she died January 11, 2000. Both she and her husband are buried in Lakeview Cemetery in Honeoye.

On A Personal Note

The house I grew up in was just a few houses to the south of Mr. and Mrs. Beam’s house, on the same side of the road. Whenever we kids walked up the hill our mother always told us to walk through people’s yards, rather than walk on the shoulder of the busy highway. We followed her instructions and were glad we did whenever we came to Mrs. Beam’s lawn. It was the most beautiful lawn in town - a special kind of grass, always green and with not a single blemish of clover or dandelion. The grass was so soft and silky we just had to lie down and roll around on it awhile. Going up the hill we lay down and stroked the grass, then again on our way down the hill to home we stopped again for another pat and a delicious snuggle and roll.

Another memory I have of the Beam family is of their daughter, Barbara, who married Dan Connolly and lived in a house on the east side of 15A, north of Big Tree Road. She taught school for many years, first at Hemlock and later at Geneseo. Her first year of teaching was for my third grade class at Hemlock School. She was also my teacher in fourth grade.

My friend Ellen Arnold and I loved Mrs. Connolly! She had sparkling red hair and the most beautiful smile. Her cursive penmanship was rather unusual, with words being broken every third or fourth letter rather than flowing smoothly. Our greatest wish all through fourth grade was to invite her on a picnic at our favorite spot at the creek, a project our mothers vetoed every time we brought it up.

As a stupid (and in hindsight embarrassing) prank, Ellen and I ran away from home one spring day in our fourth grade year. Luckily for us my dad found us pretty quick, walking along a country road, and brought us home. But still, we were the talk of the classroom the next day. It’s the only time we ever saw Mrs. Connolly cross. Her smile was not in evidence when she told Ellen and me, “If you were my little girls you would have gotten a spanking!” I replied for both of us, “If we were your little girls, we wouldn’t have needed to run away.”

The whole point of our escapade had been to be together — we wanted to be sisters and not to be simply visitors at one another’s homes. (If we’d been Mrs. Connolly’s little girls, we’d have been sisters, get it?) It was a plan that seriously backfired. For although neither of us was spanked, we were both grounded for a grievously long time! Ellen was grounded for a month, and so was I. But my sentence did not commence until hers expired.