No place like home

Strasburg Holiday Heritage Homes Tour If You Go After taking a break last year, the Strasburg Heritage Association will again host a Strasburg Holiday Heritage Homes Tour from 10 a.m. to 4 .m. on Dec. 10. Tickets for the tour are $10 and available at Hotel Strasburg, People's Drug Store, First Bank, Strasburg Chamber of Commerce and Walton & Smoot Pharmacy. The tour features five stops at historic homes in town, four easily within walking distance of each other, said the Heritage Association's executive director, Barbara Adamson. "We felt it was important to do it this year because of Strasburg's 250th [anniversary] celebration," she said. The tour is a great way to feature older homes significant to the town's history, she said. The group had its eye on each of the homes featured this year for some time, she said. They tell a story about Strasburg families and the way they were built show how the town has evolved. "We know that they're special," she said. Tour stops are: • The Whitehead-Cleary home at 276 W. King St. • The Massound home at 292 W. Queen St. • The Hitchings home at 208 W. Queen St. • The Fagan home at 256 S. Holliday St. • The Schetrom home at 168 N. Massanutten St. During the tour, complimentary refreshments will be served at the Strasburg Emporium, and the Strasburg Museum will be open featuring handmade decorations and gifts, Mayfest 2011 commemorative pottery, prints and History of Strasburg booklets for sale.

Restored house on holiday tour was long on couple's radar

By Jessica Wiant -- jwiant@nvdaily.com

STRASBURG -- Driving through Strasburg on U.S. 11, the house at 276 W. King. St. might not exactly be eye-catching for an amateur. For Jim Whitehead and Sheila Cleary, however, its steep roof signaled its old age and beckoned them to come inside.

Whitehead and his wife, who first came to the valley about 15 years ago, had had their eyes on the King Street house -- they call it the George Eberly house, since the Eberlys lived there the longest -- for years.

So, when they heard it was going to be auctioned, they came, bid and won, the same day. That was in 2007.

The couple first bought a Woodstock farm several years ago. It was as a weekend place, while they still lived and worked in Northern Virginia.

But, as so often happens, the couple said they liked the people, and valley life very much. Two-day weekends became three-day weekends.

"What happens to Northern Virginia people is they come here and they love it and they don't want to go home," Whitehead said.

So the Eberly house, the couple decided, would be their full-time place to retire.

Whitehead said they gave themselves a year to restore the home, and it ended up taking 2 1⁄2.

The back, original part of the house dates to 1780, with an addition sometime around 1800. Over the years, there had been many changes and eventually the house was even divided into apartments, resulting in an upstairs kitchen and bath -- and water damage -- that the couple had to deal with.

During restorations, the basic backbone of the house remained, while Whitehead and Cleary worked on things like staircases, floors, the kitchen and bathrooms throughout the house.

"The house is amazingly solid," Whitehead said.

Two of the first things Whitehead and Cleary set out to do during their restoration was trace the deed's history all the way back to Peter Stover, the town's founder, and tour the home with Larry Beeler, who lived in the house for a long period beginning in the '40s, to see what he could remember about the way it used to be before so many remodeling jobs.

When Peter Stover deeded the land to George Voegdley, he required "one good dwelling house with a stone or brick chimney" be built within a year, the couple explained.

The back, original part of the house still features the stone central fireplace with two sides. Its structure is more German in nature, Whitehead said, whereas the rest of the house, built later, has more English features.

"Houses all have mysteries," Whitehead said, and part of the mystery of the Eberly house has been uncovering which pieces were built when.

From there, he and Cleary have had to decide what to try to restore and what to do to suit their own taste.

"It's a mixture of trying to get it back to what it would be originally and what we liked," Whitehead said.

The house now, with renovations complete, features lots of yellow pine -- taken from other historic properties, mostly in Maryland -- completely replastered walls, exposed beams in some rooms, a restored claw-foot tub and new tiles shower stalls, a kitchen with custom cabinets and granite countertops, and family heirlooms throughout.

When original floors, joists, cabinets or even windows weren't there or weren't salvagable, Whitehead and Cleary often used old materials from other homes to do the restoration. They replaced newer windows in the front of the house, for example, with old "9 over 6" windows, used old pine to replace floors where needed and used old lumber for new kitchen cabinets.

Modern touches include sinks in the bathroom that look like dry sinks but aren't, the tiled-in shower stalls, and a big flat-screen TV in plain view in a guest bedroom in the upstairs of the oldest part of the house.

A benefit of that steep roof that drew them to the house originally is a large attic for storage in a house that otherwise doesn't have closets, Clearly explained. The result is a house clear of clutter.

Though the end result is a polished-looking house, the two both admit it was more work than they expected.

"It's a bigger house than it looks like," Cleary said.

Having already hosted lots of curious visitors during the restoration of the house, Cleary and Whitehead agreed to be a stop on this year's Strasburg Holiday Heritage Homes Tour.

"We like to encourage people to restore old houses," Cleary said.