David Bradshaw, the author of this story, is a great-grandson of the German immigrant whom Michael Meylert brought to his new town (LaPorte) in the 1850's. He spends his summer months each year in the old house, which he now owns. Bradshaw was born and educated in New York, served in the Armed Forces in the Second World War, ran an art business in New York City in 1947, a real estate business in 1959, and at present is a  teacher at the New School and Art Student’s League.

David Bradshaw

NOTES ON "THE BRICK HOUSE" - AND MICHAEL MEYLERT

 By David Bradshaw

      This choice-a place of importance, but not of domination, is typical of the man. The county is not named for him, nor is the town, nor is the main street--and the single unimportant street that does bear his name disputes it with another designation--Raspberry Alley. At any rate, we find him at 24, in 1847 deep in the fight to locate the county seat at LaPorte,  having just won-with his father, Secku's, help the partition of Sullivan County from Lycoming.  His father was failing that year and made Michael his attorney--he died two years later, but not before he saw the fight won. Upon winning it, Michael proceeded to live up to his campaign promises made to the people of the county. It is recorded that he spent $13,739 on the town, and this in the days when a skilled carpenter like Isaac Lamareaux (who was one of the chief builders of his house) made 20c an hour.

      How did this man arrive in this northern backwater in Pennsylvania, where did he come from, how did he choose the northeastern section of Lycoming as his theater of operations? Answers to those questions take us to his father Secku Meylert, born on Christmas day, 1784 in Cassel, Germany, a year in America when the thirteen states were pulling apart and the Articles of Confederation were less and less binding. The Constitution was three years from being written, the sovereign Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was the next thing to an independent country, and Sullivan County was a trackless forest with a very few cabin frontiersmen.

      Secku was a colorful, vigorous intelligent and restless man, who arrived in Susquehanna County at Montrose, to the northeast of Sullivan, at the age of 33 having already had two careers and having survived a saber wound at the battle of Friesland on the Russian from ten years before. He began life as the eldest of his father Michael's eight children--himself, six girls in a row, and a boy Jacob. Of them all, Secku was the only one to emigrate to America, although Jacob or his son Augustus is said to have paid a visit to the Meylerts in the 1890s. His early years were spent in the company of the moneyed class of Germany; his mother was Mindwell Rothschild of the famous banking company.

      Apparently Mindwell didn't live up to her name, for she married out of the Jewish faith in choosing young Michael Mailert (or so it was spelled then) and perhaps the story is true that this fact her occasioned her being cut off without her share of the princely fortune a Rothschild might otherwise expect. However that may be, son Secku was employed by his uncle, Baron Rothschild's bank--in which his father may have had a small interest as well. He had been there for several years before the tide of Napoleon's armies reached Cassel and he got to know the occupying French General LaGrange who offered the 21 year old Secku a post on his staff. For two years he served with LaGrange when he received the saber stroke in riding with dispatches to Napoleon. Either the circumstance of arriving wounded, or his personal impact, made Napoleon offer him a post on his own staff, and there he served for the next seven years, close to all the great of Europe. Waterloo in 1815 obvioulsy meant an end for Secku--certainly to army life and undoubtedly to any connection with banking, but he remained in Europe two more years before reading in England, where he had gone, a pamphlet by a Dr. Rose of Silver Lake that was persuasive enough to induce to emigrate to the country on the far north brank of the Susquehanna. There is some evidence that Secku had become disenchanted with Napoleon before his fall, and that after the restoration of the old Elector of Westphalia, Meylert worked against the status-quo-ante epitomized by this return to monarchy and absolute rule, and for a liberal constitutional government. Perhaps it is as a result of these activities that he was either forced to flee or considered it expedient to leave. At any rate in the summer of 1817, unmarried, approaching 34 he arrived in the village of Montrose--but not penniless, for he had enough to start a dry goods business in nearby New Milford.

