Saving an Italianate Farmhouse Generations Have Known

"Henry Campbell, born at Londonderry, Ireland, 1697; he was swept in with that great tide of emigration which was flowing to the shores of New England. He, with his family, came to Watertown, Mass., and soon joined his Scotch countrymen at Londonderry, N.H. In 1733 he bought 240 acres of land in Windham, of John McConihe, upon which his descendants still live."

L.A. Morrison's "History of Windham in New Hampshire, 1719 - 1883.

            In 2019, after retiring from 40+ years of working at newspapers, I began to write essays. The first one I wrote was about the Campbell Farm field titled, "A Field of Our Own," which explored the 64-acre meadow and pastures Windham had decided to buy to save from development. The house came along with the field as a part of the deal. I walked that autumn day, enjoying every step, knowing the land would not be developed: the trees would stand, the rolling hills would not be flattened, and the access would be open to all. After my walk, I drove by the farmhouse that came with the field and stopped to talk to Tom Paquette, who allowed me to interrupt his day to discuss the renovations to the house. Several years later, that encounter led to an invitation to a Christmas open house showcasing the renovations. Tom and his partner, Byron James, and their company, Pillar & Post, LLC, restore and repair historic buildings. I wanted to explore the house's history and write about the last generation to have lived there.

            In 2014, the Windham Conservation Commission had recommended the purchase of the 64-acre farm and farmhouse, which would preserve the asset that had been home to eight generations of the Campbell family, and preserve the open field for community and recreational purposes. The Conservation Commission had decided as early as 2008 to place a major focus on preserving the remaining historic farms in town.

Beaver Brook runs through the entire length of the town of Windham, including the Campbell Farm property. The farm was being offered for sale as the last members of the Campbell family had chosen not to live there. The idea of purchasing the farm and all its property was presented to Windham voters, who would decide its fate. To present the idea of the purchase, the town hired a videographer to create a silent video taken from the point of view of the birds that fly over as the drone flies. (Campbell Farm drone footage)    The snowy scene showed the natural world of this precious property with a series of meandering turns and curves as the camera made its way to the town line, where Pelham, New Hampshire, takes over the brook's natural flow. The Windham citizenry chose to preserve the Campbell family farm, which was the site of the first mill in Windham, providing a source of power and supporting wildlife, encouraging the growth of a community and a town's identity.

            Alan Campbell represented the eighth and last generation living on the farm along with his partner, Joan Normington. According to Jon Normington, Joan Normington's son, Alan and Joan met in early 1970 when they attended courses in Massachusetts at the United States Power Squadron, now known as America's Boating Club.

Jon explained, "Alan and my mother met when they were both taking the courses, and eventually, each of them, at different times, were teaching the course. Power squadron was [learning] the old way of sailing by compass."

Jon spoke about his mother and her journey to living at the farm. "Joan was an amazing person all on her own. She was quite talented. Joan had graduated from Wellesley College as a zoologist and married a West Point grad, Charles August Normington. They had five kids in seven years. We moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where my dad was getting his master's in engineering. He was a captain in the Air Force, just shy of a promotion to major."

"In 1966, he was finishing up or trying to get more flight time to get his promotion to major, and he crashed in a jet with another pilot, that was in a single-engine T-33 jet. They left Michigan flying to an air base in St. Louis, and then they were going to go down to Florida and then back again. That would have been about half his flight time that he needed. The Air Force said they probably sucked a bird or something into the engine. These T-33s can't coast at all. So the pilot brought it in just enough to get over the fence into the airfield. At the same time, he ejected my father's seat. But, back then, they didn't have the rockets that would take you up high enough, so the chute didn't really open, and the two of them died. The West Point burial was pretty memorable. I was six, and that's when my mother's life completely changed."

Jon explained that with five kids under the age of eight, Joan thought it would be a good idea to have a man in the house. She remarried. "But he turned out to be very abusive." That marriage lasted a year, and then Joan started seeing Alan Campbell.

Both Alan and Joan were sailors. Joan grew up on her grandfather's boat, and Alan had his own boat on the Wareham side of the canal, down in Marion, Massachusetts, near Buzzards Bay and the Sakonnet River. Joan's family sailed the Coast of Maine. Naturally, Alan and Joan, sharing the love of sailing, began to spend the weekends sailing together.

Jon talked about how they were when they were out on the open ocean. "They would sail from the Cape all the way up past St. John's Bay in Nova Scotia, way up past New Brunswick. My brother and I sailed with them from the tip of Nova Scotia, Yarmouth, down to Provincetown, Mass. It was 84 hours of straight sailing. We were 400 miles out, and this was a 37-foot sailboat. At one point, the air had just stopped. It was probably 90 degrees on the ocean. It was just the boat sitting there drifting. We had every sail we could and were maybe making two knots an hour, just barely trying to keep it on the course, and Alan would refuse to turn the motor on. He said, 'Why would I run the motor out here to get us further?' We're not in any hurry. We're not going anywhere."

