The Lyman Mead house, priced at $2.9 million, was built in Italianate style in 1855 and has been designated as a significant home of its era by the historical society of the town of Greenwich.
GREENWICH — The Mead family has lived in town since 1660, when brothers John and Joseph Mead arrived after first moving from England to Massachusetts, then Long Island. They bought land from Richard Crab and other early settlers when they came to Greenwich, and Mead family members still live in town more than three centuries later.
Circa 1855, one descendant, Lyman Mead, built a three-story home in Italianate style, also known as the Tuscan or Lombard style, which was popular in this country from about 1840 to 1885. The wide overhanging eaves with elaborate curved brackets with pendants, the low hipped roofs and the square walk-up cupola seen at the more than 5,000-square-foot Lyman Mead house are typical of the era.
Lyman Mead, born in 1824, was the son of Mary Lashley and Zenas Mead, a farmer who served as the town treasurer for many years. For two terms he was also a member of the state General Assembly. One of his ancestors was the second Ebenezer Mead to reside in Greenwich.
The 2 Silk Road home is listed at $2.9 million. Within it, beyond the neo-Classical, columned entry porch, a wide central hall opens on one side to a guest powder room and, through pocket doors, to the living room, which once were separate front and rear parlors, as was popular in the mid-19th century. The matched pair of marble fireplaces in the room that runs the length of the house have hand-carved arches centered with a bracket motif.
To the other side of the hall is a library and the dining room with a similar fireplace in marble and boxed, paneled beams running across the ceiling.
The roof is new, there's central air conditioning, but much of the original charm remains.
The newer kitchen of creamy limestone features a large central island, a wet bar with ice maker and wine cooler, a breakfast area and a tile mural behind the range with a bottle of wine, whose label reads Lyman Mead 1855. The mural also depicts cheese, lemons, figs and an olive branch. There’s a large laundry room with a full wall of cabinets and a mud room nearby, and a second family powder room is on the first level.
Upstairs is a bedroom that was used as guest quarters for Greta Garbo, the famed Swedish actress, when visiting her attorney, Joseph Buhler, who owned the house from 1921 to 1950. Buhler, a senior partner in the firm Buhler, King and Buhler in Manhattan, was also the attorney and friend of other theatrical lights of the era — actor H.B. Warner and Jack Whiting, a song-and-dance man, among them.
In World War I, Buhler was a captain in military intelligence and founded the Men from the Front Section of the Committee on Public Information. Before World War II, he organized the Wake Up Committee to alert the public to the dangers of the military plans of the Axis powers. He received citations from U.S. presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt and was decorated by England in 1947 for distinguished service in the cause of freedom, according to The Historical Society of the Town of Greenwich.
Also on the second level, the master suite has a marble fireplace, along with a dressing room and an exercise room. There are three additional bedrooms on the second level and two additional baths. The third floor has another two bedrooms and two baths and a family room that at one time functioned as a ballroom, according to legend. Stained-glass doors open to a short flight of stairs that run up to the cupola, with its arched stained-glass panels over the windows and built-in benches for seasonal views of Cos Cob Harbor.
Throughout the house are nine-foot ceilings and oak floors, along with front and back stairways, and a railed porch that runs along the rear facade, according to the listing agent, Kathy Adams of Greenwich Fine Properties.
The property is now 0.7 acres, but it was as large as 370 acres early on. Today’s gardens with multiple perennial flower beds also feature Kousa dogwoods, copper beech trees and ancient maples. Within the last three years, among other improvments, baths have been updated and a new one installed on the third floor, central air conditioning added and the exterior repainted.
Ebenezer Mead, son of John and Hannah Mead, bought Indian-owned land in the “Indian Field” in 1663 and received a home lot in 1684. In 1694, the town of Greenwich appointed Ebenezer “to keep a place of public entertainment for man and beast.”
His Mead Tavern stood for almost 200 years on the Post Road in central Greenwich, until it was torn down in 1886 for the Presbyterian Church. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Greenwich taverns were centers of commerce, government and socializing, brimming with customers waiting to sail on the weekly packet boats, filled with local produce, to New York City.
Captain of the East Connecticut Regiment at Horseneck in 1738, his son Ebenezer II was a justice of the peace for Fairfield County from 1732 to 1758 and deputy of the state Assembly from 1733 to 1734.
Lyman Mead grew up on the family farm and received a common-school education. The common schools of the 19th century, locally controlled, were public schools, meant to be open to all and geared to youngsters from 6 to 14 years of age.
Lyman Mead was also a farmer who first married Sarah Acker, with whom he had three children. Her father, Peter, kept a dry goods and grocery store at the corner of Greenwich Avenue and Main Street. After her early death at age 27, he married Harriet Mead, daughter of Jabez, and the couple had 10 children, all born on the farm.
Active in politics, Lyman Mead was in the state legislature three times and a delegate to Republican county and state conventions. An incorporator and director of Greenwich Savings Bank, he was also a director of other businesses and served as treasurer of his school district for many years.
