This house is at the western end of the Penfield Historic District, with Penfield Four Corners is roughly the center, and Five Mile Line Road north to Whalen Road (the Hipp-Kennedy house (
visit link) and the Horace and Grace Bush house (
visit link) ) and south to the southern boundary of Penfield village (the Samuel Rich House (
visit link) ) being the eastern edge, forming a sideways "T".
The New York State Office of Parks Recreation and Historic Preservation posts NRHP nomination forms and photos on a document imaging system (
visit link) . Unfortunately, the nomination form for the Penfield Historic District is not available online, and so I haven't been able to learn the provenance of the houses shown in the nomination photos (which are on the document imaging system (
visit link) ).
Most of the domestic single dwellings in this historic district remain such, and most of those were built in the Federal and Greek Revival styles. One of the buildings in this historic district is a church, and at the time of its nomination continued to be utilized as a church (as witnessed by the NRHP listing (
visit link) ) but has since be adaptively reused as commercial space. Likewise, this historic building has been adapted to commercial use. It's architectural integrity must certainly have been compromised in that adaptation, but it remains significant because of its provenancial connection to the town founder: Daniel Penfield.
The History of Penfield
The Sullivan Expedition of 1779 opened up the territory west of Seneca Lake to white settlement by driving out the native Iroquois tribes. Prior to 1786, and the Hartford Treaty, the territory west of Seneca Lake and the Military Tract (a district in Western New York set aside for Revolutionary War veterans, both Massechusetts and New York claimed jurisdiction. With the treaty, New York was granted territiorial jusisdiction, but Massechusetts was awarded preemptive title. The land then became the "Phelps and Gorham Purchase" in May 1788, when Oliver Phelps and Nathaniel Gorham purchased the preemption rights from Massechusetts and acquired legal title. They concluded a treaty with local indians in July 1788 (known as the Buffalo Creek Treaty), where the indians gave up their claim to the lands in exchange for a grist mill built on a 100-acre parcel on the west side of the Genesee River (see High Falls history and "Indian" Allen), which allowed the partners to then sell parcels of this land.
25,000 acres was sold in 1790 to Jonathan Fassett of Vermont. Later, Phelps and Gorham found themselves short on cash, and sold off holdings in this area to Robert Morris, who sold it to Pulteney Associates. They in turn hired Captain Charles Williamson to be their land agent, who advertised the land for sale and had a road constructed through northern Pennsylvania to improve access to the holdings.
During 1792-93, general Silas Pepoon of Massachusetts bought the Fassett holdings and by 1795, Daniel Penfield, a New York City merchant, had begun acquiring the Pulteney Associates holdings. (Penfield didn't get clear title until 1803.) Penfield was apparently acquainted with Oliver Phelps as a commissary clerk under Phelps during the Revolutionary War. William McKinstry acted as Penfield's agent and developer from 1804-1810. The Embargo Ace of 1807 (prelude to War of 1812) imposed great hardships on merchants like Penfield, and he eventually left New York City and used his entreprenuerial talents to carefully control development of the tract of Western New York (to his own best advantage?).
Daniel Penfield established saw mills and grist mills in 1803 and a flour mill in 1814 as well as a fulling mill (for wool) and a brickyard. He controlled all the water rights in Penfield, and thereby controlled the industry and growth there. Competing industry only flourished outside the boundaries of his ownership until after his death. (See the Samuel Rich House (
visit link) and the Daisy Floor Mill (
visit link) NRHP waymarks) In part through his tight control of local development and in part to the remoteness of his acreage from the Erie Canal, Irondequoit Bay, and the Genesee River, major development bypassed this area during periods when neighboring Pittsford and the City of Rochester exploded.
Although Penfield was the first of the seven east-side towns in the county to be established, it remained among the smallest. By 1814, the census count was 1,874 residents, and it had reached approximately 5,000 people by 1840 (after Penfield's death) when Township 14 was set off as the Town of Webster. The resultant population figure of around 3,000 remained fairly constant for almost a century, until World War II. (
visit link) Only recently did Penfield's character as farmland and orchard change dramatically, when urban sprawl made Penfield an attractive bedroom community for the City of Rochester.