      Very shortly, however, he left dry goods to manage land for some fo the larger holdings, the Binghams of Binghamton, the Merediths, and most significantly Thomas and William Clymer of Philadelphia. In a few years he was speculating on his own in additon to handling his clients' land, and doing survey work. The introductions to these families in Philadelphia must have come from his family connections--the Binghams' friend and agent was General Louis de Noailles, a cousin of Lafayette, and may be that the Rothschilds staked him to some extent. The Meylerts became people of substance in Montrose and he eventually held many county offices *. Some indication of the early status he had achieved is evidenced by his marriage to Abigail Nichols in 1821, the daughter of the Deacon, Amos Nichols, only four years after his arrival when presumably he still carried his Franco-German accent and was a very new newcomer.
* Editor's Note: One example of the range of Secku Meylert's interests was his involvement with the the Great Bend and Coshecton Turnpike. The Newburgh and Cochecton Turnpike began on the eastern bank of the Delaware River in the hamlet of Cochecton, New York, where travelers could continue west through Pennsylvania on the Cochecton and Great Bend Turnpike toward Binghamton. This turnpike extension became the basis for modern PA Route 371. From Cochecton, the turnpike headed generally southeastward to the city of Newburgh on the Hudson River by way of Monticello and Wurtsboro. The old turnpike path roughly corresponds to what is now County Road 114 from Cochecton to Fosterdale, connecting with NY Route 17B between Fosterdale and Monticello, NY. How did Secku end up having a hand in this endeavor and countless other regional development activities?
As you will read further along, Secku was intimately connected with both the political and fianncial elite in France. After the downfall of Napoleon, he came to America. Arriving in New York, he read a glowing description of Northern Pennsylvania and soon after settled in Susquehanna county. There, he was, successively an instructor in languages, clerk to the county commissioners, and agent for the sale of real estate. In the latter work, he became peculiarly successful and was finally made agent of the Bingham estate, the Meredith estate and other large landed interests covering much of the northern part of Pennsylvania and the adjacent parts of New York State. In company with Thomas and William B. Clymer, about 1845, he purchased about 33,000 acres of land in the Pennsylvania counties of Bradford, Lycoming, Wyoming and Luzerne. Through his efforts, Sullivan County was formed in 1847 and included within.its boundaries much of the land that he and his colleagues had purchased. At a central point in the new county, was located LaPorte, the county seat. The development of these lands was vigorously begun, but Mr. Meylert did not live to see the accomplishment of his purposes. His health failed and he died in 1849, at the age of sixty-five years, at his home in Montrose, Susquehanna County, PA. Secku Melyert was conspicuous for his ability as an accountant, his skill in all matters pertaining to the management and sale of real estate, his earnest and thorough manner of transacting business, his honesty and fidelity in the management of the business affairs of others, and his genial personality and varied accomplishments.

      In 1822 his eldest son Amos was born, followed by Michael in 1824, then Henry, Asa *, Mina, William, Maria, Gurden and Priscilla. Nine Meylerts-- and none of the name today. With six boys, it would seem that 150 years later the counties would be littered with Meylerts, but four of the boys died without issue, including Michael. Of the other two, Amos and William, only one son William's boy Francis was produced and Frank died childless. Michael was the one in whom Secku reposed most confidence, it can be deduced, for it was with him that he embarked in the big adventure of both their lives. With a partner William Jessup, in 1846, Secku and Michael (then 22) acquired 33, 000 acres of land in Sullivan County, then a part of Lycoming. And it was Michael whom he made his Attorney the following year, and it was to Michael that the management of this vast tract fell, upon Secku's death two years later in 1849. It was in this period that Michael spent $13, 739 on the town of LaPorte. He had big ideas which had been fed by the kind of free-wheeling cosmopolitan that his father was, and he himself essentially unselfish and large minded. And yet the expenditure had a businessman's practicality abour it--a big businessman.

* Editor's Note: Secku Meylert, b. 25 Dec 1784 , d. Feb 1849, married Abigail Nichols, b. 18 Aug 1797,d. 7 Jul 1879. As indicated above, they had nine children:

Mr. and Mrs. Michael (Ann) Meylert

      The ultimate idea was to break Sullivan off from Lycoming, establish LaPorte as its capital, acquire the choice land in the new county and retail it to the growing population. To stimulate this growth, the theory was to pledge cetain public expenditures, prime the pump with roads, streets, a new courthouse; donate land for a cemetery, a park and a school and a community hall, a water system and then go get some new land holders. Buy land cheap, develop it, and tout its merits and sell it by the parcel dearer than you bought it.

