Revival architect Edson Gage
led the early20th-century restoration of the old house. He replaced Victorianera mantels with classic Colonialstyle ones.
A remodeling ca. 1790, under the influence of Bellamy’s son David, gave the house its distinctive, late-Georgian features. The corners of the clapboard exterior were wrapped with stone-like quoins, the eaves highlighted with modillions, and the front entrance showcased with a two-storey entry pavilion featuring Ionic columns and a Palladian window. The embellishments may have been the work of William Sprats, a British soldier-turned-architect whose nearby work, including the Julius Deming house (1793), eight miles away in Litchfield, shares similar features.
the house remained in the Bellamy family, largely unchanged, until 1868, when it was sold to a succession of unrelated owners. By the end of the century, Victorian-era additions—including a porte-coche`re, bay windows, and a wraparound porch—overshadowed the house’s Georgian details.
In 1912, the house was purchased by Henry McKeen Ferriday, a wealthy New Yorker, as a summer home for his wife, Eliza, and their nine-year-old daughter, Caroline. Not many years later, the two women would embark on a mission to restore the house as Bellamy had known it. They scoured the region for period furnishings and objects connected to the family, establishing their own museum dedicated to Bellamy in a playhouse on the property. Their acquisitions include the wooden box in which Bellamy kept his Bible. Carved in the bottom are his initials, along with “1740,” the year of his arrival in Bethlehem.
Eliza Ferriday hired the architect S. Edson Gage, a proponent of Colonial Revival taste, to adapt the house for 20th-century living, and to guide her in reappointing its interior to reflect its Colonial origins. Indoor plumbing was installed and a large kitchen, pantry, and servants’ quarters were added to the north end of the house. Victorian-era mantels were replaced with Colonial-style ones, and walls were repapered with vivid floral and avian designs reflective of Colonial taste. Gage left his own signature on the house with his renovations.
Eliza removed the Victorian porte-coche`re—an appendage she reportedly found distasteful—but she was no architectural purist. She left intact a bay window that had been added to the sitting room, as well as a colonnaded porch that ran along the front wall of the original portion. For Caroline’s 16th birthday, Eliza had her daughter’s second-floor bedroom enlarged with a bay window overlooking the home’s formal parterre garden. In the library below, a similar bay and a break in the flooring that mirrors one in Caroline’s room suggests that the library was expanded at the same time—although a competing theory posits that the library was enlarged by the Bellamy family in 1767.
In any case, the library bookshelves, still filled with more than a thousand volumes from Caroline’s collection, owe their sagegreen color to the Ferridays’ painstaking efforts; it matches the bottom layer of paint and was assumed to have been the color chosen by Bellamy. We can’t be certain, though, because, for all his writings, Bellamy left no written account of his house.