By Kalleen Rose Ozanic
The Hour
WILTON, Conn. — The Wilton Historical Society is objecting to plans from the town volunteer ambulance corps to demolish a historic home formerly owned by an emancipated slave to make way for a new headquarters.
The Wilton Volunteer Ambulance Corps bought 232 Danbury Road — a home that once belonged to John C. Walley, who was born into slavery around 1803 before he was emancipated in 1824, according to Julie Hughes, archivist at the Wilton Historical Society’s history room — to build a headquarters that can house equipment on site.
In July, Hughes said she had hoped the property’s eventual buyer would keep the house intact as an example of one of few historic 19th-century Black homeowners in town.
The property had been under contract for about two months in July after it was listed for sale near the start of the year, Mike Spremulli of William Pitt Sotheby’s Realty said at the time.
“The person who’s in the contract now with us is aware that it is, in fact, a historic property,” he said earlier this summer. “They’re going to make some minor modifications to it as far as I’m aware, without, you know, destroying anything or changing anything up too much.”
Spremulli didn’t disclose the buyer at the time, but WVAC’s plans to demolish the home extend far beyond those “minor modifications.”
The plans Joe Cugno of Cugno Architecture presented to Wilton’s Architectural Review Board last Thursday show a two-story building of about 4,000 square feet that would allow for lower-level storage and a private area on the second floor for corps members that would include bunks.
“It really didn’t work into our plan to save (the building), and I looked at it and I really couldn’t see how I could find a place for it,” Cugno said. “I couldn’t see building something and then trying to put it on this building or adjacent to it.”
After discussions of architectural improvements to the plan, the board tasked the corps’ representatives with finding a way to incorporate the Walley home’s history into the new build.
Kathleen Royle, an associate at the Gregory and Adams firm in Wilton , acknowledged that the corps’ plans put an “essential service” against a home that embodies the oft-forgotten history of racism and slavery in the North, Hughes said earlier in the summer.
Royle said one of the corps’ considerations is adding plaques or panels that detail the history of the Walley house.
“It is the only standing Wilton house owned by a formerly enslaved person,” Hughes said in a statement in September, urging residents to defend the home to the board ahead of the meeting.
One resident, Daphne White, forwarded an email from Hughes to the board to be entered in public comment.
“It is clear John’s house should be preserved and used as an invaluable teaching tool, shedding light not just on the history of slavery in Connecticut, but on how freed people fit into their local communities, and what possibilities and impediments they faced after gaining freedom,” the forwarded Hughes email said. “As John’s fellow Wiltonians, we all have a duty to preserve his home as the last remaining physical relic of his history and his voice.”
Kathy Poirier, a member of the board, said she hoped for some plans that could retain some of the Walley structure.
Royle noted that if plans were modified to keep the structure, funds to save the historic building would need to be solicited.
The board decided the corps’ plan will come before it again following its architectural feedback during the Thursday meeting. The board’s next meeting is scheduled for Oct. 10.
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