      By 1850, Michael was well on the way. He had his 33,000 acres--subject to a mortgage to the Clymers it is true (it has been wryly said that Michael lived all his life under mortgage to the Clymers and remained so after he died--a reference to the burial in Mountain Ash cemetery in LaPorte, then under the Clymer mortgage)--he had final approval of the separation of Lycoming and Sullivan, and he had secured the couney sear for LaPorte. He owned or controlled one seventh of the county's land area, some 50 square miles, and the young county already in 1850 had 3,694 residents, 6 of them negro. By 1860 it had grown to only 4,100 wirh 9 negroes. The mother county, Lycoming, had reached the 5,000 plus mark in 1800 and in its next ten years after the 5,000 mark it was destined to more than double, to over 11,OOO--why not Sullivan? He was confident enough at any rate to risk a bet with a young whipper-snapper who had married his niece Ada--daughter of his older brother Amos--young Joseph Scranton that LaPorte would outrun Scranton's valley town. The result has not yet been fully determined.

      Well here he is at 28 picking our a site for a house to match his incipient empire. The deed from the Clymers for the ground on which it is to stand is dated December 6th, 1851, but he fails to record it until 1853 in March, when his young friend, Thomas Jefferson Ingham recorded it in Deed Book 2, page 304. Already this was a busy new county; officially less than two years old and well into the second deed book--over three hundred pages in!

      Polk has gone out of office, President Taylor for whom the country cast 489 votes in 1848 is dead and Millard Fillmore is in the White House. The uproar over slavery is warming up, but the biggest excitements--the Mexican War, and admission of Texas, and the discovery of Gold in California have become old news, and it well may be that Sullivan is the place to make your name and your fortune. As for name, well, that had to be given away to Charles C. Sullivan, State Senator from Butler who had helped get the legislation through the Senate at Harrisburg--and to John LaPorte, later a Congressman and Surveyor General of Pennsylvania, a friend of Secku's, and the first Assemblyman from the area .

      Land was selling, but how well is hard to make out at this distance--B. L. Cheny bought lot No.1, price undisclosed; William A. Mason took lot No. 14 at $35.00. The original hemlock of the townsite was being cut and it would be 15 years before Michael asked young 12 year old T. J. Keeler (whose 50 year diary tells us much of the town's history) to plant maples on each side of the major streets of the town. The hemlock, bored one and one half inch, is being sold for 10c a rod for water pipe. Coffins can be bought for $2.50 and 1000 feet of lumber costs $4.00. Workmen, skilled ones, like Lauerdaux and Karl Wrede will shortly be making 20c an hour, and in passing a house can be built for about $1200--a two story house with seven or eight rooms. But still its going to be hard going to cover that $13,000 promotion expense and keep up the payments on the mortgage. The Clymers really seem to have scraped the cream off--rhey had taken advantage of the 1792 law for the sale of unseated lands in this area at 6-2/3 c per acre, with a limit of 400 acres per person. Through purchasing under many names they and the Merediths and Binghams had amassed huge tracts, warranted in a variety of titles, but ultimately to pass to them. As super wholesalers they now were passing on the problem of getting them settled and the money back to Michael Meylert--their cost for his 33,000 acres at this rate works out at $2,197.80. Of course they may well not have acquired all their holdings at the price offered from 1792 to 1814, and may have had to pick up some of that acreage at somewhat higher prices­-but such was the nature of the hardships of these grandsons of one of Pennsylvania's signers of the Declaration. Of course they did have the taxes on the unproductive land--let's say, from 1814 to 1846--for 32 years.

      The beginnings were hard for Michael; we can deduce this from the population which increased only 500 in ten years from 1860-70, after the auspicious leap of over 2,000 in the 1850-60 period; but he was on the right track if he could stick to it. Lumber was the coming thing. Coal had been discovered and the tanning industry was in the offing. Lycoming County had not paused in its growth with the loss of Sullivan, jumping from 26,000 in 1850 to 37,000 in 1860 and gaining still a second 10,000 by 1870--the first ten years brought only 500 to Meylert, and the second a heartening 1600. But Lycoming was in or closer to the traditional paths west which ran from Philadelphia to Harrisburg to Pittsburgh, down the Ohio across Missouri and out. The other major western route bypassed Meylert far to the north--from New York to Albany, through the Mohawk Valley (or since 1825) out the Canal to Erie and thence west. The Civil War which helped so many localities seemed to have had no effect on his domain--except in the loss of a few residents, some of whom never returned. This part of Pennsylvania is still sparse in its East West roadnet compared to the rest of the state as a glance of any roadmap will show.

