Doing Good by Stealth: The Philanthropy and Service of Annie Burr Lewis
Deming Lewis House
An early and notable demonstration of Annie Burr’s commitment to the preservation of historic homes and their importance to Farmington was her purchase of the house at 80 Main Street in the center of the village. Variously called the Ancestral House, the Deacon John Hart House, the Hart-Deming House, the Chauncey Deming Place, and now the Deming Lewis House, the structure was originally built around 1730 for one of the first Farmington families, the Harts, and was later lived in by the Deming family. By the beginning of the second quarter of the twentieth century it had been rented out to tenants, had fallen into disrepair, and was in danger of demolition. Annie Burr Lewis stepped in and safeguarded its survival, and former owner Miss Deming expressed her pleasure in Mrs. Lewis’s commitment to do for the house what she herself had been unable to accomplish.
Annie Burr hired the firm of Douglas Orr, Inc., of New Haven and ensured that the house, with its architecturally significant divided staircase and unusual door surround, was restored. She had an old store moved from the property to a site on Mill Lane, and she transferred the adjacent land for a nominal sum to the town to be used for the new fire station. In 1954 Mrs. Lewis deeded the house to Miss Porter’s School. The house, still painted in the deep red color Mrs. Lewis chose for it, remains the property of Miss Porter’s School and is lived in by one of the school administrators and his family.
Annie Burr’s preservation of the house and generosity to the town led the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society in 1947 to bestow upon her an award “for Alertness in saving from threatened destruction a rare old house by the gift of another site for the town’s proposed fire-house.” And in a posthumous tribute, the society praised her for setting an example for philanthropic intervention in her efforts to save the house: “Important as this thoughtfully considered act has proven to Farmington, it provides a pattern by which others of great good will may similarly contribute to the preservation of the architectural record of our American heritage” (July 22, 1959).
