Hunt House: Cultural Landscapes Inventory, Women's Rights National Historical Park

Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation

The Hunt House is part of Women’s Rights National Historical Park (NHP), located in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. The 7.44-acre park comprises four noncontiguous units that are thematically linked to the early nineteenth century Women’s Rights Movement in the United States and to the first Women’s Rights Convention, held in Seneca Falls in 1848. The four units are the Wesleyan Chapel/Visitor Center and the Elizabeth Cady Stanton House in the incorporated village of Seneca Falls and the M’Clintock House and the Hunt House in the county seat of Waterloo. The Hunt House unit is located approximately three miles west of the Wesleyan Chapel/Visitor Center unit. It includes the residence of Richard P. and Jane Hunt, who participated actively in the First Women’s Rights Convention. Jane Hunt, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Ann M’Clintock, Martha Wright, and Lucretia Mott originated the idea for the convention in the Hunt House. The focal point of the 2.74-acre unit is the Hunt House, built by Richard P. Hunt in 1828. The site represents a small portion of Hunt’s 145-acre estate farm that in the mid-nineteenth-century included fields, pastures, orchards, and barns and extended south to the Cayuga-Seneca Barge Canal, part of the Seneca River. After Hunt’s death, the family continued to reside in the house but the farm was subdivided and shifted from largely agricultural use to a combination of residential, municipal, and commercial uses. Today the unit is situated within a medium-density, mixed-use area at the eastern edge of Waterloo, near the Waterloo/Seneca Falls town line. It lies along the north side of East Main Street (US Route 20/NY Route 5), formerly the Seneca Turnpike, which is a major road running east/west through the region. The site’s topography is generally flat, gently sloping away from the Hunt House in the southeast quadrant, with some grading to the north of the house. The landscape has the overall character of a large residential lot, and features a range of shade, ornamental, and evergreen trees; deciduous and evergreen shrubs; and groundcovers and herbaceous perennials. Linear plantings of mature shade and evergreen trees, including silver maples, Norway spruce, and arborvitae, loosely enclose the perimeter of the property. These trees roughly follow the current lot lines and form a visual separation from the surrounding lots. Within the perimeter, the area has an open spatial character consisting of mown lawn surrounding the Hunt House as the focal element. Ornamental plantings and large shade trees define the vertical and overhead planes along the front of the house and screen the front yard from the highway. Crabapple trees are located in front of the main entrance, and ornamental foundation plantings are located around the house. Circulation features include two connected asphalt driveways, a gravel right-of-way, and concrete walkways, all constructed after 1977. The Hunt House is the only extant building in the unit that dates to the period of significance. A wood-frame cottage/pool house constructed in 1938-39 is northwest of the house, and concrete-block garage dating to 1954 is northeast of the house. Nearby is a rectangular, in-ground, concrete swimming pool installed in 1962 and filled in with sand in 2001 to eliminate potential safety hazards. The Hunt House is not open to the public, and is currently used for curatorial purposes and storage. The garage has been retrofitted with climate-control for storage of its museum collections, while the cottage/pool house is vacant. The grounds are open to the public but no interpretive programming is offered.

Hunt House: Cultural Landscapes Inventory, Women's Rights National Historical Park

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