939 Joseph Chadderdon Road

Joseph Chadderdon Road takes its name from a family threaded through the hamlet around it for the better part of two centuries. In the Acra Village Cemetery, four generations of Joseph Chadderdons are buried: the first born in 1776, who lived to ninety, his son Joseph, born in 1809, Joseph Pierson Chadderdon, born in 1895, and Joseph N. Chadderdon, who died in 2012. Federal postmaster rolls add another chapter. Heber Chadderdon was appointed Acra postmaster in 1903, and Marian Chadderdon carried the office from 1914 until her retirement in 1948.

Acra itself was a turnpike hamlet. An 1884 county history counted about eighty residents along the Windham Turnpike, with two churches, one store, a hotel, a blacksmith shop, and a cider mill, and recorded the local claim that Thurlow Weed, the newspaper editor and political boss, was born a short distance east of the settlement. Farming, the same history notes, long remained the town of Cairo's predominant occupation, and this farmstead is a surviving piece of it.

The farmhouse went up around 1850, and the Greene County record still describes it plainly: old style, a story and three quarters, wood siding, one fireplace, full basement. Inside, 2,804 square feet hold four bedrooms and two baths under wide-plank floors and the original details of the era. The later addition is the argument for the whole place, a post and beam Great Room under a vaulted ceiling of handhewn beams, anchored by a woodstove, the kind of room the original farmers never had and would have understood immediately. County records date a remodel to 2004.

The 14.18 acres unfold as open meadow and specimen trees, framed by the two red barns that give the farmstead its silhouette and its utility. The land sits at the foot of the Catskills with long mountain views, down a quiet country road off Route 23, the old turnpike line that still runs west toward the skiing at Windham and the high peaks beyond.

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