Walter Stratton Stone House, 1828, Meeker Hollow, Roxbury

Catskills Folk Connection offers tours of Manhattan Country School’s historic house.

On Saturday May 30 and Sunday June 7 as part of Headwaters History Days, Ginny Scheer, folklorist for Catskills Folk Connection, will offer tours of the Walter Stratton House at 3217 New Kingston Mountain Road, Roxbury, NY, just up hill from the Manhattan Country School Farm.  Tours of the exterior and interior of the house will be offered from 1 p.m. – 4 p.m. each day.

One of five historic stone houses in Roxbury, the Stratton house is not unique, but does represent an early and substantial construction by a local business man.  Walter Stratton was the son of a prosperous miller who owned a number of mills on streams closer to the East Branch of the Delaware River.  

Eighty years later John Corbin purchased this vernacular house and its tiny lot, made renovations, and raised his family there.  For decades it was the summer home of his daughter, Lena Corbin, a teacher in Amsterdam, then was sold to the Manhattan Country School by members of a more recent generation of her family.

Ginny Scheer will offer period documents and analysis of the structure and site to interpret how families have lived in this house over the years.  Included in the tour will be a 19^th century loom donated by a Meeker Hollow neighbor, a 1920s cook stove and refrigerator, early wall and floor finishes, a wooden spiral staircase, extensive stonework around the house lot and in the cellar, which features the huge stone foundation of a former fireplace.   

Listen to Catskills Folk Tuesday, May 19, from 7 to 8 pm on WIOX Community Radio, 91.3 FM or streaming at www.wioxradio.org when the topic will be the Walter Stratton Stone House.