Historic Landmarks of Pound Ridge

Partridge Thatcher married Mary Lockwood (daughter of Major Ebenezer Lockwood) in 1789. This house was originally a small center-chimney house with two fireplaces and a sleeping loft. The Thatchers raised ten children in this small house. The roof was not raised until early in the 20th century, perhaps at the same time the front porch and French-style windows were added.

Betsy Lockwood, the oldest daughter of Major Ebenezer Lockwood married Alsop Hunt in 1777 when she was 14 years old. After the Revolution, the Hunts lived in New York City, where Alsop was a successful merchant. In 1823, Betsy returned to Pound Ridge as a widow and either built her home a that time or, possibly, altered an existing structure which had been built when she married.

Judge Ezra Lockwood sold a quarter-acre lot west of his residence to the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1833. The town's original meeting house was burned during Tarleton's Raid in 1779. The church, built on a stone foundation, had wooden steps leading up to the two entrance doors. A rear section was added in 1947, when the church was renamed the Pound Ridge Community Church. The steeple and narthex were 1965 additions; the Parish wing was built two years later.

The Community Church Parsonage is difficult to date precisely. It is most likely a barn, one of several, built around the time Ebenezer Lockwood built his own house, 1758 or 59. It is believed that this barn served as Major Lockwood's home for a short time before he could rebuild the one across the way, which had been burned by the British. Judge Ezra Lockwood, son of Major Ebenezer, probably added onto the original section of this house when he married in 1798. He was Town Supervisor (1807-1819) and also Judge of the Court of Common Pleas. The original section of the house comprised one large room, a pantry under the stairs, and a sleeping loft. The large two-story addition is 19th century. The house later became another of Hiram Halle's renovations.

William L. Smith, a grandson of Capt. Joseph Lockwood, built this home about 1829, when his mother, Prudence Lockwood Smith, sold him an acre and a half of land. He married Clarissa, one of the ten Thatcher children, and was Town Supervisor from 1854-55. According to a 1936 interview with former Town Supervisor George I. Ruscoe, Smith was the first Pound Ridge citizen to embrace Temperance with enthusiasm. Hiram Halle purchased the property in 1934 and removed the Victorian embellishments.

Solomon Lockwood, son of Capt. Joseph Lockwood, probably built his house in 1790, the year he married. His home was one of the few center-hall structures in town. Four rooms were built off the center hall, and two chimneys stood on each side of the house. An 1827 document refers to Solomon Lockwood as an innkeeper. His own will (1841) refers to his “mansion house”. In 1868 Daniel Rockwell purchased the house, where his young nephew, Norman Rockwell, occasionally visited. In the late 1930s, the property was home to the Rainbow Tea House and Shop; its profits went to the Association for the Aid of Crippled Children in New York City.

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In 1840, Horace Reynolds, a blacksmith, married Mary Lockwood, daughter of Horatio. In the same year, Solomon Lockwood sold Horace a three-quarter-acre parcel of land for $100. Horace sold the parcel the following year to John Waterbury and Isaac Weed of Darien for $1,200. According to the 1842 Assessment Roll, Waterbury and Weed had a house on the lot, so the house probably dates to this period.

Tradition has it that Horace joined the 1849 California Gold Rush, but he must have done so after 1850 because the 1850 Census shows Horace and his wife living in her father's home. The Horace Reynolds House is one of Hiram Halle's earliest renovation efforts.

This is one of the oldest houses in Pound Ridge. It is called the Mercy Waring House because this daughter of Capt. Joseph Lockwood is the first known owner of record (an 1809 mortgage deed). The house, however, is no doubt older than 1809, as evidenced by a bake oven at the rear of the kitchen fireplace, a phenomenon dating to the early 1700s. Further evidence of an earlier date is a 1740 deed by which John Tyler sold a house, presumably this Landmark house, to Mercy's grandfather, Joseph Lockwood, and his brother, Israel. Tyler himself had purchased the dwelling house in 1737. Thus, the house likely dates to at least 1737 and may be even older. In the 1930s, the house became another Halle renovation.

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Capt. Joseph Lockwood owned this mill site, which at that time (late 1700s) housed a cider mill. In 1793, the year after Capt. Joseph died, his heirs quitclaimed their shares of the property to his daughter, Prudence Lockwood Smith, with the deed specifically referring to the “Cyder Mill & the Cyder Mill House”. In 1842, when Capt. Joseph's grandson, William Lockwood, sold the property, the deed specified a saw mill, rather than a cider mill. Aaron Wood, who purchased the property in 1870, operated a saw mill on the site. In the 1930s, Hiram Halle purchased and totally modernized the building. It became the meeting place for the faculty of the New School's University in Exile, which Mr.Halle initially underwrote to help the teachers and scientists who had fled Nazi Germany. The building was subsequently known as the Old Mill and is now a private residence. The mill stream still runs under the house.