Alan was 15 years older than Joan when they met, and Jon said he didn't talk much.

"He was a funny old man. When he did speak, he would put his head down, clear his throat, and always start off with, you know, and then a very long, slow sentence, and he would tell you what he thought, what he meant, and what he wanted, and we loved the guy. He was really great for my mother, and they had a great relationship. The freedom they had, the freedom. Alan was an engineer. He eventually retired."

"Alan inherited the Campbell Farm property in 1982. He had three sons, one passed away in the '80s. Two are still alive. The son who passed away had a daughter, and she was the third inheritor of the property when Alan passed away. So it went three ways."

Alan Campbell's original will was to turn the farm over to Joan, but due to the inheritance tax, Joan refused the will. Joan and Alan's children agreed to have Joan given a life estate. Jon explained. "So she talked to the boys, and then a new agreement was written up with the Campbell sons letting my mother live out her life there as long as she wanted to, and then they would inherit the property." He said, "They loved my mother."

"She wasn't the healthiest, having smoked for 50 years. She was a reformed alcoholic since 1980, and I remember helping her through that. She did quite a lot of work in the building. She maintained the house herself. We've got photos of her standing on a ladder painting with a cup of coffee and a cigarette in one hand and a paintbrush in the other, two stories up, painting."

Jon explained that while Joan did what she could to maintain the property, it still fell into disrepair, noting there wasn't a septic system, just a cistern, there were plumbing and electrical issues, and the furnace was constantly in need of repair. "There was a thunderstorm that came through with a straight line, and it ripped the roof off, because it's a membrane roof. It's a flat top. The back edge had worn off and had a loose area. The flashing had broken away. The roof was leaking. My mother was literally there."

Joan Normington left the farm when she was unable in her last years to be alone and passed away at 84 years old in 2020. Alan, whose last act as a member of the town's founding family, spoke at Windham's 250^th celebration on August 27, 1992. He arrived with other noted speakers in a horse-drawn wagon. A CD of the event, available at the Nesmith Library, is grainy and hard to understand what's being said, but Alan represented the family well and was given the honor of reading the original town charter. He looked barrel-chested, strong, and even with the droll language of a charter was able, on the occasion, to amuse the crowd. Alan passed away in 1997. He was 78 years old.

So what would happen to the farm? One of Alan Campbell's sons lived in Florida, one in Texas, and the granddaughter lived in North Carolina. They offered to sell the farm to the town, and the town officially acquired it in July 2014, making it one of the projects that was chosen among several properties that have been restored and kept for future generations following the Conservation Commission's mandate that started back in 2008.

Betty Dunn, a former selectman and retired attorney, was brought on to direct the restoration and was chosen to chair the Campbell Farm Sub Committee along with seven other members. Dunn said, "The town bought this property not for the house, didn't want the house really, but the house was on one of the last pieces of acreage that is open fields and forest in the town, and wanted to preserve the open space, and along with the open space came the house."

            The property was bought for $860,000, paid for from the conservation funds, Dunn explained, "from current use lean transfer tax. So, the town didn't have to pay. It was bonded, but the payments on the bond were paid and have been completely paid through the transfer tax."

The issue then became, what does the town do with the house? The land would stay as open land and hayfields, where the original owners kept dairy cows.

            An RFP request for proposal was determined to be a way for the town not to have to spend any money, and a long-term lease with a historic preservation requirement was presented for bid. The submission deadline passed without a bid until Tom Paquette of Pillar & Post LLC called, hoping it wasn't too late. The town reopened the process, recognizing that Paquette was the "first person that we had that had a background in historic preservation and was serious and had experience that could do this."

            Tom's personal experience is working on a half dozen other properties. One experience he brought to the project was the relocation of an 1850 plantation house in Louisiana from its existing rural location to a historic district 50 miles away, within a National Historic Landmark District. Pillar & Post LLC is made up of Paquette and his partner, Byron James. They are now in their third project, one of which is the purchase of a historic meetinghouse in Westminster, Massachusetts, for which they paid $10,000. The project will be developed into a multi-use facility.

            For the Campbell Farm, they received a 20-year lease with the requirement to restore, repair, and preserve the property. The house had been chopped up and used by various family members, including multiple kitchens, apartments, and sections. The decision was made to make the property into two units to rent. Pillar & Post would recoup their investment by collecting rent, and the restoration began.

