"The house was tired, and it went away"

Edwin Miller looks over the ground at the back of his old home. The door frame was left standing when someone drove past and asked excavator Grant Deller to leave it for him. The next day, only the frame remained.

The old house stood along side Lititz Pike for 200 years and now Edwin Miller looks over a pile of red bricks and a door frame. He remembers growing up here.

But the two-story brick home, built around 1810, was showing its age, and was torn down last week after decades of unuse and misuse. J. Joseph Deller and Sons Inc., of Red Lion tore down the home before it could collapse. Just north of  Neffsville,  it's a bare square of dirt where the house once stood.


Now 84, Miller and his wife of 62 years, Phyllis, wandered over what was once a 40-acre farm in Manheim Township, Lancaster County. His father bought the land in 1917, with the house, the pig barn and a beautiful Victorian style barn on it.  WILMAC of York owns the property now, part of Lancashire Nursing & Rehabilitation Center.

 Movie actress Daryl Hannah (Splash, Blade Runner, Kill Bill) had apparently made an offer to dismantle the gingerbread-covered barn and have it rebuilt elsewhere, but those plans fell through, says Miller. This barn shows a building date of 1861, but an earlier barn built on the site may have burned down, although Miller says he never found evidence of that.


Miller's father lost some of his 40 acre farm to the Manheim Township school district through eminent domain. A developer offered to buy the remainder of the property, and then build a nursing home, which couldn't be 'eminent domained', Miller says.


The house was rented for a few years, but renters didn't take care of it, and then it stood vacant. Vandals stripped the house of everything, including  wire and pipe. Some of the 200-year old bricks were crumbling and turning to chalk.

A few good bricks will be taken to New Jersey, where Miller's son lives. Maybe, too, a few of the old bottles they found.  Behind the summer kitchen, Phyllis spots half of a mill stone, something she thinks should be taken to Jersey too. With help from Deller's backhoe, the stone is dropped into a pickup truck and now sits in the Miller's Rohrstown backyard. Edwin thinks it will probably stay there.


Edwin recalls memories of New Year's Eve parties, shelling peas on the front porch and their wedding rehearsal dinner at the house; farm chores with the pigs, cattle, chickens, turkeys, quails, dogs and cats. Since Ed was an only child, his Dad, Sandy,  hired extra farm hands and 22 people crowded around the dinner table. The house had two cold water spigots, one for the cistern and the other for the well. When the work was done, Ed's mother would play her peddle organ.

Ed's father was one of six children, and bath day was quite an ordeal, as Ed was told. The family took baths in the attic, he says, and the children would haul water upstairs. Once full, the kids would take baths in descending order of 'dirtiness', Edwin says. The boys, he admitted, would always go last.


"The house served several families well, but it was tired, and went away," says Edwin. "It wasn't a good feeling, seeing the house you grew up in being demolished. But we had 20 years to get used to it happening. We were happy it was still there for Dad."


Edwin went off to graduate from Lafayette College and returned to work for 36 years at Lancaster's RCA -- the first mass produced color TV tube was built there. He retired in 1986, and now he's a guide for  historic downtown Lancaster. He'll tell you stories about two of the town's most famous residents, president James Buchanan and abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens.  The pair owned offices a couple blocks apart before and after the Civil War, and their verbal and political battles are famous. And that is just one story he'll tell. He's living history.

"They've already planted grass where the old house was," Edwin said Wednesday. "It's not growing yet, but it will."