A historic home at 60 Taunton Hill Road recently hit the market for $1,160,000. The home, currently owned by William DeRosa and his wife Kersti Ferguson, was built in the 1700s.

DeRosa shared that Town Historian Dan Cruson “went crazy in this house … he was on his hands and knees all over this house” to try and pinpoint an exact date the house was built.

“We’re guessing 1765 because …[ Cruson] found a date on a beam written in pencil with someone’s name … in the attic,” DeRosa said.

DeRosa and his wife bought the house in 2011, but it wasn’t the first time they had seen it.

“I was a very well-known concert cellist,” DeRosa shared with The Newtown Bee. “I was going up to play a concert in Martha’s Vineyard … We left from New York City, and we got somewhere around Exit 8.”

He explained that he took his then fiancé, Ferguson, with him on the trip. “She said, ‘There’s an open house that’s right up the street here.’”

He described the first time he walked into the house, “We didn’t come through the front door, so we came to this kitchen, and I mean, this place was wiped out … It was really old. But, there was something. And [Ferguson] walked through the door and she looks at me, she goes, ‘I want this house.’”

“I was like, ‘Can we at least just see it? We haven’t even come in the house yet!’ She goes, ‘This place, there’s something, I can feel it.’” DeRosa smiled adding that he “felt something too, [they were] gonna miss [their] ferry” to Martha’s Vineyard.

DeRosa explained that both he and his wife walked away from the house and looked at hundreds of others, but every time Ferguson would say, “It’s just not Boxwood Farm.”

After about five years of separation, DeRosa was with his late mother celebrating the holidays and got a phone call about the house. He shared that he made a “crazy offer” and didn’t think he would get the house. He was shocked when the offer was accepted, and didn’t get to see the house until April after playing a concert in Boston.

“I got done and I came here. It was like 11 o’clock at night … the back door was open … Looking around, I got the phone, and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh what have I done?’ It’s freezing … that was the first time I had seen it in four or five years.”

After he moved in, he started the process of restoring the home. He took great care in making sure the house is as original as it could be, including hiring someone who specializes in plaster to reattach the plaster to the wooden lath around the home.

He shared that he hired a team to “hand sand” the floors because “you can’t put a machine” on them. The floors are solid chestnut wood, just like the front of the door.

“This door is a solid plank of chestnut … it weighs like 2,000 pounds, but it had paint all over it,” DeRosa said. “It took a while … We took apart all the windows, reglazed them, fixed the hardware so they would go up and down.”

“We did every single thing that could be imagined and restored. We took all the faucets off from the 30s, that had the gorgeous pedestal sinks that [the previous owner] had put in and we had them reglazed and re-dipped,” DeRosa said. “God was it a labor of love this … thing. And most of it I had ended up doing myself!”

It took a long time to get the house restored to its former glory, but the historic nature is not all that makes this historic house unique.

A previous owner of the home, Walter J. Hutchinson, was a former FOX executive. He worked in the film industry on movies such as Gone with the Wind, It’s a Good Life, and more. DeRosa added that he has all the plans from Hutchinson’s additions upstairs in the attic.

Hutchinson added on a large dining room meant for entertaining, as well as a speakeasy bar.

“He built himself quite a house here,” DeRosa said of Hutchinson.

Across the street, there was a barn, with concrete walls, that Hutchinson had to screen movies. He made sure it was concrete “because [he] couldn’t dare take the chance that the films would burn,” DeRosa explained.

DeRosa added that he knows this “isn’t folklore” because he met some people who were children at the time of these movie screenings.

“Walter would go around Newtown … he would drive around Newtown and pick up the little children,” DeRosa said. “He was … a very well-known philanthropist … And they would sit in there, with the fireplace going, on the floor, and they would screen the movies.”

“Walter did a tremendous amount of entertaining here,” DeRosa said, adding that the Newtown house was more of a “weekend getaway.”

DeRosa continued, saying Hutchinson added the bar room and the service quarters at the back of the house. DeRosa even has the original call boxes that butlers and servants would use to tend to Hutchinson and his guests.

This is where some of the “folklore” comes in regarding famed playwright Arthur Miller and his even more famed wife, Marilyn Monroe.

“They were good friends,” DeRosa said. “Walter was at [Miller’s] parties. So one would assume that [Miller] was down here as well! So the rumor was that … [Miller and Monroe] could come here and have a drink and have a martini, and there was really not a whole lot that it would be. It all kind of fits, but do I have any pictures of her? No, I don’t.”

DeRosa continued, explaining that Hutchinson wrote “England Re-Envisioned” on the plans, and the property was originally called the “Walter J. Hutchinson Farmhouse.”

Now, it’s known as “Boxwood Farm.” DeRosa isn’t exactly sure why, but assumes it is because there were huge, beautiful boxwood trees on the property when he moved in.

=====

Reporter Sam Cross can be reached at sam@thebee.com.