Historic East Lyme home nearing its final days
Flowers House likely to be demolished within next month
East Lyme — With the historic Flowers House nearing its final days after standing on Boston Post Road for the last 158 years, town preservationists toured the site last week in an effort to salvage artifacts before the home is demolished to make way for a national retail chain.
With headlamps and flashlights in hand, members from town historic groups such as the Brookside Farm Museum Commission and Samuel Smith Farmstead eagerly walked through the home, making lists and ogling at elements to preserve.
But for Historic Properties Commission Chairwoman Barb Johnson Low, Thursday’s tour was more than just her last time in the home, it was a walk down memory lane — a glimpse, she explained, into how homes around Flanders Village once looked and an opportunity to tell stories otherwise forgotten.
“This (home) helps paint a fuller picture of the lives of those in Flanders in the late 19th century,” Johnson Low said while walking through the now-dark home after its windows had recently been removed and covered in preparation for demolition. “This is a window into how people lived. And that’s what we want to understand.”
“We don’t often think about the early indoor plumbing, or the early electricity. But it’s homes like these that can demonstrate that lost history,” Johnson Low said.
The property, which sits at 144 Boston Post Road, across from the Flanders Fire Station and East Lyme Pizza Restaurant, was most recently home to the Nutmeggers Antiques shop until it was purchased for $250,000 last fall by Art Linares Jr., the former state senator in the 33rd District, from Jeffrey Kozlowski of Kozlowski Orthodontics.
It is proposed to be demolished at some point in the next month or so, Linares said last week, though an exact date has not yet been set.
Built in 1862, the home is listed on the town’s historic house inventory as the Flowers House. It is not listed on a state or federal register, according to Todd Levine, the state’s preservation office historian, and it is not known to have been home to anyone historically significant.
Linares has been in contact with Historic Property Commission members in recent months and is allowing them to salvage valuable items — such as the home’s original electrical panels and a 400-gallon cistern built with the home and which still sits in the attic — before the building is destroyed.
As part of that agreement, the commission will soon release Linares from waiting out the entirety of a 90-day demolition delay triggered when he submitted a demolition permit application with the town’s building department on Feb. 21. The delay ordinance was written and passed in 2018 to ensure properties listed on the town’s historic house inventory are not torn down without warning or discussion with the Historic Properties Commission.
The less-than-1-acre property, which also includes a 1,776-square-foot barn next to the home and a large copper beech tree in its front yard, sat on the market for several months before Linares purchased it. The barn, also built in 1862, also is proposed for demolition.
Zoning Official Bill Mulholland, who has been working with Linares for the past couple of months on the new building’s architectural style and design, said that because the property is in a commercial zone, Linares has the right to demolish the old structures and develop the site for retail use without additional zoning approvals.
Though Linares said he could not yet identify the company moving to the property, renderings of the building filed with the town’s Zoning Department depict a Dollar General store. The national retail chain, according to its website, operates more than 12,000 stores in 43 states and is “growing every day.”
News of that prompted backlash in the form of a petition from town residents opposed to tearing down the home to make way for a chain store and garnered more than a thousand signatures, but ultimately did not stop Linares from moving forward on his plans.
Linares has said he plans to construct a visually appealing building on the site and has been working with Mulholland to ensure that. Linares also said he expects to have the store open by the fall.
Learning lesson
Resident and Zoning Board of Appeals member Debbie Jett-Harris, who started and posted the petition, said she is considering the experience as a learning lesson and hopes now that because residents are cognizant about old homes being at risk for demolition, an effort will be made to register more historic properties on the town’s list with the state so that a similar issue is less likely to happen in the future.
Despite not knowing the first owners of the four-bedroom house, Johnson Low said that besides its grand size, other clues — ranging from the unique fireplace mantle to the front room’s floor-to-ceiling windows and drawing room doors, to the hard-oak-wood floors throughout — indicate the property likely was home to a “wellto-do family, maybe from Boston or New York.”
“You can tell they had a certain amount of disposable income just because they had a drawing room,” Johnson Low said, pulling out its original pocket doors from the wall. “These rooms would allow the head of the family to do business here in the front parlor, while the family can keep using the rest of the house the way it is.”
“And you know how, just like today, you can go to Home Depot and buy (door) latches for $2.30, or you can spend some serious money on them?” Johnson Low said, later pointing out an elaborate door hinge upstairs. “Well, these guys spent some serious money to get these.”
Johnson Low explained that large, ornate homes built in the Queen Anne style of architecture — which typically features turrets and wrap-aroundporches, as is the case here — were becoming more popular and easier to build with the dawn of mass production.
“This was built when East Lyme was going through an immense amount of change,” she said. “Large homes like this one were starting to pop up around here right when the town was going through its own industrial transformation.”
“It was built during the beginning of the surge of mills here, and it stood here as families lived here during the evolution of our town moving from farming to the north to fishing in the south, from a factory town to a resort community,” Johnson Low said. “This property represents the period where the town was primarily agrarian and then the mills came in.”
“It was the mill managers that would live in homes like these,” she continued. “And once we started having transportation, the area really started to grow. This was the first time people had enough time and disposable income where they could go out and enjoy themselves.”
Salvaged items from the home eventually will be on display at the town’s Brookside Farm Museum, a property that also was built in the mid-19th century, while other items will be sold off. Those proceeds will go toward supporting the Historic Properties Commission.
More information about the town’s historic properties can be found at bit.ly/ELHPC.