Helen E. Ellis and Rosamond Peirce
Interviewed by Mary Giles
September 15, 1975

Helen E. Ellis, Rosamond Peirce and Mary Giles - A conversation about the way in which Helen Ellis remodeled a neglected old house at Westport Point.

Helen Ellis - I bought it about 1916. Some people say there's something new going on all the time. As we live, we change the things to fit what we're doing.

Mary Giles - What were some of the things you first did to it in 1916?

Helen Ellis - You see, my brother was with me when I bought the house, and he was scared to death that I'd get into more than I should. He was sort of holding me down, he knew my weaknesses.

Rosamond Peirce - You said it had hideous wallpaper all over the walls. You probably took that off first.

Helen Ellis - Oh, it was awful. You couldn't have seen a more awful looking house. We cleaned it up as much as possible and took off the old wallpaper, but it was very untidy. Some would think that I am wrong in saying that, but it was so. It wasn't in order at all, and it wasn't as if I had to be careful of hurting anything because there wasn't anything worth saving. I'd paid for it and I wasn't going to just….. My brother thought it was terrible, that I bought this thing. He didn't know.

Rosamond Peirce - You were teaching school at Milton then.

Helen - I had perfect right and I had money enough to get it, and I didn't see any reason why I shouldn't. I had a perfect right.

Rosamond - You decided to run a tearoom here - do you remember?

Helen - Yes, but not for many years - just to get people here, to get them interested in the house. People were awfully nice about it. The Prescott's came down every weekend. She brought all her boys down and they always sat at a little round table in the front window. I had already taken off the old wallpaper and cleaned it up. Can you remember, Rosamond?

Rosamond - No, I wasn't here then, but I think you said you put on sort of an oatmeal paper - just a plain paper. That was long before you began paneling.

Helen - It was wonderful because so many nice people came because they knew me.

Rosamond - It was after the tearoom when you and Carlton Wing, one of Westport's carpenters, put up the paneling yourselves.

Helen - He didn't do planning - he just followed along doing what I wanted.

Mary - It's the old 18th century type of raised paneling. Rosamond - It's an old ivory color and you haven't changed the color from the beginning.

Helen - The latches were here. Rosamond - The living room fireplace had a stove in it. The fireplace had been ripped out the way they used to do. The big old fireplace in the pantry had been ripped out.

Helen - By taking out the stoves, we tried to get it back to its original condition.

Mary - What were the floors like when you came? Do you remember?

Helen - Board floors. I don't think they were anything too much, so I did the spattering because that covered up all the secrets. It's badly done.

Mary - I don't think it's badly done. I think it's lovely. As long as I can remember, this room has always had a blue floor. Has it always been blue?

Helen - I know I put the blue color on and spattered it.

Rosamond - I know I've always seen it blue.

Mary - Did Carlton Wing build the mantelpiece?

Helen - I put the tiles in.

Rosamond - I think you said the mantelpiece itself was here.

Helen - Yes, I added the tiles.

Rosamond - And the corner cupboard in the dining room was in the original house. It is a very nice one. You said you took the panels from an old door and made them into the mantelpiece for the dining room.

Helen - The windows are the same as they have always been, and I thought it was quite surprising because they're quite big panes. I don't know whether the windows were that size when it was built because I don't know when it was built. I was trying to think who would be able to talk with me on the subject.

Rosamond - It's hard to find the age of some of these old houses. Because of the paneling in the dining room, you would think this one was (built) around the late 1700's - 1760 or 1770 or around there.

Helen - It's just a guess.

Rosamond - There's a piece of feather paneling in the dining room - just one piece - and that was about that era.

Mary - I've been so impressed with the way you created your own unusual crewelwork design for your big wing chair and the smaller one in the dining room, and the other crewelwork. Most people send away for patterns. In all these things you made up the stitches more or less as you went along.

Helen - Well, all these things I made to fit what I was doing. You can't put your finger on just what I did and how I did it. Rosamond, if you turn that stool up, it would help show how the pattern fits into the frame of the wood.

Mary - I know so many people who attend classes in crewelwork and get pieces all stamped out and the stitches they should use are all described. That isn't the way you approached you work at all, is it?

Helen - No, no. I couldn't do that.

Mary - Aren't you glad you couldn't?

Helen - Yes, I wouldn't want to do someone else's design.