      Although he recorded the deed in 1853 it is almost certain that he didn't begin this building immediately, for this house was to be more than a house--it was to be a status symbol, a quiet unostentatious symbol in the best taste of the period. This called for a city architect, and the popular Greek Revival style--and anyway, he had a few other houses to build first, a newspaper (The Sullivan Democrat--started in 1851) to found, lumbering and tanning to get going, lots to sell and a county to organize. First he built a house just south of his site, a simple frame dwelling, two stories, country style, unornamented, clap board, a service dwelling for the time being--Later it passed into the hands of Dr. Fleschutt, thence to his grandson, Guy Crossley, and now is owned by the John E. Myers family and used as a summer home. Next he built a more prententious and pleasing, but still frame house, with a lower silhouette and several wings and outbuildings­-this passed eventually to his brother William. These out of the way, he could begin. Steven Vaughan Shipman of Chicago and New York was the architect chosen, a follower of Latrobe, the great innovator of the classic revival in American architecture. Anybody who was, or wanted to be anybody, from 1825-1850 put up columns, pediments, friezes and interior decoration in imitation of the Periclean age of Athens. The hero of decorative arts of the period was Duncan Phyfe who died in 1854, and with him died grace and classism [sic] in furniture. In came heavy Victorian; but still in Meylert's heyday, wherever the warm rays of fashion penetrated, up sprang an acanthus. The house as Shipman designed it was not built all at once. The north-south wing, hugging the earth, with lower ceilings, no decorative plaster ceilings, and newly sawn beams, obviously came first­-but clearly too, this wing was planned to expand into the second wing, running east-west, and finally into the full lavishness of the main section, on which T. J. Keeler was still putting finishing touches in 1871. The beams of this grander section have irrelevant notches in them to clearly indicate their previous uses in another structure. In sum, the house took 15-18 years in the building, but, except for its cupola following Shipman's classic designs faithfully, rendering in wood the forms worked out in stone 23 centuries earlier.

      Probably some of the lack of haste in completing it was a result of lack of money--together with an insistence on superb workmanship and materials "nothing but the best". In the woodwork, the marriage of excellent French cabinet work of Lamereaux with the linseed oiled clear native cherry, he achieved his standards. However, some of the original wing's and the second wing's west wall, made of bricks formed to his design, and made from native clay of the nearby hillside and sun-dried, crumbled in 1869. How much damage resulted it is difficult to determine, but this past summer my son and I worked on this wall, now over 100 years old, full of cracks, bulges, and settlements (some windows are several inches out of plumb), and we can attest that the bricks leave much to be desired. We removed a sample brick, made of a sandy lime and clay mixture, which can be literally rubbed away with the fleshy part of your finger. It is the paint film built up--7 layers 2 grey (to look like Greek stone), 2 red-­Victorian, and 3-- the current soft Colonial yellow instituted by our family in the 1890's--that keeps a precarious grip on the face of the brick and preserves this first shaky wall.

      We don't know whether riding this hobby of a house kept Meylert straitened for cash, but we can approximate the cost, which was huge for those days. At 20c an hour for skilled labor, with 3 men on the job 10 hours a day for 10 years--all conservative estimates, the labor cost alone would be $18,000. And to purchase the quick-silver filled glass doorknobs, the deep relief plaster ceiling decoration, the cast iron railing, French etched glass windows flanking the front door, the modern gas chandeliers, the steam and hot air heating system, the gas plant works, the double pump and tank system for that coming thing--the bathroom--all of these and more could easily cost again as much--to say nothing of bringing in the bricks for major sections of the house from Philadelphia, by train to Muncy, and thence by wagon to LaPorte.

