Originally published in the Courier News
Forty-one years ago, my grandmother, Elsie Andrews, left her storybook house, with its wrap-around porch, cupola and acres of tree-covered land, where she grew up in Bridgewater.
Time has been kind to the sprawling 150-year-old home at 707 E. Main Street, but has nonetheless left its mark. The yard, where she planted fruit trees and bachelor’s buttons with her father, was sold long ago for a small strip mall. One side of the huge porch, where her nephew accidentally rode his tricycle of her father’s toes, was sacrificed to add a large chapel. The semi-circular driveway, where her son learned how to drive a car, has a painted parking spot labeled “clergy.” The living room, where her husband proposed to her more than 60 years ago, contains a display of shiny caskets with their lids partially ajar.
Even with all of these changes, it is still her old home. And, since my grandmother and her two sisters sold it, it has become a funeral home.
My grandmother, a thin woman with short, wiry hair, kept the memories of “The Old House” alive for those of us who never lived there. She hung a photo of it near the ones of my sister and me in her bedroom. When we visited the house for wakes of friends and family, she told us about our dad growing up in the little room above the porch and how the cupola was once part of her mom’s dining room. My grandmother made her final trip there in January after she quietly passed away in her sleep at age 90.
The house, as my grandmother knew it, came to life again where her family and friends filled the chapel to say goodbye to her on that winter day. Some of the visitors who lived there as children, mentioned that my grandmother never told on them when she caught them sliding down the cherry banister. Neighbors remembered how the sun lit up the little jars of colored water that she kept in the window over the front door. Although I thought I knew everything about her, they gave me a glimpse of the woman she was before she was my grandmother.
The house has a long history, but only a few owners. Bulit in the mid-1800s by a Finderne attorney named Mr. Windsor, the house was originally called the Windsor Mansion. It appeared in a small book called “Picturesque Finderne,” that promoted the area as “malaria free” and only “an hour train ride to New York City.”
A photo of the house, taken in 1899, now hanging in the foyer of the funeral home, shows a horse and buggy parked in front.
In 1920, John Biacovsky, my great-grandfather, bought the house and converted it into a two-family home. My grandmother, who was then a petite 8-year-old girl with dark wavy hair and hazel eyes, lived on one side with her parents, her brother and three sisters. Her father rented out the other half. Later when she and her sisters started having their own children, they filled both sides of the home.
Two years after my great-grandfather died, my grandmother and her sisters decided to sell the house. It broke their hearts, but it was time to go. In 1962, they sold the home to Edward and Jean Kowalenko who turned the two-family residence into The Bridgewater Funeral Home.
About eight years ago, the Kowalenkos started thinking about their retirement plans, and they decided to eventually sell the business to a successor. They chose James DeMaio, 27, who had been working at the funeral home since 1995. He plans on raising his children in the historic home and eventually passing on the business to them.