Old Buildings Create New Connections While Maintaining Links to the Past
For Sydney’ s Sake
By Paul Tukey
A long, comfortable conversation, daughter to mother and back, silently permeated the 229-year-old dining room where the late Mary Ann Kephart’ s remarkably confident portrait hangs on the wall.
A ceramic sugar bowl, maybe 100 years old and nestled among more than two centuries of family and house artifacts, was missing its lid. Maybe Elizabeth“ Perry” Kapsch will find it someday. A few steps around the corner, where the fading crests of the Kephart and Perry families have hung for as long as anyone can remember, the wallpaper was installed sometime in the 1980s. It might be ready for replacement, if only something suitable could be found.
“ I still like it. Mother and I worked very hard to make choices that made us both happy,” said Perry, a plein air painter known for her provocative use of bright colors and soft light.
Then there are the tall windows, some with coverings and others bare. The current caretaker of the historic home known as Chiswell’ s Inheritance is determined not to replicate her
Chiswell’ s Inheritance.
mother’ s mistake from the 1950s, committed shortly after she and her husband, George, purchased the property from her cousin.
“ Perhaps mother was thinking of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn and hung white organdy curtains in every window,” she said, laughing mischievously— as if divulging a family scandal.“ She told me,‘ This house is just much too dignified and it chewed up those curtains and spit them out.’ As the owner of an old place, you do have to learn to read the house... and it helps to live in it for a while first.”
A history of Preservation
When Mary Ann Kephart died in 2009 at age 88 after complications from a fall, she left behind one of Montgomery County’ s most profound— and some would say controversial— legacies. A descendant of Englishman Steven Newton Chiswell and his son, Joseph Newton
Chiswell, who built his namesake Beallsville landmark home in the late 1700s, Kephart had experienced the extended rich history of Europe and Japan firsthand with her husband, a U. S. foreign service officer.
When she returned to the quickly expanding suburbia of Montgomery County, she grew concerned about the pace of change and developers’ general disregard for the past. Two non-profit organizations, Historic Medley District and Montgomery Preservation, as well as the Montgomery County Farmland Preservation Program— which led to the 93,000-acre agricultural reserve— were a direct result of her belief that celebrating the land and the area’ s oldest significant structures were key to the region’ s vibrant future.
14 plenty I summer growing 2025