Merry Christmas And A Happy New House

By Dottie Evans

Some gifts are too big to be wrapped.

Gary Seri, now renting in Sandy Hook, surprised his family on Christmas day with a “new” house at 90 South Main Street. The gift tag was a giant-sized lighted sign propped up along busy Route 25 and signed, “Love, Dad.”

Mr Seri and his three children, Karli, Jack, and Noah, had been house hunting “for quite a while” said Realtor Missy Desrochers of Curtiss & Crandon. They had driven past a lot of different places before spotting the white, two-story cape with dormer windows set far back from the road.

“Nothing seemed right until my kids saw this one. When we went inside, they instantly fell in love with it,” Mr Seri said.

“I bought it without telling them,” he added, “and they got a big surprise Christmas morning when we drove past the sign.”

After pulling into the driveway, the family went inside the house to find that Santa had left all their wrapped Christmas presents waiting for them in front of the fireplace. So they sat down on the bare oak floor and opened their presents then and there.

Mr Seri said he was amused by the variety of reactions his sign produced.

“My 8-year-old son Jack said he had a dream that they bought the house and it came true.

“The 5-year-old was asking ‘How big is my present?’ and I told him it was as big as a house.”

Twelve-year-old Karli was apparently thrilled but also embarrassed by the big sign.

“Dad, take it down!” was her immediate response but she seemed otherwise delighted.

Mr Seri, who works in New Milford at the Advance Stone sand and gravel business, is counting on the fact that after they move in sometime in January, the new house will feel like home to all three.

 

On Johnson Family Land

The Seri home at 90 South Main Street was formerly owned and occupied by Stanley King, a descendent of the Johnsons that are counted among Newtown’s earliest settlers.

The property on which the 1940s cape now stands had once been the site of a 1795 homestead built by Ezra Hurd Johnson (1772–1857). It was Ezra’s wife Julia who kept records and made notations about many of the Johnson family heirlooms that were eventually passed down to the Newtown Historical Society for display at the Matthew Curtiss House.

That 18th Century Johnson homestead burned to the ground early in the 20th Century, but its 19th Century successor to the north still stands, shielded from what was once known as the Danbury/Bridgeport Turnpike by a wall of evergreens.

The existing white farmhouse was built in 1832 by Ezra’s son Charles Johnson for his son, Ezra Levan Johnson, born in 1832. Ezra Levan Johnson became Newtown’s famed first historian and he was the husband of Jane Eliza Camp Johnson who published A History of Newtown in 1917.

Though they may not care to remember all of the history connected with their Christmas gift, the Seri children will undoubtedly enjoy exploring its one acre of land where they will find an old stone well, a few mature fruit trees, and several towering maples that could have been planted by Ezra H. Johnson himself.

They might also be on the lookout for a few Revolutionary Era artifacts buried in the back garden or tucked into a crumbling stonewall along a stream to the south –– reminders of Newtown’s farming way of life more than 200 years ago.