31 Upper Whitfield Road

Upper Whitfield Road crosses the upland north side of the Town of Rochester, near the Marbletown line, in a neighborhood the early records call Newtown. It was settled by second and third generation families working the hills above the Rondout's alluvial plain, and they built the way the whole town built, in stone: census takers counted as many as eighty-six stone houses in Rochester in 1855, and the town still holds one of the densest concentrations of pre-Revolutionary stone houses in America. Three of the survivors stand on this one road, each with its own National Register listing: the Johannes Rider house at number 7, a Krom family house at number 45, and this one at number 31.

The listing says 1770. The Register record is more precise: about 1764, a story-and-a-half stone dwelling in the linear plan Rochester's builders favored, entered on the National Register of Historic Places on August 10, 1995 as the Krom Stone House, documented that year by the town-wide survey behind the Rochester Multiple Property Submission. The Kroms were a Dutch family in Ulster County from the seventeenth century, and several of their houses in the town hold Register listings of their own. Around 1879 a two-story, four-bay frame ell went on at the rear, the move that carried these farmhouses into their second century, and the house now runs to 3,865 square feet: hand-hewn beams, wide-board floors, and three wood-burning fireplaces, the broadest set into the basement hearth.

Four bedrooms and four baths thread through the stone house and its ell, with updated baths and heat-pump systems set into the old fabric and spring water still serving the house. A nineteenth-century cottage stands beside it, ready for guests or a tenant. The land runs to 17.4 acres on both sides of Upper Whitfield Road, with ponds, meadows, gardens, and mature trees, and the outbuildings are all still working: a barn under a red roof, a sugar shack for the maples, a two-car garage, a fire pit, and a tire swing by the front door.

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