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Return to Glory

Couple works to restore Queen Anne-style home

The Inter-Mountain photos by Joan Ashley The Preston Boggs House on Main Street in Franklin is now owned by Anthony Judy and Rhonda Halderman, who are performing extensive restoration work.

FRANKLIN — A beautiful old house on Main Street in Franklin is getting the attention it deserves, as a local couple plans to restore the Queen Anne-style home to its former glory.

Listed on a walking tour brochure, the house has gables trimmed with decorative shingles; an elaborate wrap-around porch finished with a “gossip gazebo;” and a polygonal tower stretching up over Franklin. A keener glance reveals a grand ole lady standing proud in her bedraggled finery over tattered petticoats waiting to be refurbished — white paint faded, some shingles loose, some porch rails rotting, the red metal roof and sagging gutters rift with rust.

Anthony “Tony” Judy and Rhonda Halderman are taking on the project, after falling in love with the property.

“When I saw it on the market, I wanted to see in it — just for curiosity. It took us three hours to go through it! The house cast a spell on me. I couldn’t sleep!” Halderman said.

She said she tortured herself with reasons why they shouldn’t even attempt to take on the renovation, saying, “there was no way we should get into debt; a three-hour drive from my flying homeport in Dulles; distance from all the city amenities. But I started sketching out what each room could look like. That was it — we closed on Aug. 28, 2017.”

Anthony Judy works on one of the many fireplaces in the old house.

Halderman has flown for United Airlines for 39 years, currently as a purser and lead flight attendant. She has no plans now to retire, “because the house will be a money pit!” Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, she moved to Fredricksburg, Virginia, where she met Judy’s cousin. She used to visit Franklin to visit Judy’s relatives.

“I’ve felt a pull to Franklin for about 20 years. It’s funny — I once sat in this front yard for a Treasure Mountain Festival parade,” she recalled.

Judy’s parents were from Franklin, and his dad was in the Army. After his dad passed away, the family moved to Anderson Hill in 1968. In 1976, Judy joined the Navy and traveled the world earning the rank of master chief. Now he works for the Armed Forces Service Corp.

He would drive by the house thinking it was such an “eyesore.”

“Rhonda came to visit in July, and we went inside the house. Four hours later, she said, ‘This is our house, and we’re going to live here!'” he said.

Anthony Judy and Rhonda Halderman look over some of the antique finds in the old house.

Under the house’s furbelows and turret is a mail order blueprint home, designed by George F. Barber, a carpenter turned architect entrepreneur, who used magazine advertising to build a firm employing 30 draftsmen and 20 secretaries. They helped generate blueprints and deal with thousands of clients located in nearly every state of the union, as well as South Africa, Europe, Japan and China, according to “Architects and Builders, a Biographical Dictionary.”

Barber’s clients included bankers, professionals and farmers as well as wealthy industrialists, all attracted to his pictured house designs targeted to modern early 20th century American tastes and standards of comfort. His success might reflect the scarcity of local architects during this era.

Town historians say Dr. Preston Boggs’ wife, Gertrude Bowman, saw this home in the “Petersen Magazine” and selected the plan as her dream house, which was finished about 1905. Mrs. Boggs was an artist and used a turret bedroom as her studio, flooded with natural light from the circle of many windows.

After Dr. Boggs’ death, she rented and later sold the house to Dr. Jasper Moyers, who was a circuit riding physician. Moyers had practiced medicine for years at Oak Flat outside Franklin and moved to the town so his daughter, Theda, could attend a good high school.

Legend has it that on Sundays, friends would gather at Moyers’ house to concoct some of the medications for him to dispense to his patients the following week. When he passed away, Theda Mallow inherited the property. At her death, her son, Dr. John Allen Mallow, received the property and sold it to Judy and Halderman.

The Preston Boggs House on Main Street in Franklin is now owned by Anthony Judy and Rhonda Halderman, who are performing extensive restoration work.

“We had so much clearing out and cleaning up to do. Wallpaper was torn down, windows needed recaulking. We were here clearing out before we closed! Theda kept everything, old papers, medicine bottles; one room had been continually broken into … and was littered with paraphernalia and bottles.

“We hauled out 27 loads of trash to the dump and demolished and hauled away a decrepit garage costing about $2,100, with Tony doing most of the work,” Halderman said.

The house is on the National Registry of Historical Places, and Halderman noted, “There are some tax benefits, but that will all go right back into the house.”

The cleanup process has revealed a few valuable historical items.

“We have found some pretty cool stuff among the trash all over the house and outbuildings,” Judy said.

“Old medicine bottles, license plates, photos, negatives, tax bills. In 1936, the tax was $91.64. Everything here that is salvageable, we are saving,” he said, pointing to an oak table that had split into several pieces and was undergoing refinishing.

The woodwork inside the house is breathtaking, with elaborate mantles detailed in dentils and fluted columns, fabulous door and window frames, a fantastic square staircase stretching through two landings to the second floor, chair and picture-hanging rails decorating the plaster-covered wattle framework, stripped of its wallpaper and waiting new decoration.

Halderman has each room purposed and decorated in her mind. She has a lot of furniture, and friends have offered pieces conforming to the age of the house.

“We want to keep it as our own home; we can fill it up with family,” said Halderman, who has three daughters and 12 grandkids. Her daughter loves the house and plans to visit as often as she can, Halderman said.

“We could have never have done this anywhere else but here,” she added. “This is home!”

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