4918 Highway 82

Neil Larson signed the National Register nomination for the Bloomvale Historic District on September 30, 1991, and he counted the place one resource at a time: eleven contributing features and three that did not contribute, among them Isaac Bloom's Federal house of about 1801, the 1913 stone cider mill, the last surviving mill worker's house, the dam and its water system, the stone abutments of the eighteenth century bridge, and four buried building sites. Of the mill parcel he wrote that the only other built feature on it was a small storage shed recently put up behind the mill, and that the shed did not contribute. The two-story frame building on the rise east of the mill, the one with the stained glass, is nowhere in that inventory. Nothing published about the property since, across years of magazine shoots and rental listings, gives it a former use either. The record does not say what this building was, and it may not have been standing when the record was made.

Larson's footnotes credit an interview with Don Salvato, then the owner of the mill property, who by 1991 had reassembled most of the original mill parcels into one holding. The family had bought the mill as a shell in 1966, an architect straight out of school and an interior designer, and moved in by 1971. Their daughter, the prop stylist Ariana Salvato, has run it since, renting the mill out as a photo location to Elle and W. Who set the roundels into this gable, and when, is not written down anywhere.

Two stories of vertical board siding on concrete piers, with a gabled hood over the front door and a slatted balcony above it. The round leaded window in the gable peak is divided by a broad white cross with rounded lobes at its corners and glazed in amber, gold and blue. A second roundel in the same pattern sits directly below it, in red, blue and cream, and reads from the lawn straight through the open balcony bay. The wall openings are filled with divided-light sash in several sizes, no two banks quite matching. Inside, the walls are white and the floors poured and grey. A black spiral stair turns up out of one corner. An orange cone fireplace stands on thin black legs on a raised hearth, and its flue climbs through the floor above into the upper room, where the ceiling opens to the rafters under the roundel. French doors on both levels give onto decks that carry out over the brush toward the water.

It sells with the rest of the property: the cider mill that Edward C. Swezey, a civil engineer from Brooklyn, raised in 1913 out of the stone of the burned cotton mill, with a twenty-inch Samson horizontal turbine by James Leffel and Company of Springfield, Ohio in its lowest level, built to shop drawings dated June 24, 1913. Then the dam, the falls, the swimming hole, the caretaker's cottage, the walled courtyard, and the cotton mill foundations in the woods. Just over twelve acres, four parcels, and one building the record never got to.

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