$650G renovation planned for historic Miller's House at Blydenburgh Park

Suffolk County is planning a $650,000 renovation of the Miller’s House at Blydenburgh County Park in Smithtown this fall, county officials said. 

The three-story, 3,500-square-foot 1802 Federal-style house occupies one of the best-preserved mill sites on Long Island. Its interior, with hand-carved mantels, molding, floors and staircases, has not been seen by the public since part of the foundation, built into the side of a hill, collapsed five years ago. 

After renovation of the foundation and the two-story front portico, the house will be furnished and reopened for tours, joining the nearby mill and the grand Blydenburgh Farmhouse atop the hill. The setting, on the north edge of Stump Pond, one of Long Island's largest freshwater bodies, “is in a way more extraordinary than the buildings, but the two together give you an extraordinary view into late 18th century and 19th century Long Island,” said Richard Martin, director of Historic Services for Suffolk County’s Department of Parks, Recreation and Conservation.

Restoration will take six months, Martin said. Workers stabilized the nearby mill, originally built for grinding grain, several years ago. Later work will include cutting back brush to restore the panoramic view of the pond from the farmhouse, and restoring the mill to working order. 

Dozens of mills for processing cereals, timber and textiles dotted preindustrial Long Island, and this site — powered by the Nissequogue River — had all three types. “This was one of the biggest of its kind in Smithtown and on Long Island,” Martin said. Isaac Blydenburgh and the cousins Caleb Smith II and Joshua Smith II, scions of prominent Smithtown families, began work on the site in 1798 and opened two mills by 1801, according to a 1971 Suffolk County Planning Department report in the Smithtown Library’s Long Island Room. Teams of laborers cleared hundreds of wooded acres and built a 10-foot dam to hold the Nissequogue’s waters. The reservoir became Stump Pond.

The house’s first occupant was a miller, Isaac Smith. Milling was a skilled profession and “millers always had money,” Martin said. That might be inferred by the size of the house alone, but the Planning Department report suggests Smith lived especially well, with walls of “silver plaster…It is not known today how the hard satin-smooth finish or the gray marbleized effects were achieved.” The house was believed to be the only one left on Long Island with such walls.

Smith lived only a few years to enjoy his finery but part of the site operated commercially until 1924. The Blydenburghs sold the property to the family of Massachusetts governor William Weld, which sold it to the county in 1965 — one year before the Parks Department was created. 

Sarah Kautz, preservation director at the nonprofit Preservation Long Island, offered a theory about the house's odd positioning against the hill: "A lot of older buildings incorporate landscape to protect from weather and help insulation." By renovating, she said, the county was investing “in a place that’s really priceless. The benefits of this investment will be realized for generations.”