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“Perfecting Perfection” in the Village of Essex

About four years ago, Chuck Atwood and his husband, David Dedmon bought the James Phelps House, 1845, a Greek Revival on the waterfront in Essex village, in part because they loved the maritime ambiance. It reminded Atwood of the town where he grew up Pascagoula, Mississippi, which lies next to the Pascagoula River and along the Gulf of Mexico.

And he remembers when the house started to feel like home.

“The first night we stayed in the house, our neighbors brought us some fresh zucchini and a freshly baked, still-warm loaf of zucchini bread,” he says.

Another neighbor, stopping by when they weren’t home, scrawled her name on a construction wall and asked that they call. Another neighbor brought flowers. Yet another provided a thoughtful, detailed list of nearby food markets and restaurants.

Atwood and Dedmon found they have much in common with their neighbors, including one very important thing, and that is, as one of his neighbors puts it, a knack for “perfecting perfection.”

While their new home had been renovated three times in the past 10 years or so, Atwood and Dedmon decided it could be better, so they embarked upon another renovation. Their work is coinciding with a burst of activity nearby, which has turned Essex Village into a veritable construction zone. Chad and Brenda Floyd are working on their house nearby, as are Peg and Ed Kobelski. And there is a much larger project underway at the nearby Griswold Inn.

The Essex family that owns the Gris embarked on an ambitious renovation earlier this year, set to be finished and celebrated by Thursday, Oct. 4 from 5 to 6:30 p.m. during the village merchants’ monthly First Thursday celebration on the new back porch of the inn’s Hayden House, one of eight buildings on the Griswold Inn campus, six of them historic, all owned by the Paul family of Essex.

“People here have said to me there’s a lot of construction activity on the point of the village, and there certainly has been” says Geoffrey Paul, one of the Paul brothers, the inn’s owners. “I would have to tell you that in the last three years there has been more construction activity at the point than there has been since the structures were originally built between 1795 and 1807. Almost everything you see down there was built then. Not since then has there been this much activity, and all of it is positive, and all of it is ensuring the survival of these structures for another 200 years.”

New with the Old

Joan Paul says that because of the inn’s prominence on the village’s Main Street, it was important as part of the renovation to preserve the historic nature of the structures. The inn opened its doors to the public in 1776, and, in various iterations, managed to survive even Prohibition and the Great Depression, making it one of the oldest continuously operated inns and taverns in the country, putting it in the same category as other historic, venerable institutions such as the Old Tavern at Grafton in Grafton, Vermont, the Deerfield Inn in Deerfield, Massachusetts, and the Red Lion in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

In several of the seven other buildings on the Griswold Inn campus, many of them with rooms where people can stay, there are thriving retail stores. Emmy’s on Main, Goods & Curiosities: The Griswold Inn Store, Truffle Shots, Essex Coffee & Tea/The Captain’s Cup, Sweet P’s Ice Cream Shop, Society Scissors Hair Salon, and Essex Duck are among the enterprises housed on the Griswold Inn campus, providing goods and services to the inn’s travelers, the village’s day trippers, and town residents alike.

Paul recently took me on a tour of some renovated rooms in the inn, all of them with modern amenities, accessibility, and comfort along with a distinctly historical feel. She is all about getting things just so, at a reasonable price, from furniture and linens to the inn’s soap, a petite yellow bar that fits perfectly in your hand, redolent of lemon verbena. It’s a favorite, made specially by a company nearby from an old, old recipe, and is available for sale in Goods & Curiosities because it is so popular.

She points out the maritime artwork on the walls, part of a collection that is one of the largest of its kind in the country. Her brother in law, Geoffrey Paul, sometimes give tours of the inn’s artwork in the fall and winter, extremely popular events that fill up quickly when offered.

The most recent renovation is one of several and the inn’s restaurants have been updated and added to, as well.

Here’s what visitors to the inn won’t find in their rooms: a television.

Paul seems a little indignant that anyone would even want to visit the village, then hole up in a room watching TV. She wants them out getting a cup of coffee, buying an ice cream cone at Sweet P’s, checking out the exhibits at the Connecticut River Museum down the street, and enjoying the view from the town dock.

“We want them out in the community,” she says. “Griswold Square is a place where visitors and townspeople congregate for ice cream, for coffee. There’s such a temptation when you visit somewhere to get lazy and stay in the room.”

