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Park Lane Continued

by Brian R. Waesche

The house at 108 Park Lane, as it progressed from a primitive, two-story log cabin (c.1800-1870s) to Maryland farmhouse (c.1870s-1910), and finally to the 12-room estate house as it looked until 1987. Representations drawn by the author.

Like many traditional homes in our region, 108 Park Lane evolved in phases, chronicling four distinct eras in its record. Charles Colby of Herndon, Virginia, conducted much research on the house after taking an interest in the place as a teenager between 1971-81 when his parents owned the residence. The exploration of Mr. Colby’s into his parent’s home has contributed greatly to my own, shedding much light on the alterations made to the log cabin built there long before Thurmont grew up around it.

John Henry Rouzer, who was conveyed the home in 1870, remained there until his death in 1906, and is responsible for the second era of the home’s architectural advancement, likely completed in the late 1870s. Rouzer added a dining room and kitchen to the rear of the home, with a fireplace between and a steep “cupboard”-staircase against the back-most wall, rising from the kitchen to a bedroom in the expanded story above. Unchanged by Rouzer, the cabin had only two bedrooms upstairs, Rouzer’s addition adding two more over his dining and kitchen areas, with one accessed through the other. Rouzer’s wing was just shy of matching the cabin’s width, allowing a covered dual-level, stacked porch system to span the southern side of the addition. A complete covering of the home in clapboard siding completed Rouzer’s renovation. Specific to the rear addition, a reasonably unaltered example of the layout Rouzer achieved can be seen at his cousin, Col. John Robert Rouzer’s home, the Thurmont Historical Society’s “Creeger House.” Col. Rouzer’s home was enlarged in 1876 from an 1820 two-story log cabin with the same layout as described above.

Leonard R. Waesche purchased John Henry Rouzer’s farm in 1907 for $5,200 from the widow, Ella Rouzer. A civic man, Waesche laid out his property with roads and lots, perhaps simply for hobby, as he never developed the majority of his plans. The Rouzer lane became the first new road over the grounds. Called Park Lane today, it was first called Waesche Road, reflected on deeds such as those for 108 and 109 Park Lane as late as 1955.

By 1920, Waesche had transformed the Rouzer home to a sizeable estate house for his large family. The Rouzer home faced Water Street, but Waesche’s new road passed by its northern side-elevation, causing him to reorient the dwelling’s layout in an extensive remodel so that it faced his surnamed avenue. The front door was relocated between the living and dining rooms, emulating a center-hall plan, in contrast to the informal arrangement Rouzer planned. Its underside facing the new entry, Waesche broke the original stairs into thirds and arrayed the treads of the middle fraction into a “U”-shape, placing the base directly ahead of the primary entrance, 180-degrees from its former location.

Waesche deconstructed the open porches and set new footings in their place to eliminate the home’s “L”-shaped footprint—the shape the stone cellar retains—to compose instead a large rectangular perimeter. The space gained allowed a service passage on the first floor and allotted square footage to reframe Rouzer’s adjoined second-story bedrooms into four rooms, flanking a previously nonexistent hall between the tops of the main and kitchen stairways. Above the main stair, another “U”-shaped stair mimicked the one below and led to a dormered third level, accommodated by the all-new hip roof. One step lower than the original cabin, the second-floor area of Rouzer’s addition was heightened to create a uniform ceiling height to prevent interference with the revised roof and third floor overhead. The step-down remained visible by the differing header heights of the upper windows and is quickly noticed today as Waesche’s leveling of the trusses bearings have since been reversed on both the front and rear of the domicile.

The Waesche house lastly received its signature concrete porches and was finished with stucco compound, giving the home a much more formidable aesthetic— possibly a queue Waesche enjoyed at the Catoctin Furnace Ironmaster’s house he vacated upon purchasing the Rouzer property. Another noteworthy feature of the home has always been the iron fireplace insert marked with “James Johnson & Co.,” surviving in the house today; one of three extant in Frederick County, another is said to be in Johnson’s Springfield Manor. The remarkable fit within the cabin’s fireplace suggests the masonry was laid around the insert, making it an invaluable tool in dating the cabin’s construction, as James Johnson’s tenure at Catoctin Furnace existed between 1774 and 1803.

Predeceased by his wife in 1928, L.R. Waesche died in 1934. Daughters, Florence Daisy (never married), and Phoebe Grace (who never lived away from their parents), retained the home, where Grace’s husband, David Firor, and daughter also lived. Waesche’s middle daughter, Mary Amelia (also never married), joined her sisters at Park Lane after retiring from William Penn High School in 1943. Mary Waesche co-wrote the text Junior Training for Modern Business, from which she received handsome royalties for the remainder of her life. She cared for her late father’s home as diligently as she had her own in the Philadelphia suburb of Wyncote, Pennsylvania, which she had designed by Architect Llewellyn Price and was featured in the March 1937 issue of Better Homes & Gardens before her return home.

