The George Montgomery House

The Montgomery House

When I first started getting interested in local history one of the first questions I had, as I looked at the 1868 Beers map with all the houses marked on it, was "How many of these houses are still around?" The answer turned out to be so many that 15 years into writing this blog, there are still historic houses I haven't covered yet. One such house that I only recently researched sits along the hillside of narrow Barley Mill Road, across from the Mt. Cuba Center. In fact, the reason I looked into the history of this beautiful, fieldstone home is that the Mt. Cuba Center recently acquired the house, so we can get that part out of the way now -- While, like most old homes, it once had a period when it fell into a bit of disrepair, it had been in good hands for many years, and its future is secure.

While I've chosen to call the structure the George Montgomery House, he actually only owned it for a relatively short time. There were many owners of the house over the years, and even the original build date and first occupants are still a matter of debate. This is one of those situations where we know pretty much the full story of the land, but some of the details regarding the house are unclear. And to get the full picture, we have to go back and revisit the subjects of a pair of excellent 2014 Guest Posts from Walt Chiquoine, about Irishman Con Hollahan and his estate, Cuba Rock.

The important point for us now is that in about 1753, Cornelius "Con" Hollahan purchased a 148 acre tract (seen below, along with some of the neighboring properties as they were in the 1770's) from Solomon Dixson, who had purchased it in 1752 from the heirs of Daniel Barker. Con's Cuba Rock tract is the oddly-shaped one just right of center, pinched in the middle. The Mt. Cuba Center can be seen in the northern section, above Barley Mill Road, while the southern portion reaches down to today's Ramsey Ridge. Con's homestead was almost certainly down in the far southwestern corner, where the "Irish Wall" is today. What, if anything, is in the rest of the property is never mentioned. We're left to make inferences, assumptions, and guesses as to what was built where, and when.