Sullivan County

      The major and formal rooms face north and east; the more temperate southern and western exposures are reserved to the kitchen and servant's rooms (which makes for our use of it today a matter of inhabiting largely the humbler apartments.) A various count of the number of rooms may be taken, depending on whether or not the tallier is aiming for the largest and most imposing total. A common average would be 20, but by including spaces the size of today's rooms, but consisting of halls, cellars or unfinished attics, a total of 26 or 27 can easily be reached. For a childless man, who only finished his house as he approached 50, and by then, undoubtedly knew that his family would never be larger than two, its completion as planned could only be called conspicuous consumption--but such was all of his consumption--One of the most quoted anecdotes about him is the tale that he remarked "a turkey is a most inconvenient bird, too big for one man, and too small for two," To be accurate, however, actually, he had planned for more than a housing function in the building. The lowest tier of northern rooms was planned and used by him as offices, together with the vault cut into the rock hillside behind one of them. These rooms are so separate, opening on the lower side of the hill, that their different orientation and use are clear. These were for tenants paying rent, purchasers making payments on lots, buyers of hemlock, tannery people and other businessmen. How anyone worked there in winter is hard to imagine, for there is no provision for heat in these three high ceilinged rooms totaling 60 foot long and 20 foot wide. The climate in LaPorte a hundred years ago was no more temperate than it is now. But the picture of a "Scrooge" Meylert, keeping some local Crachit at his accounts, freezing in the cold, doesn't fit with his known open-handedness. It is a puzzle.

      Yet heat was on his mind,--this was to be no large, bur otherwise undistinguished house; this was to be, for the times, a 'modern', even unorthodox house. It had, as part of its integral plan, pull bells, gas lighting, steam and hot air heat, running water, a bathtub - a veritable 1850 Dymaxion! I well remember the zinc lined tub enclosed in cherry with its scratchy interior. How Michael with his 300 pounds ever fitted into it I am at a loss to understand, for even as a slim hipped 12 year old I remember it uncomfortably narrow. He must have washed here, for there were no other bathrooms. A ratio of 1 bath to 25 rooms compares to our 2 baths to our 5 or 6 rooms with these days. It indicates what a status symbol a bathroom then was, in those days of commodes, chambers, china basins and water pitchers. Alarmed as modern housewives would be about the bathroom situation, the closets, or their lack ,would be the greatest shock. The huge major bedrooms have none; and the minor ones' closets aren't deep enough for a clothes hanger. Wardrobes and clothes presses were the order of the day. The bath Meylert worked out was an ingenious arrangement (and in view of its complexity, perhaps one was as much as even he could manage). It involved cutting a circular well 15 foot deep into the ledge rock three storeys below the water storage tanks--the hillside abounded in springs, and this particular one may well have influenced his exact location. The water is beautifully cold on a hot August day--One summer I went in once bodily to recover a dropped hatchet--and failed--l couldn't stand it long enough to look or feel for it. From here a lift pump brought it 25 feet up to a side porch (we only dismantled this pump in 1935) and thence a force pump operated by his retainers sent it up to three connected 5 foot high wooden casks set on trestles between the second storey and the attic immediately above the downstairs bathroom whence it arrived by gravity flow to the fixtures.

      When I was a boy in the 1920's, this water system had been a thing of the past for some time. Instead we had a backhouse attached to the house in a two storey woodshed which Mr. Ingham had built on the west face of the servant's wing. This wooden "wart" had been cheerfully added to what would have seemed to most people an already large enough house. But in those late Victorian days, such functions as took place there, storing ice, and wood, laundry and the backhouse were nor to be permitted in a house proper. The gas lighting was another new idea, which our 'modern' Meylert insisted on having. The idea of extracting a useful gas from coal was a laboratoty experiment in 1810, and its expansion to street lighting was experimental enough to have occurred in only some 50 of the bigger cities by 1850. Its use in a rural house with a separate gas plant was an innovation when he put it in--and it almost cost him his life. The coal was coked, and the gas trapped and forced through a pipe from a small coking shed 200 feet south of the house, into a tank just below the dining room and there a system of weights forced it to all outlets thruout the house, a single jet here and there, and large chandeliers in the major rooms (some of these remain electrified). The gas must have cast a warm glow and some heat, for which I am sure all were grateful. In 1872 just after Michael and Ann had risen from dinner, Albert Conklin, his caretaker, a boy Albert Sayers and a Mr. Gage were blown up and badly burned as a result of a gas leak in the cellar under the dining room and a lighted match. Shards of the floor and table at which dinner had been served stuck in the ceiling. This was a special table built with a halfmoon cut into it to accommodate Meylert's figure. It has been speculated that had he remained at dinner, the tamping effect of his girth augmented by a full meal would have reduced the explosion to a minor quiver.

