One of the most prosperous individuals in early Southampton was Ichabod Strong, who dammed the Manhan River and established a sawmill there in the early 1730s; that mill complex, once known as the Strong’s Mills complex, now part of the Lockville Historic District. Strong, who was described in a genealogy book as “a man of stirring business qualities of character” and “best of all, a remarkably godly man,” also built four farmhouses in the area, which his sons and grandsons inherited. One of those farmhouses, part of the National Register of Historic Places, is on the market right now.

The 3,020-square-foot property at 271 College Highway has three bedrooms and two bathrooms, plus a barn, a pond, and a corn crib within its 1.8 acres. It gained some attention recently after being featured on For The Love Of Old Houses, which has four million followers on Facebook and more than 800,000 on Instagram. Its listing price is $549,900 as of this writing.

Strong, who was born in Northampton, moved to the area that would eventually become Southampton in 1733. (He’s even named on a monument in Conant Memorial Park in honor of the town’s earliest settlers.) A year later, when he was 23, he married a woman named Mary Davis, who was 21. Over the span of about a decade, they had six children: Ichabod, who died in infancy; Aaron, who was killed by a cannonball at the Battle of Saratoga in the Revolutionary War at the age of 41, leaving behind a pregnant wife and five children under the age of 14; John, later described as “a man of energetic industry, of genial, social habits, and of warm piety”; Solomon, who died a few months before his second birthday; Mary, who lived until the age of 92; and another Solomon.

The elder Mary died in 1749 at the age of 35 or 36 (only her birth year is known, not the date), and Ichabod married a second wife, Eunice Sheldon, two years later. She gave birth to Ichabod’s seventh son, Job.

In 1768, the year John Strong married his first wife, Sarah, Ichabod built the house that now sits at 271 College Highway, and it still bears Ichabod’s name on two plaques. He died 30 years later, leaving the house to John, beginning what would become a tradition of keeping the house in a family through generations. When John died in 1821, the property went to his son Phineas, who was reportedly “a man of earnest religious ideas and habits, who turned his words into deeds and put his principles in practice.”

The house changed hands a few times in the decades following 1855, when Phineas died, but a Rhode Island man named George Gorton moved to Southampton and bought the property in 1874. When Atherton Parsons wrote his 1967 book “A History of Old Houses,” which chronicles the stories of old homes in the area, the house had been in the Gorton family for nearly a century.

Even though the current ownership is not original, much of the house itself is. The woodwork comes from trees that once were part of the property (in an area that’s now an open field), and a hearth (though it’s now inoperable) sits in the living room. Much of the furniture, too, is original, or at least historic, including a number of handmade Oriental rugs.

Even so, the house has gotten a number of modern additions, including central air conditioning, forced-hot-water heating, modern laundry machines, a septic system, and, of course, electricity, though the current owners have done as much as possible to camouflage those additions in the house (by painting the electrical outlets to match the existing color scheme, for instance).

Realtor Darcie Gasparini said a few potential buyers have been interested in converting the house into a bed and breakfast, but the majority of interest has come from people who would want to live there themselves – people who “just love old houses.”

Jimmy Zolendziewski, who’s running the estate sale for the house’s current owners, said that some potential buyers have expressed interest in renovating the house to get rid of some of its quirks – slightly uneven floors, for instance – but he hopes the next buyers keep the house intact overall.

“If you were to modernize it,” he said, “it would lose the character, and you don’t want to do that with an old house like this.”

Even so, there is one original feature that gives us a clue about the Strong family, but which interested buyers in 2025 may find tricky: the height of the kitchen ceiling. That said, it made this 5-foot-2-inch reporter feel tall.

Carolyn Brown can be reached at cbrown@gazettenet.com.