Sally Graham Murphy truly is a daughter of the American Revolution.
Last October, Murphy, a member of the John Knox Chapter of the National Society, Daughters of the American Revolution, invited fellow members for a tour of her home in Bear Poplar. The event was significant in that the house first belonged to Thomas Cowan, a captain in the American Revolution and has remained in the family ever since.
Though still researching the original deeds, Murphy suspects Cowan acquired the land in 1773 and built the house, called Woodgrove for all the trees that surround it, the next year. Only members of the Cowan family lived in the house until the late 1950s and early 1960s, when it stood empty. Vandals broke into the house then, and at that point the family decided to rent it out.
Murphy was living in Pennsylvania when she heard about all the transactions the house was going through. In September 1999, she decided to move back home and, with the help of architect Karen Kirks Alexander, is now restoring the two-story house as well as planning for an addition that will be connected to the house by a “dog trot.”
There is plenty of work to do on the house that Davyd Foard Hood put on the National Register of Historic Places dated as 1820. But it has become a labor of love for Murphy, who said she is finding out more about her family as she finds more artifacts, or as she says, “screwy things,”in the house.
Ledgers dating to the early 1800s show that buying and selling went on there in the form of a blacksmith’s shop. Murphy also discovered that Cowan had a permit to distill and sell alcohol from the house.
In the attic, she found a leather holster which she presumes belonged to Cowan, and in the wall were cloth baby shoes.
She has also found a copper coin which someone has identified as British; hair combs and hairpins that must have belonged to her great aunt, Josie Graham; nut shells and chicken bones; wood whittlings; and a Christmas postcard addressed to Josie Graham and dated 2 p.m. Dec. 24, 1920.
“When people ask me about the house, it triggers a train of thought for me to explore,”Murphy said. “You just put it together like a big puzzle, and I love puzzles. You just have to dig.” Speaking of digging, Graham has invited an archeology class from Davidson College to do some digging in her yard — or on her acres — for research purposes.
Murphy wants to maintain or restore as much of the original styling of the house as possible. She has had the house’s interior paint analyzed so she can match the original colors.
“It was a very elegant house in its day,”Murphy said. Someone told her it was, at its peak, “a kaleidoscope of color.”Though some of the rooms had been repainted over the years, Murphy suspects each room was a different bright color —greens, blues, whites.
The mantel pieces to the fireplaces, which all had to be opened and reworked, were given a faux marble finish; the upstairs bedroom had a porch added to it; the interior walls were all made of individual vertical boards; and, to the delight of some of the men working on the house, some of the original doors had been sealed with a vegetable wax finish. She still has some of the original light fixtures and door locks, some of the original artwork and the original baby grand piano.
The exterior brick work also tells many stories of the Cowan family. Since the masons of the family baked their own brick with local clay, Murphy has found tally bricks and bricks with animal prints in them. Some of the bricks were oven-baked while others were sun-baked, which gave them a lighter appearance than the oven-baked ones. Therefore, the masons drenched all the bricks with a red wash to make them all uniform. Those that were sun-baked have not proven to be as strong over the years, and the house has some heavy structural damage. It’s hard to find people qualified to work on an historic house, but the masons Murphy has hired have made the effort to match the brick in color and texture.
“I want to do it the way the builders would have done it,”Murphy said.
Murphy said she’s not sure how long it will take to finish the restoration project, but when she’s finished she plans to put the property into a land preservation trust.
“I want to preserve as much as possible … but every time I do something, I feel like I’m damaging it, desecrating it,” she said.
But she’s holding onto as many artifacts as she can find:in the attic, on the front porch, in plastic zip bags, all over the house. There’s always something else to discover in her family house, so she never finds the time to get bored. Besides, when she’s finished with the restoration, she’ll still have 120 acres to roam and plenty of horses to care for.
“I don’t know how people get bored,”she said. “There’s plenty of interesting things to do in the world.”
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