Name/Title
"Middletown Times Herald" Bull Stone House StoryEntry/Object ID
000472Tags
Bull Stone HouseScope and Content
MIDDLETOWN TIMES HERALD, MIDDLETOWN, N. Y., SATURDAY, JULY
First Bull House Defiant of Quakes and Storms
Earthquake and lightning and all the sundering effects of wind and sun and the storms of more than two centuries have made this matriarch of Orange County homes not a whit less habitable than it was when the renowned Sarah Wells and her equally worthy husband, William Bull, moved in from their nearby log cabin in the Fall of 1727. For five years all the time and energy they could spare from clearing and tilling their holdings in the fertile Hamptonburgh valley were devoted to the building of their home. And they built it well. On the third night of their occupancy one of the severest earth tremors ever felt in this region rocked the house with such force that Sarah, aroused from slumber, told her husband, "We have lost our new home." But morning light revealed only a long crack high up in the back gable, a crack that still exists, no wider or longer than it was that first morning. Half a century after that night lightning left another scar but failed, like the earthquake, to shake the house that literally had been built on a rock. A spring in a room adjoining the basement kitchen assured the family of water in case the kindliness of their Indian friends turned suddenly to savagery. That emergency never developed for the Bulls, however, and Mrs. Lewis Brown, the former Corrina Ackerly Bull, seventh generation descendant of William and Sarah, has no need of an open spring either within or without the house. The turn of a faucet in the kitchen and in a modern black and white bath on the second floor brings water from the spring a hundred feet away over which Smith's earlier cabin was built. A modern heating system keeps seventh and eighth generation Bulls comfortable in Winter, and electricity has supplanted the candles of Sarah and the kerosene lamps of her first descendants. Electricity also has supplanted the spring for cooling purposes and the open fire for cooking. Every stage of cooking equipment, with the single exception of gas, is in evidence in the kitchen that first was Sarah Wells' and now is Corrina Brown's. Fireplace, coal range, oil burner and electric stove face each other from opposite walls. And upstairs, sometimes, in a modern crib and sometimes in the cradle of his ancestors, sleeps William Bull Brown, five weeks old, eighth generation from the William Bull whom Sarah Wells loved and wed in 1718, two years after he had paid his passage from England and proved his skill in masonry by laying up the stone walls of nearby Grey Court for Daniel Cromline. That was the first substantial structure in this region outside of New York. It stood in good condition for much more than a century, but finally was torn down. The corner stone inscribed "G C - 1716" was claimed by the Bulls and placed in the west gable of their family home in honor of William, whose own home seems ageless. With exception of two years recently the house has been occupied always by a member of the Bull family. To assure upkeep and continuation in the family, ownership of the property was taken over some years ago by The Bull Family Association, which summons its members by the hundreds to an old fashioned picnic on the shaded lawn each August.Relationships
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Bull Stone House