Naylor House Opens, Resident Recalls Her Time There

SWAINTON –– Although she can’t really remember her time there, a local woman showed the Herald a bedroom in a local historic home she slept in as a newborn baby.
Carol Porch, currently of Rio Grande, was at the county’s ribbon-cutting ceremony for the opening of the Naylor House, which will be the administrative office for the county’s Division of Culture and Heritage.
She looked around, reminisced and pointed out certain things about the house she recalled from family stories.
“My parents and I slept in this bedroom,” she said standing in a gutted room on the building’s unfinished second floor. “And my grandparents, slept in that one over there.”
Shortly after she was born, Porch explained, her parents moved in with her grandparents, John and Eva Powell who owned the property, to save money and help on the family farm before moving to a home on Stone Harbor Boulevard.
“I remember when this whole area was orchards and farmland as far as you could see,” she said. “And my grandmother used to have a flower garden along the house where she planted iris.”
In the summer, she said her father and uncle used to take the farm’s produce to Stone Harbor to huckster it to the residents of the shore community.
Porch said the county did a wonderful job restoring the first floor of her early childhood home, which now has gallery space and a meeting room, and is sure it’ll do a great job upstairs as the project continues.
“I’m glad they’re doing something to preserve this important building, not only to my history, but also the history of the entire county,” she said.
As the new home of Culture and Heritage, the Naylor House will be a meeting place for the nearly 80 local non-profit arts, history and cultural groups in the county.
Janice Lake Betts, chair of the project committee, said the Naylor House would be the central clearing house for these groups. It will also be home to changing art and cultural exhibits and future plans include a sculpture garden and public performances on the surrounding grounds, she said.
“We want the house to come alive with the arts,” she told the Herald.
“We’re excited to have this wonderful facility to use for county history, arts and cultural programs,” agreed Dr. Joseph Salvatore, chair of county Culture and Heritage Division.
The house is named for Viola Naylor, the property’s last private owner (she came after the Powells).
The county acquired the parcel, on which the Italianate style house is located from Naylor’s estate for $155,000 in 1993, after acquiring about 57 acres of her land in 1992 for $750,000.
The original purchase is now part of the zoo’s African savanna, which adjoins the Naylor estate. Records for this parcel of land date back to its sale to the First Baptist Church of Cape May in 1761.
The building is on the national register of historic places, where it is known as the Thomas Beesley House.
Beesley, a member of one of the county’s oldest families, owned the property from 1864 until his death in 1877. He served as a member of the state Assembly and Senate while living in the house.
Betts said the dreams of Florence Heal (deceased former chair of Culture and Heritage) have come true.
“She was the one who planted the seeds for the Naylor House project and I know she would be overjoyed,” Betts said.
Contact Hart at (609) 886-8600 Ext 35 or at: jhart@cmcherald.com