As promised, the town has sent a formal letter to the owner of a 4-acre parcel on Valley Road that includes an antique house, offering to purchase the property for $1.2 million, First Selectman Kevin Moynihan said Tuesday.
1124 Valley Road. Credit: Michael Dinan
Both the Board of Finance and Town Council approved “the town’s course of action,” Moynihan said during a regular meeting of the Board of Selectman.
“We sent an offer letter to the First Taxing District of Norwalk for $1.2 million to enter into good faith negotiations to have the town buy the property for open space purposes,” Moynihan said during the meeting, held at Town Hall.
The formal offer (with funds to come from the New Canaan Land Trust, see below), if it’s rejected, could prompt the town to pursue the legal course of seeking to acquire 1124 Valley Road through eminent domain.
The 18th Century home there, a prominent red-painted house opposite the foot of Benedict Hill Road, by the Grupes Reservoir, is slated for demolition as early as May 13. That’s 90 days from the time the application to raze the house was made by the Taxing District, a temporary delay imposed by the New Canaan Historical Review Committee.
Taxing District officials have said they’ve offered to sell the house itself to the New Canaan Land Trust, with a bit of land around it, for less than the $1.2 million that the organization has offered to pay for the entire parcel, and have offered in the past to let the Land Trust or any other interested party physically remove the home if they want it.
Yet the Land Trust is interested in the entire property, officials have said, partly because it abuts its 10.3-acre Browne Wildlife Sanctuary.
In the offer letter dated April 23, Moynihan said the town “has an interest in the property to (a) provide open space and (b) preserve and protect the Grupe-Nichols-Browne house which dates from about 1760.”
Officials from the Connecticut Department of Economic Community Development’s State Historic Preservation Office on Monday also weighed in.
According to the agency’s state historic preservation officer/director of culture, arts and historic preservation, Kristina Newman-Scott, the property “is an important, tangible expression of the story of New Canaan’s nineteenth-century rural development.”
“As it stands on its current site surrounded by stone walls, the property is individually eligible for listing on the State Register of Historic Places,” Newman-Scott said in a letter to the First District Water Department’s general manager, Dominick DiGangi, also dated April 23. “It meets the State Register Criterion I for its associations with the town’s agricultural development and Criterion 2 as a notable example of a timber-framed farmhouse expanded during the nineteenth century.”
The property last was appraised at $1,590,600, according to tax records.
Selectman Kit Devereaux asked during Tuesday’s meeting if, under its agreement with the Land Trust, the town would receive the $1.2 million to purchase the property from the organization. Moynihan said yes.
let’s hope it happens…
We have walked this quiet and serene corner of Valley Road and Benedict Hill for over 30 years. We watched the beautiful Chauncey Riley house demolished, and the large 7 acre parcel across from the Grupes farmhouse change from a wild meadow to a large manicured lawn. The farmhouse and it’s surrounding acreage stand alone to remind us of another time and New Canaan’s past. Our town has lost too much history. Hoping the town can save this important house and join it’s acreage to the Brown Preserve.