Back in May, 1988, former Oneonta city historian Eugene Milener was asked what should be done with the city-owned Swart-Wilcox House. The 1807 "salt box" style house had been largely ignored since the city had purchased it in 1975.
"Spray it with plastic and bring the subject up 20 years from now," Milener said.
All right, consider the subject brought up.
The good news is, the city never had to buy spray plastic in bulk. Not long after Milener was asked, a group of dedicated Oneonta City School District staff and others formed a movement to make Swart-Wilcox House a local historic gem.
The house was in a "one step forward and two steps back" condition. After the city purchased it and made some minor renovations in time for the U.S. bicentennial celebration in 1976, the house was ignored. In 1988, the windows had been boarded up, but the house itself was still in good condition.
A steering committee formed that year, consisting of teachers Deborah Clough, Dawn Minette and Tina Morris, librarian Helen Rees, and former assistant school superintendent Dr. John Lutz. With the assistance of the city's Community Development department, the group worked to put the Swart-Wilcox House on the state and national Registers of Historic Places.
The committee had proposed to Common Council that the house be turned into an educational/recreational center for city school students. By getting placement on these historic registries, they could then seek funding to make such a center possible. By October 1988, the Common Council formally endorsed the committee's proposal to restore the house.
The steering committee received a double dose of good news in 1990. First in March, the state agreed the house should be on the historical register.
"When we heard," said committee member Deborah Clough, "we were so excited we screamed and clapped. Our hard work paid off."
Hard work, indeed. The steering committee worked for two years and close to 200 hours researching the history of the house, built by Lawrence Swart.
Then in June, the national designation was made. There were celebrations, but they were brief because there was plenty of work ahead. Fundraising. Then restoration. Followed by more fundraising and restoration "" for several years.
The four teachers also developed a "Creative Curriculum Guide" based on the Swart-Wilcox House, which included projects for fourth-graders that gave 500 teaching ideas based on local history.
By May 1991, Oneonta was awarded a $100,000 grant from a state matching-grant program to restore the house. The challenge was to raise the other $100,000 by May 1992.
"It's staggering," Clough told The Daily Star. "We're going to try very hard to raise the money."
The teachers went to work, giving presentations and planning fundraisers. The first fundraiser was a wine and cheese party in December 1991 at the Oneonta Country Club.
"It was a nice kick-off," said Helen Rees. That was just the beginning, and they eventually topped their goal, allowing restoration to begin.
A ground-breaking ceremony took place Tuesday, June 21, 1994. The celebration featured a presentation by the Riverside Elementary School fourth-graders, who had been studying the history of the house under the direction of teacher Allen Bowers.
The same fourth-graders, having moved on to the fifth grade, were back on Sunday, Oct. 16, for the reopening of the house.
At that event, they met James Dibble, who'd grown up in the neighborhood in the 1940s. As a boy, Dibble visited the wood-frame farmhouse every Sunday to play hymns on the living room organ and talk with the aging brothers who lived there, Frederick and Merton Wilcox.
It was from the Wilcox brothers and their old-fashioned homestead "" with no electricity and soot-stained walls _ that Dibble was first exposed to early-American architecture, which he later made a career out of, as an architectural historian.
This was the condition the committee had to work with to restore the house. It remained this way until June 1999, when there was another dedication to show off a new round of renovations. This time, the house was furnished, walls had wallpaper free of soot and floors were refinished or brightly carpeted.
The successes of the Friends of Swart-Wilcox continue. To mark its bicentennial in 2007, a Revolutionary War marker was dedicated in October to honor Lawrence Swart's military service.
The Swart-Wilcox and other recent local historic preservation efforts have shown that people see that losing more landmarks in Oneonta need not continue if they get motivated and work together to save them. This way, we'll never need to stock up on spray plastic.
This weekend: while today the names Hannaford, Wegman or Golub are big in retail food shopping, 100 years ago W.H. Dunne got a start in Norwich.
City Historian Mark Simonson's column appears twice weekly. On Saturdays, his column focuses on the area during the Depression and before. His Monday columns address local history after the Depression. If you have feedback or ideas about the column, write to him at The Daily Star, or e-mail him at simmark@stny.rr.com. His website is www.oneontahistorian.com.
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