GUILDERLAND — Lori and Bill Cain raised their two children not far away, on Armstrong Circle just outside the village of Altamont, but she always had her eye on the 19-Century Federal-style home at 780 Route 146, one of the oldest homes in the area. 

Lori Cain fell in love with this house “years and years ago,” she said, when they first moved to Altamont. It went on the market twice while they lived nearby “but we had kids to raise and college tuition to pay.” 

Then, when her children had grown up and gone, she noticed that it was for sale again, in 2006. After finally having a look inside, she convinced her husband that they should buy it. 

“This was a project,” she said, that they took on five years before she retired in 2011, and a decade before he did. 

The couple, now in their mid-60s, met as students at Siena College. He had grown up in Westmere, and she in a rural part of Columbia County. Her career was in insurance, as a claims manager, she said, and he was in hospital-software sales. 

Over the years, they have done many different restoration projects, many of them undoing changes that had been made before. The Cains always wanted to return the home’s features to better align with the pre-Civil War age of the house. 

Their home is one of just five or six that remain in old Knowersville, the original center of village life until the train station arrived in the latter half of the 19th Century and the village moved west and became Altamont.

The Cains’ home was a separate building, serving as a dining room for a hotel that no longer exists; the hotel was owned first by Peter and Conrad Crounse, and later by members of the Keenholts family, Keith Lee, who wrote a book about Altamont’s history, told The Enterprise this week. 

Lee referred to a 1958 Enterprise column by the late Arthur B. Gregg, then Guilderland’s town historian, about a man who was on his way home to Richmondville from the Civil War, with both of his legs shot off; he was carried first into the Crounse Hotel and set on a table, “where he laughed and joked with every one”; he was also taken to the White House dining room, a reference to what is now the Cains’ house.

The young man was Corporal James Tanner, Gregg’s column says, who later was an expert stenographer called to the Petersen House where Lincoln lay dying, who “witnessed every tragic event of that fateful night.” 

Other Knowersville buildings that remain include the Inn of Jacob Crounse, which has been restored by another couple; the Knower House, across the street from the Cains’; and the deteriorating Dr. Frederick Crounse House, which the village and town have been considering demolishing for several years. 

The Cains’ house has been open to the public as part of the Victorian Holidays house tour — an annual Christmastime event hosted as a fundraiser for Altamont community Tradition — twice now. In 2011, Lee wrote in a description for that year’s tour that Route 146, once known as the Schoharie Road, was the main route between Albany and Schoharie, and that area establishments provided food and lodging for travelers.

Projects 

Lori Cain bought the house largely because of the center staircase, which runs in a square, she said, with its dramatic lyre-shaped newel post at the bottom that she calls “the lyre.” The staircase is “old, old, probably at least the 1860s,” she added. 

Higher up, at the level of the second floor, there is a mysterious split in the edge of the railing. She says with a mischievous smile that she and her husband have made up a story about it: “We tell our grandson that this is where the Indians put in their hatchets.” 

The wide center hall was, when they bought the home, interrupted on both sides by a half-wall that jutted in and was topped with columns that were “very Greek Revival-y looking,” Lori Cain said. The couple brought the half-walls back almost flush with the hallway’s edges, cut the columns down, and used them as design features elsewhere; they now serve as stands in the living room for two bird figures — “just little bird statues that I’ve bought over time,” said Lori — and another piece of a column is topped with a plant in the kitchen. 

The two columns topped by birds each stand in front of a window, at the center of an archway supported by a center column. The archways are another renovation added over the years by someone else, Lori Cain says, calling them “very Victorian.” They may date from about 1900, she said. Although the archways are not original, “I would never take them down,” Lori Cain says. “It adds a bit of formality to a room that otherwise is not formal at all.” 

The couple doesn’t have a playroom for grandchildren — her son’s children are 2 and 4 years old — but the center hallways functions as a playroom, Lori Cain said, and the kids can also run around “the circuit,” she said, formed by the hall, the dining room, and the kitchen. 

There are fireplaces in the living room and, across the center hallway, the dining room, both original to the home, according to Lori Cain. A red brick chimney rises from each end of the house. The living room fireplace has hardware inside it that indicates it may once have been used as a cooking space, she said. 

That fireplace “is distinctive in its lack of adornment — the lines are simple, but the effect in the room provides a sense of distinctive design,” Lee wrote for the house tour. 

The mantel in the dining room has more decoration; it has three carved wooden medallions — a decorative oval at either end and a pinwheel shape in the center. 

Lori Cain believes the staircase is original, and Lee writes that its rail shows “the wear of well over a hundred years of use.” 

The Cains spend most of their time in the living room and the kitchen, they said. They modernized and expanded the kitchen and rooms off it including a bathroom and a mudroom. 

Bill Cain pulled up the kitchen floor and discovered a number of layers, like an archeological dig: black-and-white one-foot-square tiles, with linoleum beneath, then wood beneath that, then more linoleum, and finally the original wood floor, in unusable condition. 

From someone who sells hardwood, he found boards of the right vintage, and had them laid down and stained. “It pretty much matches the rest of the house,” Bill Cain said of the new old flooring.  

Lori Cain plants and takes care of all the gardens. “I like perennials because they last,” she said. The backyard, which boasts a pond with a fountain, is shady, she said, and, in addition to many ferns and hostas, the couple has roses, lilies, and “peonies galore in the spring.” 

Stones with stories  

The Cain property was once three separate parcels; they were combined in the 1960s, according to Lee’s research. Orlando Martin, a member of the Keenholts family who died in 1931 and had been one of the owners over the years, had two sons, Christopher and Charles Martin. 

In the woods, next to their well cover, Bill Cain found a large stone, flat and several feet long, on which was scratched: “Charles Martin 6/1918” and, in capital letters, “TO HELL WITH THE KAISER.” He put the stone in a wheelbarrow and brought it over to a cleared area facing the house and set it down against a tree, where it rests today. 

A worn headstone — the Cains don’t know whose it is — marks a grave in their backyard. The stone reads “Father,” and the years 1849 - 1927, Lori Cain said, adding, “I should have cleaned it.”

Lori Cain brought in other stones from the property and set them in a circle with the gravestone, and planted a succulent garden of hen and chicks in the center. 

The future 

After caring for their historic home for 13 years, the couple is ready now, Lori Cain said, for a warmer climate, possibly Virginia.

The home is big for just the two of them, they explained, but when children and grandchildren come to visit, it is a bit tight, with just three bedrooms. 

“Probably not another historical house,” Lori Cain says. Her husband adds, “We’ve hit our limit.” They want contemporary next time, and more bedrooms. 

Any ghosts in the old home? 

“There’s no spirit in this house, no negative energy at all,” Lori Cain said. “I have been in houses that felt cold or something. But not this one! I think this has been a happy house for generations.”

“We’ve been happy here,” she said. “But now it’s time.”