Rouzer’s use of the site as a farm left a two-story chicken coop and a large bank barn with haylofts and a connected wagon shed and corncrib. At the southeast corner of the house was a two-story summer kitchen with cellar, separate from the house by a covered stoop with spigot and sink draining into the garden. The stoop’s concrete floor covered a deep well with a chestnut log inside, a common feature for pumps in the area. Charles Colby recalls early 1900s Indian Head pennies placed in the slab’s pour, dating the Waesche expansion. The upper rooms of the summer kitchen had chains and shackles affixed to the walls used by Rouzer to secure the slave-laborers that farmed his lands. Charles’ father, Lauren Colby, spoke of the shackles at his home to the disbelief of patrons at the neighboring American Legion, and bets were taken before a group was led to see the chambers for themselves. While the summer kitchen survives, all pre-abolition hardware has been removed. Diagonal from the summer kitchen was a final brick smoke house covered in vines, and beyond that, a shallow fishpond that Waesche formed large enough to have a center island. Waesche’s grandson of the same name, who went by “Dolph,” recalled wading out to the island as a child and showed his grandchildren—myself included—the two-dotted scar of a bite he received at his inner-elbow from a water snake.

David Firor died of a brain hemorrhage at the home in 1948, and Daisy Waesche in 1952, leaving Mary and Grace alone. By 1962, the sisters were spending winters vacationing in destinations like Mobile Bay and Hawaii, and eventually decided to move to Boulder, Colorado. It was at that time that the idea arose to pass the family home to then thirty-five-year-old nephew, Dolph, but this was prevented by familial disagreements. Against L.R. Waesche’s Will, requesting the home never be sold, the sisters used the intersecting boundary created by the H&F Railway to break the home-place away from its estate, leaving the house and 6.49 acres for sale. Once spreading beyond Woodland Avenue and across the areas developed today as Clarke Avenue and Tacoma Street, the Waesche family still retains much of 108’s original acreage.

Frederick real estate agents Erik and Gisela Florander bought the Park Lane home, and it was rented to Malcolm Parks, Jr., who moved his family from Indiana after he co-founded Tab Books Inc. of Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania, in 1964. In 1971, the home was purchased again by the Edwin C. Creeger American Legion and was immediately re-listed, stripped of its remaining acreage. This marked the beginning of the Colby family’s ten-year ownership during which they further modernized the home with central air-conditioning and a first-floor guest bathroom. Next to buy were Bryan & Debra Coover who sold to Luisa Faux-Burhans and Richard Allen less than three years later.If any residents have older photographs of the 108 Park Lane house or property they are willing to share, please contact the author at Brwaesche@gmail.com. The Waesche Family album has a few images that depict only the west side of the house.

by Brian R. Waesche

Twenty-nine years ago, on Wednesday night, December 30, 1987, a crowd gathered outside the Thurmont home at 108 Park Lane as firefighters from five Northern Frederick County companies reported to a blaze that engulfed the large, historic home. Among the crowd, Randy Waesche; Gettysburg Times reporter, Erin Dingle; and Thurmont natives, Diane Weant and Rick Eyler, witnessed the event burn into the story of what many referred as the “Waesche home-place,” a story beginning 152 years before the blaze.

Shortly before 1835, Henry Rouzer wed Catharine Schlosser, and in 1836, the couple welcomed their first child, Josiah. The young family resided with Henry’s father until he placed Henry in possession of a tract of land on the fringe of Mechanicstown. On the property existed a two-story log cabin—constructed in the earliest years of the 1800s—that Henry and Catharine made their home. Henry operated a tanning business on the property for fifty years, his tannery located where Thurmont’s 112 E. Main Street stands today. The tannery’s location alongside the stream, flowing through the Memorial Park today, lent the creek the name “Rouzer Run,” its final course winding through the Rouzer property before joining Hunting Creek.

Henry grew to make a comfortable living, and in 1847, he and his wife and children moved next to his tannery along Main Street to a stone mansion-house that Henry enlarged from a one-room stone cottage. After retirement in 1877, Henry devoted the attentions of his later years to improving his home property. He was an excellent farmer and his lands were made valuable by his care and hard, persistent work.

Another son, John Henry, was born to Henry and Catharine Rouzer in 1839. John Henry assisted greatly with his father’s tanning and farming enterprises and, in May of 1870, was granted “for the sum of $1,015 and labor and services rendered to me [Henry]” 59 acres of his father’s estate, containing the Rouzer’s former cabin, John Henry’s birthplace along the tannery road at the rear of the Rouzer Mansion lot. Separate from Henry’s conveyance to his son was his stone mansion and several lots fronting East Main Street. John Henry’s elder brother, Josiah, had passed away in 1857, at just twenty-two years of age.

Two years after John Henry acquired the majority of his father’s holdings, he married Martha Ellen “Ella” Clugston in 1872; by 1892, he had five children, resulting in three sons. Two daughters, Mary (1881-1883) and Ruth (1891-1892) did not survive. After Catharine Rouzer’s death in 1885 and Henry’s in 1887, John Henry, executor of his father’s estate, sold at public sale his parent’s mansion to Daniel Osler for $11,205, and to others several separate lots were sold. In time, the Rouzer mansion became the Creager Funeral Home, and later Stauffer Funeral Home, which it remains.