As a concession to those who do want to get their television fix, there will be one, just one, in the common area of the newly refurbished Hayden House. But Paul would be much happier if, while watching television, those people also availed themselves of the board games available in the common area.

When I ask her what her title is, Paul says simply she is part of the family, married to one of the Paul brothers. The brothers all have professions in addition to being innkeepers. You get the sense that they work so that they can pursue their passion, this inn.

“We have the responsibility to take care of this piece of history as long as it is ours,” Paul says.

Buying the Real Thing

Geoffrey Paul, Joan’s brother-in-law, agrees. He grew up in Essex. He had many fond memories of the Griswold Inn from his childhood, and became a student and collector of objects related to Essex history. As he was known for that, in the early 1990s a New York gallery sent him information about a painting by Guy Wiggins, a well-known Old Lyme impressionist painter who had opened an art school in Essex in the 1930s.

“It wasn’t the best Guy Wiggins, but it was obvious this dealer knew this was something in my area of interest,” Paul says.

It was a painting of the Griswold Inn.

The next time he was back in Essex, Paul took a picture of the painting with him and decided to show it to William G. Winterer, formerly an investment banker who had purchased the Griswold Inn in 1972 and was now the innkeeper.

Paul asked Winterer, “Do you think I should buy it?”

Winterer responded, “Why would you buy that if you could buy the real thing?”

The wheels started spinning in Paul’s head. Suddenly, he says, “a door opened that hadn’t been open before.” He walked through that door with his family, including Doug and Joan Paul, who moved with their family to Essex to take on a hands-on role.

“There were a number of moving parts, but it is a path we choose and we’ve been on it ever since,” Geoffrey Paul says.

His decision to get involved was spurred in part by the many memories he had of the inn. When he was a kid, he and his friends would ride their bikes up to the inn, dash in to the popcorn machine, grab some popcorn, and run out, convinced they were committing some kind of felony offense. Of course, the innkeepers at the time looked on with a benevolent eye. But that didn’t reduce the thrill of the getaway, followed by a massive popcorn pig-out session, followed by, if there was any left, feeding the ducks.

“I must have been seven or eight years old,” he recalls.

When he was 10, Paul started working in downtown Essex for some of the antique dealers in town, getting them lunch at places like the Essex Restaurant, now the Black Seal.

“I think that maybe fostered my interest in objects, and the stories they tell, and the history of objects,” he says. By the time he was 13, “I even opened the shop when they went off to do the shows. And I would man the store.”

As he entered his teen years, he began to attend Essex Historical Society Meetings.

“I don’t know what made me think to do that, other than that I was a very independent child. Number one, I lived within walking distance of the village. I walked or rode my bike. I went out the door early in the morning, and worked for the various shopkeepers, and then I came home in time for dinner,” he says.

Quite simply, the village of Essex was his playground.

“To this day, I know all of the alleyways, and between and in back of every building downtown. I ran across everyone’s lawns, through their backyards, and over their stone walls,” he says. “And those historical society meetings were a part of village life.”

His family then moved to Florida. Paul went off to college, then moved to California after college and built a successful career in finance. But Essex was always home.

“Even though I lived in California for roughly 30 years, it was never home to me. I spent every summer and every Christmas at home,” he says.

And so, when Winterer said to him, why not buy the real thing, there was an inevitability to it. It’s likely Winterer knew the Pauls would take responsibility for the inn and for the legacy of the Hayden family, the inn’s builders. Paul says his family accepts that responsibility.

“Well, that’s exactly true. We benefit from the earlier generations of people who built Essex. They built Essex at a time of growth and prosperity for the new nation. The village of Essex was built from the late 1790s and thrived until 1807, when President Jefferson’s embargo put an end to the ship building era. It picked up again throughout the wooden sailing shipbuilding era,” he says. “Those industries prospered and those people who prospered then built the buildings we see today.”

And then, he says, around the time of the Civil War, the world changed again and ships were no longer built of wood, and they got bigger, and they needed deeper ports. Since the mouth of the Connecticut River was quite shallow, with a sandbar, shipbuilding and maritime activity migrated to New London and New Haven, thrusting the Connecticut River valley into a period of economic depression.

