By JIM KEVLIN

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SHARON SPRINGS

except for the dead bats in the sink.
…except for the 50 ratty mattresses thrown throughout the house. (What had been going on there?)
…except for the wallpaper. (Remember that pattern with the Eiffel Tower and a lady and her poodle sitting in a sidewalk café?)
…except that every tourist thought the place was open to the public. (Michelle Curran got Bouviers, and that was that.)
…except for the time in the dead of winter when, hurrying to the front door to encourage the UPS guy to come around the side, one of the dogs nudged the door closed, the deadbolt snapped and she was stuck, in her bathrobe, in the icy space between the two doors for four hours. (In the end, though, she did escape, kicking out a ¾-inch plate-glass window.)
Well, marry in haste, repent at leisure.

“The view is what sold me,” said Michelle, who has owned the Stone House since 1993, when she wandered into “this weird little town in upstate New York … I was only outside of it before we bought it.
“It was one of those really crazy things you do once in your life, then you live with it.”
But how could she have resisted the Stone House, abandoned though it had been for more than a decade, overgrown with trees as it was.
Italianate is a charming style, and this was a romantic version, with pillars, a long flight of steps, floor-to-ceiling windows on the front, arched windows on the second story, an ox eye in the front gable.
Michelle came to this “weird little town” in a roundabout way. (She now says, “I love Sharon Springs. It’s like finding your family away from your family.”)
She was born on the Pittsburgh end of Ohio, raised in Clearwater Beach, Fla., went back to Ohio State and the University of Ohio, ending up with political science and journalism degrees, then just wandered hither and thither.
The early ’90s found her back in Clearwater Beach, “unemployed as usual,” looking for a summer house. Maybe in the Shenandoah Valley, where she had a time share.
This gets a little complicated.
Michelle’s cousin’s boyfriend, Sal Belloise, was a musician and had gotten a gig in Lake Placid.
He invited Michelle along for the ride up the East Coast, with the plan of stopping along the way in a place called Sharon Springs to visit his sister, Dawn, then associated with Dennis Giacomo, owner of the Roseboro.
“Dawn and Dennis walked us up to this house,” said Michelle; they thought it was for sale.
The 230 acres included an overgrown nine-hole golf course – her then-partner, Michael Lauder, had always wanted to run a golf course – and an old T-bar ski lift powered by a Model A Ford engine.
Compared to Florida real estate, the price was nothing. Michelle called Michael. They offered half the asking price. The deal was closed.
“Then we started to pour money into the money pit,” she said.
That fall – 1993 – the couple could do no more than board up the windows and install an alarm system.
The next year, “I came up around Mother’s Day and it was snowing. I thought maybe I’d made a mistake. Sharon was a ghost town then. Nobody wanted to come anywhere near Sharon Springs.”
(The “Sharon Springs Renaissance” began a few years later.)
The house lacked functioning heat. With a 50-amp system, if you plugged something in here, something blew over there.
Still, by the end of the first summer, the plumbing and electrical were redone, the bathrooms were functioning. “We had basically ripped out all of the carpets and ripped off all of the wallpaper.”
Summer Two, “what we really needed to do was get some heat.” They were stuck with hot air: The interior walls are brick; the exterior limestone. So they installed a system designed for a warehouse. “It heats beautifully; it just costs a fortune.”
Little by little, the home got better and better, and it got harder and harder to go back to Clearwater.
“Around Year Six, I decided I wanted to stay for Christmas. I wanted to decorate the house. I put up seven Christmas trees, a woodland scene in the front entryway.”
The news hook for this story was the Sharon Historical Society’s House Tour 2008, Saturday, Aug. 9, which brought throngs to this former spa resort on Route 20, and the Stone House was one of the 10 properties open to the public.
“We had 260 people go through,” said Mary Ann Larkin, realtor and president of the Sharon Springs Chamber of Commerce. “It was better than past years.”
Pavillion Street is buckled and, in places, completely worn out. About halfway up, a “House Tour” sign pointed past the “No Trespassing” one, up a dirt driveway through overgrown gardens.

Halfway up – are we there yet? – what looks like a rooming house appears on the left. (It turned out to be all that remains of the once-mighty Pavillion Hotel, which hosted Orson Welles and other Hollywood luminaries of the day. The village has received a sizeable grant to convert the building into six townhomes.)
The shrubs close in and suddenly open up, and there’s the house. Everything is spectacular, but most of all the Sharon Springs version of the view you see driving along Route 20 near The Tepee; you can indeed see all the way to the Adirondacks, 100 miles north.
Michelle was acting as a tour guide. So was Dorcas Comrie, curator at the Sharon Historical Museum, with Marjorie Parsons and Ann Adams rounding out the cadre.
The home was built between 1850 and 1854 by Dr. John Gardiner, first promoter of the healthful qualities of the sulphur-spring baths.
Gardiners lived in the house until the 1940s, when Homer and Roz Spofford bought the White Sulfur Company and moved into the mansion.
On their deaths in 1980, the White Sulfur Company was sold. But the investors, who had intended to start a water-bottling company locally, soon had a chance to buy Vermont Pure, which was fully equipped and ready to go.
“This all became an asset they didn’t need,” said Michelle.
Four years ago, Michelle decided to stay year ’round. That’s when Michael decided enough was enough. The golf-course idea never materialized, “and it’s not going to happen now on my watch.”
Despite the years of neglect, “this house can withstand Armageddon,” says its proud owner. “You could never build this house again … I have pocket doors that, after 150 years, you can still move in and out with one hand.”
Recent years have been fun ones. A couple of weddings have happened in the mansion. Michelle had one REALLY big party, 700 people and a big band one year.
But, Michelle said, she’s coming to the realization that maybe this is enough of one person living in a huge house.
Next year, maybe, she’ll redo the smaller club house (2,100 square feet) out back and move in there, selling the mansion (7,100 square feet).
Money pit, anyone? But a delightful one.

Labels: Glimmerglass, Sharon Springs