            During a virtual program presented by the New Hampshire Preservation Alliance titled "Unloading Surplus Properties the Right Way," available on YouTube, Paquette explained their process for renovations. "Our mission is to restore the exterior of every property we get. There's not always a consensus on what that restoration is. Some people want to freeze the house in time, exactly where it is today. Other people want to bring it back to a more continuous vision of what the house was intended to be when it was built. Every project is different. At Campbell Farm, we had some historic photographs, so we knew what the façade was like. The front porch was missing from the house, but we had historic photographs of what that front porch looked like. Our architect drew up the replacement porch, and when we went to build it, we stripped the siding off the front of the house to marry up the new porch, and the lines from the original porch matched the design exactly. We didn't anticipate uncovering that evidence. We did, and it was a perfect match for what was there. Our goal was to bring it back to what it was then. On the interior, our goal is always to make a property suited for modern use. Our tagline on every project we do is, the best way to save a house is to use it."

            Dunn added, "The goal was to have the building used; otherwise, it was going to go to pot real fast, and it was going real fast in some ways. It's zoned for residential, and when you have a town property that is being privately used, it has to conform to the zoning. We had to go through the hoops to get the approval to have it be a two-family or duplex kind of house. The requirement in the beginning was that the conservator under the preservation lease was going to live there, and we eventually got rid of that requirement."

            During the virtual N.H. In the Preservation Alliance program, Tom explained their process for documenting the work. "We put together an archival package, which consists of thousands of photographs, videos, walk-throughs, and we do three sets of drawings on every property. One set is how we believe it was first constructed. Subsequent sets, if there were modifications. And we do a second set, as we found the property as we received it. We do a third set as we complete the remodifications. Something else we do is we annotate on these drawings the discoveries that we have made that may not be evident if you're just looking at the property. For example, when we were stripping the painting, we discovered German wood write symbols on the windows. When the paint was back on, they were gone from view, so we photographed all of the numbers, and we annotated on all the drawings, and then we painted the house, and until someone strips it again in a hundred years, they won't be seen again, but they have been recorded. Any other discovery we've made when we took down a wall or took down plaster, we annotated that there is a historic record. It's our plan on every property to put this archival set into a locked box and put it inside a wall, and then to give a set to the local appropriate agency, the museum, historical society, but a set that's offsite, and to save a digital version of everything we've done online."

            At one point in the negotiations with the town for the Campbell Farm, Tom said, "The house would be offered with what they referred to as a curtilage. A curtilage refers to the immediate surroundings around the house. We pushed back a little bit and said we want a minimum of three acres. Our reasoning is that, without some acreage, it is no longer a farmhouse. It's a house. But from our perspective, if we were going to secure this property for it to still be a farmhouse, it needed some land to go with it. The other argument we made was that a three-acre parcel would include the field to the left of the property. That field had the most road frontage. We said that if that frontage goes with the house, we will maintain it. If there's no defined boundary, how exactly are you (the town) assessing our taxes? A curtilage is just a few feet around, but doesn't take into consideration driveways and walkways you want to put in." Paquette admits the town's interpretation would probably include those items, but felt that wasn't enough.

            "One of the questions in response to our request was, what are you going to do with that land?" He explained, "We may do nothing with it, and we certainly don't want it in order to build something else, because, by law, we cannot anyway. It's more of a way to protect the integrity of the property."

            With a passion for preserving buildings that could easily fall to the wrecking ball, Paquette says the priorities for the properties they acquire fall into three categories. "One set of priorities is our responsibility to the structure and the history of the house. But there's also being true to the historical period, aside from the physical history in terms of the people associated with this house in the past. We have a responsibility not only to do a proper physical restoration, but to assemble, maintain, and preserve the history that goes with the physical side of it. The second thing is our responsibility to the community. We have open houses at our projects regularly, and I take it fairly seriously."

            "Public opinion, in my opinion, is of utmost importance. Maybe not everybody would agree that sharing our projects with the public as one of our top priorities. In the last 4 years, we hosted at least two open houses a year to bring the public in to show them what we're doing. My opinion is that if you show them what you're doing, then they can't speculate about what you're doing. And we're proud of our work, so we want to share it, and at all stages." Pillar & Post LLC is currently fielding inquiries for the house's two rental properties located at 137 Kendall Pond Road.

            The mandate was to restore, repair, and preserve the property, and when you look at the Italianate today, she is a beauty both inside and out. She has been well cared for by the generations of Campbells who lived there, by the town in which she is located, and by the care with which the restoration work has been carried out. In a day and age when housing is scarce, and other farms are falling to the clear-cutting of their trees to make way for the future, the Campbell Farm has been saved with smart, loving, and expert care and will stand for decades and generations to come.

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