      In the '30's my brother and I removed the weights and dismantled the new gas storage room from under the front porch to which it had been removed--perhaps an indication that guests were more expendable than residents, or anyway, less frequently passing above the gas tank. The majority of the piping was removed as unsightly and went into World War I and II scrap drives, and the coking shed has long since become level earth.

      With the end of the Civil War, and Grant in the White House. and the beginning to a new prosperity and an accent on manufacturers, Meylert cast about for markets for his timber and hit upon tanning. About 1864 he located a site for a tannery with Messrs. Thorne and McFarlane at the foot of the hill on which LaPorte rests and within three years expanded to another tannery 4 miles away on Glass Creek. The two were connected by a plank road which was eventually extended to the Berwick Turnpike, reaching for the State Line and Sullivan RR--a distance of 10 miles at a cost of about $20,000. The village created by the new tannery was not surprisingly named Thornedale, and it was here that my grandmother was born, the daughter of M. C. Lauer whom Michael had first induced to come to the County as a Professor in charge of education--but who ended as an innkeeper for tannery help. Such was apparently the state of education, its needs were superseded.

      Meylert actually founded the first company as the LaPorte Tanning Company and sold out to the far more experienced Thorne and McFarlane who brought in professionals like Karl Wrede, a trained German tanner, and Robert Stormont as foreman. However he still furnished the hemlock bark--10,000 cords of it a year, and had 50 men working in the woods at times and the tanneries employed another 50 in each of the two plants.

      The county was growing--it reached 8,000 in 1880, a gain of 2,000. in ten years and Meylen's fortunes grew with it. The depression of 1871-2 didn't dent his expansive energy; the house kept growing and the ornate finishing touches were being added--the Victorian cupola dressed in butternut occupied the carpenter's time, and spoiled for the purists the Greek Colonial symmetry. But Shipman, who had lived in town for some time at the beginning of construction, had gone on to bigger things in New York and designing the Academy of Music in Chicago. A cupola was a way of saying 'I have arrived', and he had--didn't he have the only brick house and bathroom in town, and for miles around? Actually the first storey is not brick at all, but native stone stuccoed and scored to resemble large cut stone, but the rest of the main section is Philadelphia brick, except the cupola which changes to wooden siding scored to look like brick.

      And didn't he have the most modern double action heating system--steam and hot air? Whether or not it ever raised the temperature of the 90,000 odd cubic feet of the hmse from the 18 to 20 below of which LaPorte is capable in winter to a livable one to me is more than doubtful. The radiators wtre simple brass pipe in 3 foot lengths connected by elbows to make a double row and the whole surmounted by decorative brass tops. These existed in all major rooms, but none of course in servant's quarters. The hot air system came from the same furnace and consisred of a few ducts and registers--again only in the major rooms. There was only one operable fireplace, with a small basket for coal, and this in the older section of the house. The newer gaudier part has a marble mantle in the parlor but its opening is filled with a grill to which one of the hot air ducts was led. Whether one system was tried and found wanting, and another added later (a theory I fully subscribe to), or both were installed together, it is difficult to say. My own short sojourns in the house in winter have convinced me that at best one can get only half warm by facing a blazing source, the other side facing the frosty wallpaper mounted on the cold stone walls overhung with the heavy porch to keep the winter sun away--will never get comfortable. My great aunt added another fireplace in 1928 but without any effect. We now solve the heat problem by leaving in September and staying away until ]une--although my hardy wife stayed heatless one year until late November.

      The only persons I have known who survived a winter were George Draper who was caretaker for fifteen years and managed to keep the cold at bay in one sub-basement room by stuffing the windows with newspaper strips, lining the floor with dozens of the full issues, and assiduously stoking his range and doing little else--and lately the Gunther family, who, tho used to sketchy heat in former locations in thin walled old farm buildings, complained bitterly of the amount of wood it took to heat only two rooms, and the lack of comfort, after all the effort.

