RESEARCHING A HOUSE “GENEALOGY”

Although an unfamiliar story to 2024 History Committee members, collaborative research identified the house and its travel adventure.

The “Cellar Hole Project” has documented cellar holes of known historic home sites. For some of the identified foundations, it is not known if the structures succumbed to age, fire or “relocation”, which was more common than one might think. Woolwich history documented a house that had burned and was replaced by one “moved on the site by Howard Whittum” – a Westport associated name. There was a Whitten/Whittum family who had owned property in the Heal’s Cove neighborhood and there is an identified cellar hole overlooking the Cove that could potentially be “seen by boat from the Sasanoa River.”

A news item from the “Bath Independent” dated November 1932 stated in part: “The house which was recently purchased by Mr. and Mrs. Howard Whittum…has been moved from Westport to Day’s Ferry.” A deed documented the sale of a house and foundation – no real estate –on the south side of Heal’s Cove, a house that we believe was built by David Shattuck and was at one time used as an inn. And, finally, the cellar hole measurements on Westport matched the foundation measurements on the Day’s Ferry home.

MYSTERY SOLVED

Thanks to a question with new information, we now have images for and the story of the house that once covered a Heal’s Cove cellar hole. Photos to the left picture the house ca 1910 (upper right), the cellar hole today, and the house as it looks today in Woolwich.