The Stewart Sisters' Plot: 1835
impson Buck began selling off his half of the Dorman homestead in the mid-1830s. Among the first of these was a parcel about 48 feet wide on Main Street north of and adjacent to Eben Smith's homestead. To this was added another parcel the following year, which squared off the trapezoidal shape of the first piece, so it was nearly as wide in the rear as it was on the street.
These sales were to two sisters: Lydia and Mercy Stewart. Cleveland mentions another sister, Lucretia, who later married Rufus Schofield. And some years later it was yet another sister, Elizabeth, who sold the two parcels to the village of Penn Yan. How exactly they were related to the other Stewarts in Penn Yan is unknown to me, but I suspect they were sisters of John D. Stewart, the well-known downtown merchant.
In any case, two shops were built on the parcel, both of them millinery stores. The one on the south was run by the Stewart ladies themselves, and the other at first by Elizabeth Ellis, and after her by the Misses Margaret A. Graham and Margaret Grady. The village razed the Stewart shop (and residence) in 1857, but the other stood until 1884, when it was replaced by the beautiful building destroyed by fire along with the village firehouse in 1968.
Elizabeth Stewart sold both original parcels separately to the trustees of Penn Yan in 1856, for a second firehouse in the village. The first faced North Avenue (then Head Street) just east of the intersection with Main; but now that nearly all the businesses had moved from that neighborhood down to the foot of Main, another was needed. In 1857 the trustees sold the northerly part of the parcel to Elisha G. Hopkins, who sold furniture and coffins there that he manufactured across the street and up where the Public Library is now, at 214 Main St. The building on this parcel was built of brick, with a residential apartment above. A wooden porch was added some years later, and as mentioned above, the whole building was razed in 1884, by then-owner Augustus Klube.
Thus it took just over 20 years after the original sale (to the Stewart sisters in 1835, until 1857 when the village sold part of it to Hopkins) for this parcel to be split for the first time under separate ownership. The block that stood there, comprising the firehouse and the small store attached to it on the north, were a sort of detached island on Main Street. North of it and across a lane stood (by 1860) the massive Benham House; to its south was the parklike home of Eben Smith, with its Greek Revival house standing well back from the street behind a screen of mature trees. It wasn't until 1889 that this space was filled in and this part of Main Street presented a full commercial face.
Above: The area in yellow marks the location of the Stewart sisters' plot. The parcel was split into two in 1857, and the more northerly one acquired more space by an additional purchase from Elizabeth Ellis in 1878.