Costing $87,000, 108 Park Lane, built from the now unrecognizable Rouzer cabin, was sold to Luisa Faux-Burhans Allen in the summer of 1984. Luisa, the widow of Amos Denslow Burhans, and her second husband, Richard C. Allen, moved to Thurmont, where her sister Anna Faux White resided. At the time of his marriage to Luisa, Richard “Dick” Allen was, too, widowed, in 1966, by first wife, Helen Faux, the sister of his second wife, Luisa, and her sister, Anna White. Allen was the Editor of Hamburg, New York’s The Sun newspaper that he, his wife Helen, and sister-in-law Anna founded in 1945. Under Allen ownership, only three-and-a-half years after purchasing the home, a dropped cigarette was rumored to ignite a carpet in the couple’s second-story bedroom. Fire tore through the two upper floors of the house, destroying them from the inside, and causing severe water damage to the first floor. Allen and wife were both taken to the hospital where Luisa Faux-Burhans Allen passed after becoming ill. The notification of her death requested condolences may be forwarded to her husband at “Frederick Memorial Hospital, Wing 4B, Rm. 45” where he was recovering from burn-wounds. Over a year later, in June 1989, Allen’s newspaper reported “We talked to Sun editor emeritus Richard Allen recently and he is doing quite well. He has moved back into his house and is enjoying a new basset hound puppy. His address is 108 Park Lane, Thurmont, MD 21788. Phone 301-271-3262.”

Seventy-two-year-old Allen modestly repaired the home to the form that stands today. Retained was the unconventional five-bay window arrangement around an off-center entry and decorative concrete porches, whose material spared them from fire damage. The most recognizable change made by Allen was the remittance of the walk-up third floor, not replaced during reconstruction. Using steeply raked gables in place of the former hip-style roof, 108 Park Lane was instead finished with two uneven roof planes, the portion over the westward section of the home being slightly raised and forming a jog in the façade’s shingled construct. Previously, the step-up in the second floor, hinting at the higher log walls of the original Rouzer cabin within, was disguised beneath a uniform ceiling height. Allen covered the blackened stucco with typical vinyl siding, replaced the large six-over-six sashes with basic units of smaller size, and added a contrasting, 1980s-style sloped sunroom to the rear of the home, connecting a summer kitchen to the main house.

Today, the home remains a 4 bedroom, 2.5 Bath, 3,000-plus square-foot dwelling, as Allen refashioned it. It features a decorative “U”-shaped stairway, partially exposed log interior, expansive attic accessible through a pull-down hatch, and a two-story summer kitchen with a walk-in fireplace. The home deteriorated during the late 1990s after Mr. Allen moved in with his nephew, late wife Luisa’s son, Amos D. “Den” Faux-Burhans, near Urbana in 1994. Neglected and rented until sale (at one point to several Mount Saint Mary’s students), it passed into the trust of Den Faux-Burhans in 1999 after his uncle’s death. Diane Weant and Rick Eyler, the same couple that watched the home burn twelve years prior, purchased the residence at 108 days before the new millennium. Rick, a skilled builder, immediately began to remedy the underlying problems that come with any old home. Siding was replaced, roof repaired, porches patched, surfaces refinished, stone foundations strengthened, and a concrete floor poured in the dirt cellar during his tenure. The Eyler family greatly improved the home, accomplishing a fine cosmetic result, with raised panel shutters, fresh colors, and the simple warmth of family that does a home so well.

The Eyler’s sold 108 Park Lane when they sub-divided and built a new home on the property, placing their former home in the care of Becky Brashear and Jenny Hankey for the past nine years. Brashear and Hankey tastefully adorn the home throughout the holidays and seasons, while continuing to make improvements. Since purchase, the original, bark-covered timbers holding up the original cabin have been checked for integrity, and stanchions installed to re-level the settling, kitchen floor framing. Avid entertainers, several outdoor living spaces, tiered patios, and decks, and a 3,300-gallon quoi pond have been added to the property as well. Becky states “We’ve worked hard to maintain the historical integrity of the home: the original wood floors in the living room and dining room, the deep windowsills, and the front porch.”

She and Jenny also spoke of some of the oddities of the home. The continual appearance of pennies found inside, outside, and in the strangest of places has become common on Park Lane, and more curiously (initially unaware that a cigarette may have caused the great fire at their home) is the scent of cigarette smoke that sometimes materializes in the air. Nine-year old Australian Shepherd “Parker,” named after his address, and Ms. Brashear’s mother also enjoy the lovely home.

Returned to more resemble a Maryland-farmhouse for the last thirty years, 108 Park Lane contrasts drastically to the pre-1987 federal-style appearance the home displayed for the majority of the twentieth century. Perhaps more interesting than how the once-stucco manor became the house we know today, may be how a three-room log-cabin transformed into a ten-room estate house, the events of which will be the subject of next month’s issue.

The December 31, 1987, Frederick News Post cover story showing the fire that occurred at the home at 108 Park Lane. Photo by Kelly Hahn

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The house at Park Lane as repaired by Richard C. Allen. Photo taken by author, Fall 1999

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