Orford
Elise and Jared Henningsen, of Miami, Fla., say they look forward to moving to the Upper Valley and beginning repairs to the house, an exemplar of Federal-style architecture that will be subject to an easement held by the Preservation Alliance.
“We want to be good community partners and neighbors,” Jared said in a telephone interview Saturday, “and we want to make sure that whatever we do is in consultation with the local town.”
Jared, a musical event producer for CBS, said he planned to start work soon as an event planner at the Norris Cotton Center, where he likely would work on the Prouty, an annual fundraising race.
Elise, a digital marketing consultant at Wells Fargo, has roots in town: Her mother, Vanessa, lives here, and as a child she frequently visited Orford during the summers, she said.
The couple were married in Orford last summer, and now plan to use the historic house as a family home.
“We … realized it was really a once-in-a-lifetime chance to put some roots down (and) invest in something to hold onto for future generations,” Jared said.
Selectboard Chairwoman Anne Duncan Cooley described the 200-year-old mansion, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as part of the Orford downtown district, as “a grand house from the era when people came up from Boston to escape the city in the summer.”
“The antique features inside it are just amazing,” she said. “The carvings around the fireplaces — you just imagine yourself in the Downton Abbey era. It’s really grand. You just kind of walk from bedroom to bedroom and forget where you’ve gone to. It’s really amazing.”
Duncan Cooley and other town officials were reluctant to give information about the prior owners, who transferred the property to the town in a tax sale. Selectboard minutes say the property belonged to the Pensco Trust Co., which purchased the property in 2010 on behalf of Paul Greenwald.
The Henningsens’ later purchase took place this fall for $263,000, according to an Oct. 26 story in the Journal Opinion newspaper.
Carl Schmidt, a local historian who researched the property and helped organize funding for the easement, said the Rogers House represented a prosperous and busy era of Orford’s history.
The structure stands in a row of seven homes known as the “Ridge Houses,” after the elevated land they occupy, set back from Main Street on what Schmidt said once was an ancient bank of the Connecticut River.
Local attorney John Rogers built one of the first Ridge Houses, in 1817, while Orford was a bustling commercial hub.
Rogers “did quite well” as a lawyer, Schmidt said, but eventually left the profession to invest in sheep, a business that was booming at the time. Thousands of the woolly creatures dotted the Vermont and New Hampshire landscape.
Orford, Schmidt said, was at “a peak in terms of activity and economic development and commerce.” The town’s population in 1830 was about 1,800, compared to an estimated 1,245 in 2015, according to census records.
Schmidt counted about 15 owners through the house’s history, many of them prominent citizens — shop owners; people with Dartmouth ties; and, in the 1980s, a television actor named Jameson Parker.
About a century ago, the Cushman-Fay family made major renovations, investing an estimated $150,000 in 1916 dollars to rebuild the back portion of the house and add such amenities as a greenhouse, carriage house, icehouse and swimming pool.
When the 3-acre property was transferred to the town, in fall 2015, for unpaid taxes, Schmidt and neighbors to the land decided it would be wise to try to protect it. Working with the New Hampshire Preservation Alliance, they raised money for a fund that finances legal enforcement of the easement.
The fund will not pay for renovations to the house, he said, but it does involve annual inspections and monitoring to make sure the terms of the easement are observed.
Schmidt welcomed the purchase by the Henningsens, which he said would be a fitting next step in the property’s history.
“It’s an extraordinarily positive ending — or at least a new chapter — to the story of the Rogers house,” he said.
Rob Wolfe can be reached at rwolfe@vnews.com or at 603-727-3242.