Oliver Miller was one of the early settlers by most standards: he moved here in 1772. Nevertheless, he was not the first European settler on this site: a certain Silas Deckster or Dackster or Daxter (or some similar spelling: names were often spelled several different ways out here on the frontier) had owned the land before him.1
The Miller family are famous for having more or less provoked the Whiskey Rebellion, which broke out into open hostility when the federal marshal showed up at the nearby home of Oliver’s son William in 1794 (Oliver had died in 1782) to serve a writ for failing to pay the whiskey tax.
The Old Stone Manse we see today had not yet been built by the time of the Whiskey Rebellion: it was built by Oliver’s son James, who inherited the property. A log house stood here in Oliver’s time. In the late 1700s, a stone kitchen was added in the back. Then, in 1808, the smaller stone section we see here on the right side of the house was added. Finally, in 1830, the old log house was replaced with the larger stone main house—the section in the picture below.
Although the house was never really designed—it just occurred over a number of decades—it nevertheless makes a pleasing sight. We are reminded of what Charles Stotz, our pioneer preservationist, wrote about these early unpretentious farmhouses: “Their quiet lines and excellent mass are wholly satisfying. It seems that in the essential qualities of architectural design their builders, curiously enough, were capable of doing no wrong; and instinctive good taste is demonstrated in the thoughtful choice of site and the placing of the building with relationship to its surroundings.”2 Stotz described this house in particular as “one of the best preserved examples of indigenous domestic architecture.”3
The springhouse is older than the main house, and may even have been built by Mr. Deckster before Oliver Miller bought the land. We are told by Wikipedia’s sparsely sourced article that a date stone was recently found with a date that some people read as 1765, but others as 1785.
A log house on the grounds is easier to date: a date stone near the top of the chimney clearly reads “1988.” The timbers and stones are a little too neatly cut for an eighteenth-century house, but it does give us a good idea of what a log house of pioneer days was like.
A Pennsylvania bank barn is also on the grounds. Bank barns are built on slopes to give two floors ground-level access, which makes storing hay and keeping animals much more efficient. Imagine having to carry your cows upstairs every time you wanted to put them away.
- Most of our information comes from the Oliver Miller Homestead site, with some from the Wikipedia article about the Oliver Miller Homestead. ↩︎
- Charles Morse Stotz, The Early Architecture of Western Pennsylvania (New York: William Helburn, 1936), p. 17. ↩︎
- The Early Architecture of Western Pennsylvania, p. 36. ↩︎
Leave a Reply