If you take one of the ghost tours of the old Huffman home, now known as Huffman House this October, let that little shiver of the season lead the way and let the spell of history be your guide.
The people who once called this stately house home have a tale to tell about life in Greene County as the 20th century came knocking. Look around at the beautifully carved staircases, the stained glass windows and hand painted wall coverings. This was once the height of social standing, when the riches of an extraction boom allowed some families to build the most amazing home they could imagine.
When Thomas Jefferson Huffman, (1849-1937) and his family took up residence at the foot of Richhill Street in 1907, he was already wealthy and a bit of a trendsetter for what was about to change our world forever.
According to G. Wayne Smith, on May 29, 1902 the Waynesburg Republican reported “The first auto-mobile to appear in Waynesburg was on exhibition here last week.” By August 1903 T.J. and son G. Edward were off in their automobile to vacation at Deer Port Maryland and the new word had lost its hyphen. Not to be outdone, “Shortly thereafter, T.J. Wisecarver, a Waynesburg businessman, became the owner of an automobile.”
T.J. was a successful farmer turned businessman when he moved from Ruff Creek to Waynesburg in 1900.
When skilled craftsmen and artisans finished creating the Huffman family’s dream home in 1907, T. J. and son G. Edward were ready to do business on High Street. They would soon be doing the profitable work of any century – building furniture and coffins – and embalming the dead.
Their new business venture would pick up where another family business, sadly, left off.
The Ganiear family and its furniture building business had been on the corner of High Street and Whisky Alley since 1847. Mary Beth Pastorius has done extensive research into the family and first wrote about their life and times in the May 2016 edition of GreeneSPEAK! Cabinetmaker James Ganiear and his wife Rebecca Johnson bought a lot from the estate of William Crawford, an original town survey lot 60 feet wide and 160 feet deep, enough room to build a business and raise a family, 19th century style.
The Ganiears added rooms with a front façade you can still see today to the small colonial brick home on the western corner of the lot that became their home. They also added a frame shop on the east side of the lot next to Whisky Alley and opened for business. Cabinetmakers of that day also built coffins and Pastorius notes that the Ganiears did embalming on the premise as well.
When James Ganiear died in 1864, Rebecca and sons John Hayes and David continued his work. John Hayes replaced the frame shop between 1896 and 1900 with a handsome three-story brick building faced with rusticated sandstone and a cast metal cornice bearing the family name. His son Charles Hedge was now managing the business and the new building would be expanded in back beginning in 1902 as Waynesburg and the rest of the county continued to prosper.
Pastorius tells us that according to descendent Charles Ganiear, furniture was manufactured and sold on the first floor, caskets were crafted and embalming was done “in the lower level” in the middle of the building and accessed from the alley.
These glory days are captured in “Waynesburg Prosperous and Beautiful” a publication by Fred High, who photographed and identified all the fine houses and businesses in town in 1906. The photograph of the Ganiear building shows J. Hayes, son Charles Hedge and grandchildren standing in front of the plate glass windows on High Street, captioned “the oldest furniture store in town.”
A professional photograph of the business taken by “Babbit, Waynesburg” describes the untimely death of Charles Hedge, at age 37 in its cutline: “Following a family tragedy in 1908, Ganiear sold the furniture and undertaking business to G. Edward Huffman who is shown here with his family.” The Ganiear family would continue to own the building until 1953. Today, Mary Beth Pastorius owns their family home next door
When T.J. died at the respected age of 87 his obituary in the Washington Observer states he was organizer and CEO of Huffman Furniture and Undertaking Company until his death in 1937.
Daughter Inez Huffman and her husband C. W. Parkinson took over the family home and a generation of neighbors grew up calling it the Parkinson House. In 1987 Glenn Toothman Sr. bought the house and turned it into a family legal practice.
At some point, the Rice family opened shop in the Ganiear building and Waynesburg Floral was born. The building was almost lost when Waynesburg Floral closed its doors in 2000 and the building fell into years of slow disrepair. A leaking roof did major damage to the interior but the sturdy brick building with its handsome stone facade was worth saving. Purchased by the county Redevelopment Authority in 2016, the rear additions were removed and the original building was renovated with new windows, up to code infrastructure and put on the market – another Hail Mary save for history.
Through decades of boom and bust economic cycles, a gratifying number of the grand old houses and buildings of Greene County’s county seat are still with us, thanks to conscientious family business owners, citizen historians and county officials who value the handprint that history leaves on a community.
Pastorious notes that Waynesburg’s historic district was recognized in 1982 as part of the National Register of Historic Sites, with architecture dating from the founding of the county in 1796 to the beginnings of World War II.
Saving history depends on the right people doing the right things, sometimes just in the nick of time.
After the law offices closed, Huffman House gradually disappeared into a tangle of vines, waiting for a new generation to see its value and be inspired to save it. Pam and Kent Marisa became the new owners in 2021 and the fixing up has begun. This October Huffman House is celebrating its ghostly “before” condition as it is readied for restoration. Let the memories of all who lived, grew up and sometimes died in this old house be summoned once more. Outsider Paranormal SWPA has been on site for months, exploring every nook and cranny, letting their machines, devices, rods and cameras pick up on the chatter and misty imagery of things that don’t quite have a name in the world of day-to-day living.
There’s pencil marks on the wall to be seen, the last traces of some of the children who grew up here. Where are they now? What are their names?
“This sliding door with the heavy velvet curtains can be pulled, cutting this part of the house off from the rest. You see that in old funeral parlors,” Damon Keys noted. Standing in the high-ceilinged front room with its exquisite stained glass accents, he pulled a chrome-plated crucifix from a shelf. “We found this here. You can see the holes where it would have been fastened inside the casket during the viewing. Families usually took them home as keepsakes.”
As we stepped through the front door onto the intricately tiled porch with its towering columns, Keys gestured to the group’s wide array of devices to measure what can only be described as “What is it?”
“This is a pretty amazing place. I think people are going to love exploring with us.”