Rich with woodwork, detail, memories, 1850s-era Hunter House goes up for sale.

By Steve Wartenburg

The 4,800-square-foot Hunter House, at 129 S. Main St. in Mechanicsburg, will be auctioned on Thursday. The property includes a 21-acre farm.

Barbara Hunter Ward, on the second-floor balcony of the Hunter House, says the 158-year-old home "has such a sense of the Hunter family history." Ward decided to sell the home because the task of maintaining the farmhouse is too time-consuming for her family to bear.

The memories came flooding back to Barbara Hunter Ward as she walked through the Hunter House in Mechanicsburg for one of the last times. "My brother and I spent hours dancing here," she said, pointing to a spot in front of an ornate tile-and-carved-wood fireplace. "My grandfather had an old Victrola and records from the 1920s."

A few feet away is a wooden spiral staircase that reaches up past the 12-foot ceilings of the first floor and beyond the second floor to the attic. Ward used to slide down the banister.
Outside, on 600 acres filled with wheat, corn and soy, she played croquet and explored the Little Darby Creek, which cuts a swath across the front of the farm.

"I love this house; it has such a sense of the Hunter family history," said Ward, 57.
But soon it will no longer be the Hunter House. Ward's father, Vincent Hunter, died in 2005, and her mother, Mary Jane, 78, is in poor health. Nobody in the family is ready to take on the time-consuming and costly job of maintaining the old farm house, which was built in the 1850s and purchased by Vincent Hunter, Ward's great-great grandfather, in the early 1860s.

The 4,800-square-foot house will be sold at auction on Thursday by Garth's Auctioneers & Appraisers. The minimum bid is $399,000 for the house and surrounding 21 acres. The rest of the farmland was sold
soon after Vincent Hunter died.
"You don't see houses like this around here; it's very ornate and was very expensive to do," said Charles Virts, curator of the Champaign County Historical Museum in nearby Urbana.
He said the spiral staircase is his favorite part of the house, and he's never seen another like it. "I saw one in a painting of the John H. James house in Urbana, but that house is long gone."
The first Vincent Hunter in the home, who lived from 1819 to 1884, was a miller by trade when he purchased the house and surrounding acreage in 1863.
The interior of the house was plain at the time and remained that way until his son, Calvin (1857-1924), became engaged to Elizabeth Burnham about 1895. She was a bit of a socialite, and her husband-to-be had the house totally redone so she could entertain in style.

Expensive, quarter-sawn oak molding was added to the first floor, as were stained-glass windows.
The ceilings were hand-painted and incorporated roses, foliage and hearts in the design. The first-floor fireplaces were redone with ornate tile and carvings. One features wooden lions and the other a tile
representation of a child with wings being pulled through the air by a team of butterflies.
"She had big dinner parties and bridge parties with bridge tables set up all over the house," Ward said. "Probably most of the town was here."

The renovations remain well-preserved, which makes a stroll through the Hunter house a step back in time. "It's absolutely magnificent," said Sherri Grubbs, a Columbus resident who attended a recent open house. "There is so much woodwork, and it's in phenomenal condition."
"The fact that it was done with such creativity back then shows real class," added her mother, Ellie Grubbs. Outside the house are two water pumps: one for drinking, the other for washing. There also is a wood house, ash house, carriage house and even a soap house.
"I hope someone buys it who has enough money to keep it up," Virts said. "It's a beautiful home and deserves someone who will keep it up." Ward said her grandfather Norvell Hunter (1898-1985) was "a gentleman farmer" known around town for always wearing a suit, even when he was working the fields.
"His work clothes were his older suits," she said.

Norvell Hunter graduated from the University of Virginia and returned to Mechanicsburg, where he taught a little school and was a county trustee. "When he got back from the University of Virginia, he said he never wanted to leave the farm, and he never did," Ward said. "He was born in the front room and died in the back bedroom." Ward and her family moved to Florida when she was 7, but she spent every summer on the farm. Her father, Vincent, retired as a banker in 1978 and returned to Mechanicsburg to help run the farm. "Dad was a hands-on guy. He liked to know how everything worked," said Ward, who returned to the farm in 1969 while attending college.

She lives in Mechanicsburg in a house from Norvell Hunter's wife's side of the family that is from the same era as the Hunter House. Ward's mother and her daughter, Laura, live next door.
"Barbara's parents are the nicest people I ever met, and her father was a walking encyclopedia of everyone in town," said George Ward, Barbara's husband.
He said the older couple represented high society in small-town Ohio, recalling dinners with Vincent and Mary Jane as formal affairs. "There were ornate place settings, china and silver. Every type of item there was to set out they set out."

Her father's death and mother's health concerns made selling the house inevitable, but Ward said it still was a difficult decision that took months for her to accept.
It's not just a house; it's the history of her family.

"What I'll miss the most is the Hunters," she said. "When I'm here, I feel like I'm with the Hunters."