HISTORIC HOME BEING RENOVATED

DEXTER — There’s a little house in Dexter that has big history inside.

The house at Route 180 and West Kirby Street is being renovated. The partially reinsulated house rests on a foundation built in 1832 by Jesse Babcock, a wealthy abolitionist who laid a track of the Underground Railroad right in his home.

Other than a plaque in front of the house and a stack of newspaper clippings, there is little to prove the homestead housed runaway slaves by night before they were smuggled into Canada, possibly via Cape Vincent, according to a Watertown Daily Times article by David C. Shampine written in 2000. The house was passed on through the family until Kimberly J. Quimby’s father, John W. King, a direct descendant of Babcock and a World War II veteran who was wounded on D-Day, died of cancer in 1984.

According to Mrs. Quimby, her father left half of his estate to his wife of less than a month and half to Mrs. Quimby and her three sisters. Mr. King’s widow, Patricia LaPointe, lived in the house until last May, when she moved out and sold everything inside.

“We had some photographs that we tried to retrieve from the auction,” she said. “It was just one thing after another. There were scrapbooks. There were old Bibles, but so much old stuff went.”

Marble-topped tables? Gone. Civil War-era tin windup toys? Sold. These objects, which tied the house to the abolitionist movement, are relegated to memory.

As the closest owner of the house, Mrs. Quimby is having it rebuilt to the way she remembers it. In some ways, it might have been the way Mr. Babcock remembered it.

“We’re going to get it back to where it used to be,” said Mark A. Reff, owner of Reff Development Inc., Clayton.

Since late November, the construction company has been rebuilding the house to its former looks. It is in the insulation stage and has nearly three more months until completion.

During the restoration and rebuilding, the workers found an opening in the barn’s staircase that hid runaway slaves. They also discovered a 3-foot-wide, rock-lined well that could have been another hiding spot.

“Most handmade wells are six feet in diameter,” Mr. Reff said.

The original house had clapboard siding. To simulate this, synthetic chestnut-brown siding will be placed on the outside. A dark green tin roof will replace the current roof. Many of the original boards on the inside are staying intact, but all of the walls have been restudded. One and a half bathrooms were added to the interior. In total, the 1,700-square-foot house will have eight rooms when completed.

The heart of the house, a closet that played an active part in the Underground Railroad, also is being restored

“There was a dark closet on the side of the house where they kept the slaves,” Mrs. Quimby said.

The closet, whose entrance was covered with a bookshelf in Mr. Babcock’s days, was where two of Mrs. Quimby’s sisters slept. It was the width of the house — nearly 30 feet — according to Mrs. Quimby.

When the house is finished, the closet will be lined with cedar and used for storage.

Parts of the house cannot be restored, however, because the original foundation threatened to fall in certain places.

The section where Mrs. Quimby slept as a girl has been torn down. Even so, she feels the pull to move from her home in Clayton to Dexter, where she grew up.

Just shy of 200 years ago, Mr. Babcock, then a cotton mill superintendent, felt this pull to move from Brownville to Fish Island — now known as the village of Dexter — to build his homestead and several mills.

According to a Watertown Daily Times article written in June 1939, he operated a linseed-oil mill, which he turned into a plaster and planing shop over time.

After the mill was destroyed in 1874, he built a flour mill on the site.

“He had his fingers in a lot of pots,” Mrs. Quimby said.

Another article written in December 1961 that referred to Mr. Babcock as a “rabid abolitionist” said he fed soldiers in Sackets Harbor during the Civil War for 29 cents per ration per recruit.

“We don’t know why he offered it as a safe house,” Mrs. Quimby said. “We thought that maybe Jesse Babcock did it for the cause.”

Other houses in Watertown, Oxbow, Richville, Constableville and Henderson Harbor all played the same part in hiding runaways for whatever reason they chose. Mr. Shampine’s report in the Watertown Daily Times on March 5, 2000, said the slaves might have been smuggled through Lewis County and Watertown. Exact years the house was used as a “station” are unknown.

Mr. Babcock died in 1885 after being disabled by a falling bridge, but Mrs. Quimby said she still felt a “presence” in the house while growing up. She said she heard heavy breathing at times.

“When I was a little girl, my gram used to tell us ghost stories,” she said. “There were some creepy moments.”

She and her sisters never saw any paranormal activity, however. It was just a feeling.

After the house is renovated, she plans to move in with her husband, William E., and two sons, Jack K. Smith and Jesse K. Smith, to keep it in the Babcock line again, ghosts and all. The house has been passed on since it was built in 1832 and titled in 1840 by S. Newton Dexter. She is planning for her sons, the seventh generation, to inherit the house when she is gone.

“That’s where I grew up,” she said. “My dad loved the house. My gram loved the house. You gotta keep the house in the family.”