In 1851, land was donated for a new schoolhouse at the site of the current Library. At that time, the District 5 schoolhouse was adjacent to the Presbyterian Church and was about thirty years old. A new schoolhouse was built on the donated land, and the building remained a schoolhouse until 1939. During World War II, the building became the headquarters of the local Red Cross. After the war, the Hiram Halle Estate donated the schoolhouse and a parcel of land for a library. The Hiram Halle Memorial Library opened in 1952. Its core is still the old schoolhouse, but additions in 1954, 1964, and 1971 have considerably enlarged the building.

Captain Joseph Lockwood, brother of Major Ebenezer Lockwood, built this house around 1760 upon his marriage to Hannah Close. On the morning of July 2, 1779, Prudence Lockwood (Capt. Joseph's daughter) watched from the window of this house as Major Tarleton and his band of British soldiers passed right by! The British had come for her Uncle and father, who were leading the American troops in this area. Prudence told her mother she wanted to join the fighting! Her mother pulled her back and drew the shades. There was a terrible fight, and the British went on to burn her uncle's house, Major Ebenezer Lockwood. They would have burned Prudence's home too, but some American soldiers in the field fired upon the British and extinguished that idea!

Prudence's father, Capt Joseph Lockwood, was granted the first pension issued to a Revolutionary soldier. Prudence went on to marry her cousin John Smith of Stamford, and had eleven children, whom she raised in this house. At the time the farm consisted of 500 acres. Capt. Joseph Lockwood's descendants retained ownership of the house until 1939, when it was sold out of the Lockwood family by Capt. Joseph's great-great-granddaughter, Helen Smith Tomlinson. She and her husband, Dr. Edward F. Tomlinson, built the side porch and made other major alterations to the house around the turn of the century. The house was originally a center-chimney house.

A general store was once located next door to the Alsop Hunt Lockwood house (now the Inn at Pound Ridge) until it was destroyed by fire in late 1905. In 1906 Samuel Parker purchased Jesse Parson's house and lot across the street and constructed a new store next to the house (the Joseph Lockwood property). In 1922 Andrew Schelling purchased both the house and store, and in 1928 sold both to his son Ernest. Thirty years later Ernest sold the house, but the Schelling family continued to run the store, Schelling's Market, for some years after that. It became The Huntress in 2021.

This building was erected in early 1853 as a Lecture Room associated with the Presbyterian Church (now Conant Hall). The building was probably erected on the site of the former District 5 schoolhouse (1820-1851) after a new schoolhouse was built farther down the road on the site of the present library. Two members of the Female Sewing Society, which raised the money to construct the Lecture Room, donated the land for the new schoolhouse. In 1921, the Presbyterian Church sold the building to the Town for a Town Hall. Since 1983, the Town has leased the building to the Pound Ridge Historical Society for its history museum.

Lewis Lockwood, the son of Judge Ezra Lockwood, probably built his home around1833, at the time of his marriage. Sturgis Northrop purchased the property in 1868 and added the mansard roof, cupola, and other Victorian-era features. In 1959, his granddaughter, Mabel Williams, sold the house to the Pound Ridge Community Church, which, in turn, sold it to a private owner in 1965.

Major Ebenezer Lockwood commanded the local militia during the American Revolution and allowed his home to be used as headquarters for Col. Sheldon's cavalry regiment. In addition to serving as headquarters for Col. Sheldon, Major Lockwood's house had also been converted into a temporary hospital for the wounded of both sides. Before destroying the house, the British did a brief search and came away with military documents and the battle standard of Sheldon's regiment, taken as a trophy. The house was then burned to the ground. Ebenezer moved his family to Ridgefield where is son Horatio was born later that same year in 1779. At the close of the war they returned to Pound Ridge where Ebenezer 'converted a barn into a dwelling'. Ebenezer's last child, Lewis was born there in 1783 (that is the site of the Community Church parsonage). The exact date of construction for Ebenezer's new home on his old property is not known. When Horatio inherited and moved into this home though, it is thought that he built additions on to it in 1808, the year he married Berthia Lockwood, daughter of his cousin Solomon Lockwood. The orginal section of the is thought to be the center-chimney house which is now the south wing of this Landmark home.

The Methodist Parsonage was built in 1851 as a residence for the minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church of Pound Ridge. Located in the historic hamlet, the house forms part of the Pound Ridge Hamlet Historic District and reflects the village’s mid-19th-century religious and residential history.

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