Paul pauses while telling this story, then adds, “poverty is the best preservationist.”

Not a Museum

“So no one could afford to tear down the old buildings and build new ones, which is what was happening in New London and New Haven. We were frozen in time,” Paul says. “No one had any money to do anything but to try and survive with what they had. I think that’s the reason why Essex feels historically correct. Because it is.”

Most structures survived and most of those that were added were added in a historically sensitive way, “But what’s really impressive about Essex today is that we are still a real community. It’s not a museum. Each building down there, every one of those buildings and additions, have been organic and natural, even as the use of those structures evolved.”

As an ardent preservationist, Paul says he wants not only the buildings to be preserved, but the community as well.

“We don’t want these to be houses turned into museums, lacking life. We do want adaptive use of these historic structures to keep our community alive,” he says.

If the recent improvements to keep guests comfortable at the inn are successful, Paul says people will not notice them.

“Most of the money has been spent on insulating the buildings; installing central air and heat; removing 20th century floors and restoring the original floors underneath; making sure we have modern, comfortable baths in each guest suite; and converting a number of buildings from oil heat to propane,” he says. “When someone comes to the Gris, and maybe they haven’t been there for 20 or 30 years, and they say ‘This is exactly as I remember this,’ that is the best compliment I can get.”

While Paul and his life partner, John Voege, are in Essex, they live in their home in Champlin Square, in the biggest house in town, which also has been meticulously maintained and updated in an historically accurate way.

“That house, too, is really a microcosm of our region’s history. It was built of the wooden ship building era, and ultimately the Champlin family married into the Cheney family that was involved in the ivory trade, and that is what carried the family through the industrial revolution” Paul says. “The history of the family is just a small version of the history of Essex.”

Part of that history is new money marrying into old prestige, and new money being injected following economic declines. Some of that money being injected into Essex comes from people who have made their fortunes in the financial industry, others as lawyers, and similar professions.

“You’re right, some of it is tied to finance, and the ability of people to work remotely, and also tourism and hospitality,” Paul says. “Part of what rescued Essex from its economic depression was its discovery as a yachtsmans paradise. The pleasure boaters in the 1930s and 1940s put Essex back on the map, and drew people here, and caused some of these great homes to be restored and reclaimed and rediscovered.”

A Deep Understanding

Hospitality and the hospitality industry have been the driving force behind the local economy for about the last 70 years, he says. The people who care about Essex are happy to extend that hospitality and share their hometown with others.

He tries to define why the town claimed him at such a young age, a claim it never released.

“You carry Essex in your heart wherever you go. No matter where you live, Essex is your home,” he says. “When I walk the streets of Essex...I really, literally in my eyes see this town as it was 100 years before, or what this building looked like 100 years before. I feel the presence of those people who have made such great contributions to our community, that most people have forgotten...I have a very deep understanding of the people who came before me, and what made Essex what it is today.”

That’s a sentiment he shares with other village residents. In addition to Chuck Atwood and David Dedmon, Chad and Brenda Floyd are the owners of a stone house behind the Hayden House that is currently nestled in scaffolding and undergoing a top-to-bottom, inside-and-out redo. Chad Floyd is the principal architect and partner in the internationally known Centerbrook Architects. Brenda Floyd is an artist. They currently live a couple of blocks away from their new home, on a quiet street overlooking North Cove.

“We’re going urban, so to speak,” says Chad Floyd. “We anticipate the convenience and interest of being in the middle of things.”

Peg and Ed Kobelski live in a brick house, known locally as the old rectory, to the east of the Hayden House. They have been living in New Hampshire and are looking forward to living in the village when their home is done.

“The whole village atmosphere is appealing,” says Peg Kobelski. “The people are so friendly. I just walk across the street and get an incredibly good cup of coffee. It’s very dog friendly. You meet people all the time walking your dog. Ed and I feel like we’re stewards. We’re the current stewards. The house will live way beyond us.”

Neighbors like that are what make the community what it is, says Geoffrey Paul.

“We’ve been extraordinarily lucky as a community. Essex seems to attract people who love history and love old buildings and the sense of community our little town has...people have really tried to do the right thing when they come to this town and enhance it rather than damage it. Hopefully it will always be the same.”

Check out this article on Zip06.com to find out more about the historic buildings on the Griswold Inn campus.