History, to go

This house needs a home. And it could use a guardian angel, too, though it's had a few of those already.

The Barnard Capen House is one of the country's oldest, most historically significant homes. It is also in pieces, dismantled and sitting in stacks in a storage facility in Norwood, waiting for a buyer to give it new life at a new location.

It was taken apart in May by Mark Landry , a contractor who specializes in historic preservation and renovation. Landry spent a month methodically labeling and photographing various parts of the house as it was disassembled.

"So much of the house was still there. It really had not been altered that much. A lot of the beams and other components survived. It has a great frame. The craftsmanship is incredible," said Landry, who has a master's in historic preservation and owns Landmark Services in Walpole .

Landry obtained the house from prior owner Josef Rettman for $1, who had found it impractical to live in the Capen home after he bought the Milton property, with its 2 acres that back onto the Blue Hills, last year. Like homes of its era, the Capen house has very low ceilings; Rettman is 6 feet 4 inches tall.

"I had to bend over to walk around," he said.

After failing to interest local historical organizations in the house, Rettman said his real estate broker, LandVest, connected him with Landry. Now, Landry's hope is that someone else will step forward to buy the house and have it reassembled elsewhere. The components of the house -- "as is" -- are selling for $80,000, plus delivery.

"It's a fairly significant house and it was worth saving," he said. "There are very few 17th-century houses. It's a shame to let them be demolished."

Significant indeed. The Capen house has a rich and interesting history. The house was originally located in Dorchester, at what is now 523 Washington St. In 1909, it was moved to 427 Hillside St. in Milton. The reason? To save it from being demolished to make room for a triple-decker. How history repeats itself.

Pictures show the Capen house to be plain, in the early Colonial style. It is three stories, with a sharp pitch to the roof, clapboard on the front, and shingles on another side. A full-size shed was added at some point, which gave the house a New England saltbox profile.

Inside, the rooms feature exposed beams -- some painted -- brick fireplaces, wide-board flooring and molded, wooden-paneled walls. In some rooms, the door frames reach almost completely to ceiling height. Among the more curious elements is a room that was added after the house was moved to Milton, where leftover paneled doors were used to cover the walls and ceiling.

For years, even centuries, the Capen House was thought to have been built in 1638, but a 2003 study by Historic New England established the date as 1675. The study used dendrochronology, or the counting of tree rings in timbers. The dendrochronology lab at Oxford University determined that Capen House timber samples were from trees felled in the winter of 1674-75, indicating they probably were used to frame the house in the summer of 1675, said Anne Grady of Lexington, an architectural historian who conducted the study for Historic New England.

"It's the fifth oldest house that we've dated," Grady said. "And many of the original features that are usually lost are still intact."

The house's historical roots are as old as the European settlers' history in the New World. One of the first to arrive in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 was a Barnard Capen. One of his descendents, yeoman John Capen, built the house, which by the late 1700s was owned by a second Barnard Capen.

Among features of homes from those days was a decorative detail on beams known as a chamfered edge, "just to dress them up because they were exposed," Landry said. The Capen House has particularly nice chamfered beams.

Until recently, the house was owned by Roger Gregg, a descendent of Kenneth G. T. Webster, the Harvard professor who rescued it from demolition nearly 100 years ago. And before Webster moved it to Milton for a summer and weekend retreat, the house had remained in the Capen family for more than 200 years.

Back then, the proposed demolition created a stir. Among old houses, the Capen homestead is a bit of a celebrity. The Boston Transcript editorialized, "It is greatly to be regretted that no measure has been taken to preserve the Capen House, so important in the history not only of Dorchester, but of New England. Unless some timely action is taken to liberate the building from its impending fate, it will soon be but a memory."

This time though, "there seemed to be no interest" in saving the Capen house in Milton, said Anthony Sammarco , author of several local history books and a former member of the town's Historical Commission, "People said, 'Oh, it would be a shame to lose it,' but nobody rallied."

Though Grady said she wishes the house had not been dismantled, she wrote in an e-mail, "Its availability presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for someone to build a house around one of the oldest and most beautifully decorated house frames in New England and one that comes with rare original finish materials associated with the frame."

Much, but not all, of the house as it stood in Milton was saved. "We have the frame. We have the flooring, the staircase, a nice old corner cupboard, and some paneled walls." Door latches and hinges also were salvaged.

Any new owner will need to add updated touches with rooms such as the kitchen, family room, and garage. "We could work with an architect to put together a schematic drawing of how it will look," Landry said.

Even in pieces, the house won't be a bargain. Constructing a new house around the core of the Capen House will probably run about $300 per square foot, Landry said. That contrasts with about $200 per square foot for a cheaply built subdivision, and as much as $400 to $500 a square foot for high-end construction.