The Benham home lots - 1820
t the time Miles Benham bought the large 14-acre property once belonging to Jonathan Bordwell, it was for the most part bare land. Bordwell still lived there, apparently, because the deed mentions that fact. He was Miles Benham's business partner (they were tanners) and it's barely possible that it was Bordwell who built the brick federal-style house at 165 Main Street.
It 's more likely that it was built by Benham; Cleveland said he did, and he certainly talked to people who would have remembered. The tannery at the back of these two lots was built very early by a man named Charles Phillips, who lived on the lot but lost it to creditors in 1817. Phillips was a brother of the chairmaker Samuel F. Curtis' wife Abigail, and of Sophie, the wife of physician and politician Joshua Lee. The father of these three siblings was named Pearly Phillips, and Samuel Curtis named his son Pearly P. Curtis after the boy's grandfather. The younger Curtis became a prominent businessman later on, being involved in the mills along the Outlet, including what's now Birkett's mill, and the large papermaking venture at Fox's mill.
The tannery used water from a pond backed up behind a dam on Jacob's Brook, which at times stretched to just below the (then) bridge on Clinton Street. It filled up all night and was emptied during the day, which with the stink of the tanning operation itself must have made life hideous for the well-to-do people who lived in this neighborhood. Maybe the wilderness of mud and horse manure that made up Main Street competed well enough to drown the other out.
The brick house was built about 1820 and served as the Benham & Bordwell store. They sold leather goods and shoes there. Miles Benham's brother George acquired the lot next door from the George D. Stewart estate and built what Cleveland describes as a "snug old-style story-and-a-half house," known for decades as the "Benham cottage." The lot was much larger than Miles', and included the tannery, the pond and the water machinery. After Bordwell left Penn Yan, the two Benham brothers ran the business, and George kept it at least into the 1860s. The old tannery house is mentioned in deeds as late as 1906, and the mutual right of way down to it between the two buildings is still in use as a driveway.
Above: the two Benham home lots. Miles Benham's brick house was on the more northerly, and the house does still stand today. George Benham's house stood on a much larger lot that also included his tannery, down by the creek. His house was demolished to build larger one, and that to make room for a Grant's store; that building was refurbished later for the Birkett office building now on the site.
Both modern lots were once part of the 14-acre plot of Jonathan Bordwell. When Miles Benham bought it, he built a house and lived there for many years. The more southerly part was acquired later by George Benham from the Stewart heirs.
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