Pember House likely to be sold
By Erik Pekar, Town Historian
The historic Pember House sits at 49 West Main Street in the village of Granville. For several years in recent times, it has sat untouched. After being sold, and some renovation work having been done this year, it was offered up for sale, and a sale appears to be in the works.
The house was built in 1873 by Franklin T. Pember. Originally, the house had two stories and only the front section was present. Pember remodeled the house in the 1890s. The back section was added and the third story was added on top of the front section.
The house’s new look was in the Victorian-era Second Empire styling. The houses built in this style were grand and large. As the years passed, their size made maintenance and cleaning more tedious than smaller houses. These issues tended to result in “Second Empire” houses being run-down or abandoned altogether. By the 1960s, this type of house was commonly shown in movies and on television as the stereotypical “haunted house.”
Franklin Pember died in 1924. The house was left to his nephew John Pember, who lived there for many years. John Pember passed away in 1967.
Over the next 18 years, ownership of the Pember House passed through several owners; none of them owned the house for more than a few years. The house was split into apartments, and greatly altered. Some these alterations impacted the house to the point that it was nearly unstable, and in danger of collapsing. The last owner in this time period started a small effort to repair the house but did not make much headway.
This was the condition the Pember House was in when bought by William Dieffenbach in 1985. Dieffenbach set to work on efforts to restore the house, with intent on making its appearance look as it did when Pember himself lived in it. In the following years much work was done on the interior and exterior.
The house was repainted in the late 1980s and early 1990s. From 1988 to 1990, the house was primed in pink. This color scheme caused much discussion in the area when it was completed. It was the color scheme the Pember House had when featured in the book America’s Painted Ladies: The Ultimate Celebration of Our Victorians, published in 1992. In the early 1990s, the house was painted in a multi-color scheme. It was then repainted in another multi-color scheme representing the colors of slate found in the Granville area.
The Pember House and property were worked on into the early 2000s. A full front porch was added. Small slate squares were added to the sidewalk. One of the last major projects done at that time was the removal of a line of overgrown brush and bushes that was along the tree line boundary with Veterans Memorial Park to its west.
Work on the Pember House stopped around 2004. The Pember House remained quiet for over a decade. During that time, there were people interested in seeing the house preserved, and many hoped that one day work would resume and the house would be restored. People occasionally made offers on the building, but were always turned down.
That changed early this year, when a small group made an offer to Dieffenbach for the Pember House, and the offer was accepted. The sale of the residence, to Pember House Restorations, closed in February; the property sold for $75,000.
Activity began to be seen at the Pember House once more. More work was done over this summer. A couple of estate sales were held as well.
Near the end of September, work began to wind down again. At the end of the month, by Sept. 29, a sign appeared in the front left window on the first story: “House for Sale – Make an Offer”. However, the “House for Sale” sign disappeared by Oct. 5.
The Pember House is under an agreement or contract to be sold. Smilansky confirmed last week that such an arrangement existed. He had noted that the buyers “…are well known in the town of Granville” and would fix up the house and “…[make] it their own residence.”
The opportunity for the historic Pember House to be preserved and restored would be great news for Granville. A sale of the Pember House to locals who will repair and restore it would be electrifying towards the advancement of historical preservation efforts in Granville. Hopefully, the sale goes through, and the house will be restored. In the event that the Pember House contract falls through, hopefully someone interested in preserving this landmark will rise to the call and make an offer.
The Pember House is one of Granville’s houses of grand stature and significance. The house is of high importance to Granville’s heritage, having been built by Franklin T. Pember, who funded the construction of the Pember Opera House (now demolished) and the Pember Library and Museum. Its place in Granville’s history, and the efforts that have been made in the past 35 years to restore the building, would aid in applying for the building’s placement on the State and National Registers of Historic Places. It would be disappointing and a great loss for Granville if the restoration of the Pember House is never completed, and it gets demolished or rots away as have some of Granville’s other lost landmarks.
Note: This article was modified after publication to correct two associated errors. John Pember's year of death was printed as 1973, and the elapsed time to the purchase by the Dieffenbachs in 1985 was printed as 12 years.
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