Just up the road from where several limestone quarries regularly rattle the town of Nazareth, Ronnie Simpson lives in a house surviving from colonial America, built in 1761. Undoubtedly, horse-drawn carriages once bustled by that house, heading to and from town when it housed no more than a few dozen inhabitants. In those days, only Moravian Christians, who spoke German, were allowed to settle here.
With her husband, Richard, Ms. Simpson bought this piece of living history in 1984 and still has the original deed. It bears the name of none other than William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania, who once owned the whole colony. King Charles II had granted it to Mr. Penn in England before he left for America in 1682. On his arrival in the New World, after he’d traveled up the Delaware River, colonists pledged allegiance to him and a Quaker government was set up. Much like the settlers of Pennsylvania, Mr. Penn held compelling religious convictions.
“People that wanted to purchase land were purchasing it from him,” Ms. Simpson told The Epoch Times. “The land [where our house stands] was purchased by Abraham Steiner—he built the house—and the land was purchased from William Penn.” Adds the Nazareth native, the Moravians came here from Germany, so Mr. Steiner was more than likely Moravian.
Mr. and Ms. Simpson uncovered some of their 1700s home’s history from the museum in Nazareth and Whitfield House, where they obtained diaries and deeds. Delving back a ways, they ran into a stumbling block: At a certain point “it’s all written in German,” she said. Now she keeps that history in a folder.
Tracing the house’s recent owners, she shared, a couple in the early 1900s, Harry and Florence Warner, moved in and stayed there for 60 years before selling the house to a “hillbilly” fellow. That was around the late 1970s. And that hillbilly was Ms. Simpson’s friend Jim—from whom they would buy the house. Though it saw better days before he moved in.
“He went on the road because he was a mechanic for a big-time racer … based in California,” she said, adding that he didn’t mind not having heat or electricity. “The house was not attended for quite a while. … It took a while for us to buy it, and then it got neglected no more.”
The house, by then pushing 250 years old, was beyond a fixer-upper. “It was a bulldozer-over,” Ms. Simpson said, adding that someone nearly did just that, before they saved it. “You had to have a chainsaw or something to clear the entrance because there were little trees and stuff growing around the door.” There were animals and critters living inside and it was dark, as there was no power. That was just the beginning.
Mr. Simpson had grown up in a new house right across the street. The historic log home would be their first home purchase as a newly-married couple. As a construction worker, he saw it as a restoration challenge.
So they bought it.
In this two-story house of around 3,300 square feet (306 square meters) with a basement, history lives throughout. Most strikingly, its signature “stripes’' of log walls, filled with chinking made of mud and horsehair, speak volumes of its roots. Yet it was covered in a modern veneer gone rancid, which they would remove. Much of the chinking had also crumbled from the constant blasting of the nearby quarries. That had to be replaced. But they weren’t about to paint over it—no way. As their daughter Jenna, now grown, would comment, no one else she knew had striped walls.
“We live by cement mills, so they blast in the quarries and it feels like an earthquake,” Ms. Simpson said, adding that the whole house had sunken about 12 or 18 inches. “We jacked up the whole house.”
The original wooden floor planks in the living room survive, too. They are displayed openly in all their 1760s glory.
At the center, a rock fireplace stands on the main floor. Its chimney sneaks up through the ceiling, through the second floor, and out an opening in the roof. It harkens to a “whole different lifestyle.” “We’re talking about the 1700s,” Ms. Simpson said. They brought livestock inside when it got bitterly cold in the wintertime “so the animals wouldn’t freeze. … They'd sleep down in the bottom floor and people would go sleep upstairs around that opening where the heat rose from the fireplace.”
Mr. Simpson found his muse matching the big original 1700s cabinets with a new set in the kitchen. Obtaining the hand-forged “rattail” hinges would be costly.
Ms. Simpson remains slightly squeamish about the basement, though, calling it “creepy.” A creek runs under the house where “the walls are stone from the 1700s,” she said. “They carved a bowl out of stone. … They used to keep their cold goods in this water because the water maintains the same temperature.” A neighbor once reminisced how, as children, they enjoyed wetting their feet in that cool spring water during summer.
Yet much has been lost. The original cedar shake roof is no more. Gone are the interior “woven walls” made of willow, once used to divide rooms like modern drywall; friend Jim tore them down. The sagging exterior walls and ruined windows were removed, of course. Yet replacements of newly-reclaimed hand-planed wood pays homage to the old.
By the mid-'90s, the critters were out, and the Simpsons were in. The 1700s house was more than livable—it was a family home. Inside, there are period-appropriate furniture pieces and fixtures, antiques, and decorations. Ms. Simpson has cooked using her antique coal stove. She marvels how women in the old days controlled the heat with such precision to bake a cake.
Shortly after the restoration, the Governor Wolf Historical Society dropped by and asked the Simpsons if they would showcase their historic home for public viewing. To date, the family has opened their doors to visitors around Christmas on six occasions.
There is one thing visitors will notice displayed markedly outside the home: a period-appropriate Betsy Ross flag always flying. For Ms. Simpson is no fair-weather American, only flying flags on Flag Day. She is a patriot of particular devotion. “I was raised—and a bunch of my relatives and my dad and their friends—by Marines,” she said. “That flag has been flying here since we owned the house. And I fly it 24/7 because I’m an American 24/7.”