Rosamond - Remember when you went up to those women who were experts in Boston and asked them what they would advise, and they told you they were terribly sorry but they couldn't give out any advice unless you bought one of their designs. When you went back some time later to get some more wool, one said, 'Oh, how did you do this?' And you said, 'You wouldn't tell me how I was supposed to do it, so I can't possibly tell you how I did do it.' You sketched out freehand what you were going to do as you went along, but you didn't have a set pattern.

Helen - I think that little footstool behind you shows how very informal I was in the way I did it. It's now crewel - it's just some sort of stitch I made up as I went along, and I think that is the way I worked.

Rosamond - Where the little greenhouse is now was originally a door to the outside. There was the front door and this door too. I call that the 'pool room' because it has a pool in it.

Helen - I think of it as a little greenhouse. If you think of a poolroom, you think of a big thing.

Rosamond - We put the plant room on about 15 or 16 years ago. I was trying to think who did it. I think it was Carlton Wing who helped you with the woodwork and Allen Haskell helped you later with the planting. You had the door into the greenhouse made into a French door. We didn't use it much as a greenhouse - it sort of grew into a greenhouse as we went along. Most of the rooms here are about 14 feet by 14 feet. I wanted a large room for my bedroom, and I did it by just adding six feet onto this room.

Helen - I wouldn't want it that way for anything. I like nice cozy rooms. It's gone into a barn almost, but I told her to go to it and do what she wanted. I was horrified because she made it into a larger room. She has large tastes.

Rosamond - I love it. We had this paneling done so it would look like the rest of the house. We had an excellent man do it.

Helen - If anyone wants to have anything done to old houses, he's the one. He's just perfect. Vaughn Baasch.

Rosamond - He lives in Westport and he's very good in connection with older house, and he's done over a lot of the historic district in Newport, and he was doing work down at the Old Dartmouth Historical Society when they renovated an old building.

Mary - I remember when you added something to your room, Betsy. Will Brightman and Dave Tripp worked on that.

Rosamond - Yes, you put that little alcove over the garage.

Helen - Yes, it was over the garage that goes under the house. There's a new garage for Rosamond's car.

Mary - So you really have two driveways.

Helen - We wouldn't have had room to park two cars down here.

Rosamond - We've had a variety of heating arrangements here. At first we had a coal stoker, which we had until it began to be difficult to get coal out here, and now we have electric heating, which is very satisfactory.

Helen - Electric heating is looked upon as a luxury, but it's the cheapest thing we could have, because we can regulate the heat in each room and turn off whatever is not in use.

Rosamond - The rooms heat up very quickly because the ceilings are so low. They're only six feet. We know several people who have to come in quickly and sit down.

Mary - One of the nicest places to be in this house is that little porch off the kitchen where the baskets are, where you can sit and look out over the garden.

Rosamond - Well, we haven't very much this year, but we did in the past.

Helen - I built that little porch. This house was a very crude house; the only think that I liked about it was that it was on the road here. The kitchen, pantry and woodworking shop were here to begin with, but I made them into something much nicer. They were very crude. The walls of this house are very thin. The width of that post is the width of the wall - it's only about four inches thick.

Rosamond - The boards on the outside are put up vertically. They couldn't blow any insulation in here. I think they used newspapers under the paneling, and when you had the electric heat put in, they put regular insulation up under the eaves so we wouldn't waste heat.

Helen - I don't think we're giving you very much.

Mary - Yes, this is exactly it - the fact that you have taken this house, taken off the old paper, put paneling on, painted the floors and spattered them blue and red… You've had so much fun out-of-doors with the garden.

Rosamond - Out front, we had a fence - half picket and half stonewall and last year we took down the pickets and made it all a stonewall. Elliot Taber put it up five or six years ago.

Helen - If you knew how much I hate picket fences, you'd know I wouldn't have nay more than we could help. These beautiful elms were here when we bought the house. I try to take care of them. The house is called 'The Five Elms.'

Rosamond - We've done a lot of planting with Box and Librium and bulbs and ground cover and a great variety of shrubbery. We have Borne Knowles, who has very fine men working for him; take good care of the trees. The men and boys who do this work are the best we could have.

Helen - This house was hard to live in because it had an open attic and so few closets. The closet in the front hall was where it is now, and the stairs went up just as they do, but we had two bedrooms and a bathroom made in the open attic, with a big hallway in the center. You see, my family was a big family and sometimes they would come down and just take over. I've made some special plans for this house and the way the plans are made now, nothing in this house can be legally removed.

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