A visit to the McNutt cellar, part three

When we moved to our house we found this letter from Harriet and Basil Heanssler to Elizabeth Hyde. It was tucked inside an old desk in the back bedroom.

Later we moved the desk to the fish house, which Greg restored as a little one-room cottage for summer guests. But we left the letter inside the desk as a memento.

When they wrote this letter, in summer of 1991, the Heansslers had owned the Benjamin McNutt property for two decades. They had bought it from Louie Hemeon, whose family had owned it since 1941. The property is still known locally as Louie's, or, as the Heansslers called it in their letter, "the old Hemeon house."

For some reason the Heansslers had not taken care of the house and it had become a danger. But when they wrote to Elizabeth, she was suffering from the brain tumour that would eventually claim her life. By then it was too late for Elizabeth to help. The house was destroyed in a controlled burn sometime in late 1991 or early 1992. Pat Randall noted in her historic property inventory of September 1992 that the house was gone.

But is it a tragedy, the loss of Benjamin McNutt's house, locally known as Louie's? When I was younger I would have thought so. But now I think, well, it was old and neglected, falling down and unsafe. Its destruction was just the final step in a long process of decay.

Click on the Heanssler's letter to enlarge it.