The Five Generations

In 1841 David bought the one-acre home lot from his father-in-law, John Andrews, and built a Greek Revival house with five windows across its gable front: an announcement, high on the hill, that the Coleys had arrived. The rest of the land came to Mary from her father, as a gift and then an inheritance. The official owner of the Coley Homestead was a woman.

Over the next 36 years David pieced together a farm of about 107 acres, deed by deed, from neighbors who needed cash more than land. They grew onions. As Cleora Coley told it in 1979:

“They raised bushels and bushels of onions. They took them to Westport, Fairfield and Norwalk to be shipped. In those days they used oxen to transport them.”

Clearing the fields left stone walls “as wide as this living room” at the back of the farm. Mary's sampler, stitched when she was thirteen, hangs over the dining room mantel: “Mary Elizabeth Andrews is my name, New England is my station, Norfield is my dwelling place and Christ is my salvation.”

David's son James Lewis Coley died in 1870, only 29 years old. His wife Harriet was left a young widow with two small children, Ida and James. No photograph of James Lewis is known.

Harriet lived on into the 1920s. She wrote down the Coley family's genealogy, and she made the oval wreath that hangs in the dining room today, woven from the hair of her relatives. Which relatives, nobody now knows. Cleora's niece recalls that her sister “always wanted to know who the redhead was.”

James married Florence Sturges on 8 November 1899. When his sister Ida married that same year, he bought her half of the farm for $1,500. He was a building contractor and a farmer: a herd of milking cows, sheep in a stone fold he built, pigs and a smokehouse.

He was also the boy who had watched the barn burn. Around 1910 he pulled down the great stone chimney at the heart of the house, which fed three fireplaces, and he never left the smokehouse fire burning overnight. The floor and the dining room's false mantel still show where the chimney stood.

1923 · A document and a memory

Paid in land

When the Connecticut Light & Power Company wanted an 80-foot right of way across the farm, James signed it over and took a five-acre tract of land instead of the money. His nephew remembered how that went down at home:

“Uncle James, at the time, was about as land poor as anyone could be. I remember my mother was furious with him for not taking the cash.”

James died in April 1941, seven weeks after his grandson was born, in the year his house turned one hundred.

James Sturges Coley, called Jim, was a carpenter and builder like his father. He built houses around Weston and raised oxen, showing them at the county fairs and taking home a lot of prizes. “Working with oxen was a great pleasure for him,” his wife remembered.

Cleora Barnes Burr grew up on her family's farm in Redding and trained as a nurse at the Bridgeport Hospital Training School, graduating in 1922. While she was nursing in Queens, Jim wrote to her about the house he was building for them in Weston: “I'm working on your house. I'm working in your kitchen.”

They married on Saturday 30 May 1931 at Christ Church in Redding, she in a gown of rose point lace and an illusion veil with lilies of the valley. The newspaper said the wedding “united members of two of the oldest families in Fairfield County.” In 1935 they won first prize at a Halloween dance in Wilton, dressed as Spaniards.

In the spring of 1941 they moved into the homestead with their baby son, to live with Jim's widowed mother. Cleora kept the books for Jim's business, raised Morgan horses and African violets, led a 4-H club, and was a leader in the Grange and the Farm Bureau. In 1942 she was appointed to Weston's wartime Rationing Board. Her story has a room of its own: Room 2, Cleora's Office.

The farm was no longer what paid the bills: Jim's building work and a dozen rental houses did. Around 1960, as his health failed, he sold the back land. “That was a sad situation for him,” Cleora said. Jim died in 1965. Cleora lived on in the house with their son, and before she died she made sure the homestead would go to the Historical Society, as Jim had wished.