      Part of this difficulty stems from the very thick walls throughout--28 inches at the base tapering to 2 feet on the main level and 18 inches at the top. The framing is in proporrion with some 12x12 beams, 4x12s commonly used for floor joists. Settling of these heavy walls in the soft springy earth has caused cracked plaster (hair and lime), bowed floors, and trapezoidal window and door frames in many places, These walls are pierced by 61 windows and 12 exterior doors, wilh 52 more doors inside. There are 94 shutters to paint. The outside walls absorb 50 gallons of paint and the exterior woodwork another 30. Yet with all these windows and doors, it is a dark house, the large windows face the north and east, and are shaded by the massive porch. Those to the south and west are small--all to keep the Victorian carpets from fading. The floors are of hemlock and inclined to be splintery, surely designed to be fully carpeted.

      The interior of the house is quite different in mood from its exterior. Outside it is simple, imposing, well proportioned with its 10 dignified white Doric pillars and its commanding location set in a sloping green lawn. If the cupola were eliminated, it would be outstanding in its otherwise simple lines, even by today's exacting standards of simplicity.

      Inside, it is quite different, being pure Victorian, high ceilings, narrow halls, dark heavy woodwork, little light, wallpapered and carpeted. The main stair hall is 22 feet high but only 8 feet wide, and the largest room in this house which covers a 65x65 ground area is less than 20x20.

      In the 1870's presumably Meylert filled this mansion with appropriate furniture--only six pieces remain with us, and they tell a story of earlier purchase, being simpler than the typical Victorian pieces of the 70's. Some of the rest of his pieces are in LaPorte owned by families who picked them up at the dissolution of his estate. This furnishing, carpeting, curtaining, etc. must have taken another forrune--our family have finally succeeded in filling it, but only through successively pouring into it the breaking up of my great great aunt's and great great grandmother's Philadelphia houses, followed by my great aunt's New York place, my grandmother's belongings and latterly many of my mother's New York things, Some of these households of course are of the period and on the whole the melange now fits the house quite well.

      Michael Meylert however, can only have lived a few years in the full bloom of the place, for he died in January of 1883, leaving an estate which when it went through the Orphan's Court in 1887 required the sale of the house and most of its furnishings. His widow Ann who died 20 years later lived for a long time in one of his smaller houses in town but retained little of what was his .

      His vaulting ambition and energy and enterprise had kept him ahead of the real growth of the County, and without him his enterprises couldn't be sustained. He missed the biggest year of growth--for by 1890 the population was 11,620, with 443 in LaPorte township and another 375 within the Boro, and by 1900 with the establishment of Lake Mokoma in 1888, the coming of the Williamsport and North Branch RR in 1893, the county reached its high water mark--12,l34, and the township 465; 442 in the Boro. Since then, with the fading of the original timber, the dying out of the hemlock tanning (in 1896 the Thornedale plank road was Undrivable) we have steadily dropped until today Sullivan County is a bare 6,000--less than any time since the late 1860's.

      The same T. J. Ingham who recorded the deed for Meylert, together with his son Ellery P. Ingham, bought the house for an undisclosed amount at tbe Orphan's Court sale in 1888. In 1902 Ellery, my great uncle, bought his father's share for $3,800. In 1926 be left it to his widow, Katherine B. Ingham, my great aunt, who at her death left it to her niece (they had no surviving children), my mother, Olive B. Bradshaw, who in turn, at her death in 1958, left it to my brother John and myself. We shall be its custodians and pass it along, quite happy in the possession of the interesting old place. Michael, however, would probably yearn for a solar heated air-conditioned, pushbotton model done by Frank Lloyd Wright or Edward Stone, cantilevered over some point in the Loyalsock Canyon--and financed by an expansion and rebirth of his County.

      (Turn the page to see the floor plan of the Big House.)

Floor Plan of Meylert House

      Floor Plan of the Old Brick House of Michael Meylert

It was in the great house that the spirit of the man lived. "Big" was the keynote of his life. Even the yellow bricks of which it was made were over-size.

      Everything in the house is over-size, rooms, hallways, doors and windows, even the woodwork around the windows is much wider and thicker than is ever seen today and the panelling, all cherry, together with the cherry baseboards and massive hand-made cherry doors, the natural wood rubbed down with linseed oil and put together with pegs, are the glory of the house.

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