The Henry Guest House is in New Brunswick, New Jersey at Livingston Avenue and Morris Street. It was originally located on New Street (previously known as Carroll Place) between Livingston Avenue and George Street. The Georgian stone farmhouse was built in 1760 by Henry Guest. He was a New Brunswick alderman and an associate of John Adams and author Thomas Paine.
Henry Guest, who operated a tannery, bought two and a half acres on the corner of Livingston Avenue and Carroll Place (New Street) in 1755. He built a sandstone house five years later and lived there with his family until his death in 1815. Henry Guest said, “If his descendants would only keep a roof on it, the house would stand till Gabriel blew his trumpet.” In a 1817 sales advertisement the building was described as "one of the best stone houses in the State of New Jersey."
By the twentieeth century the house was threatened with demolition, and in 1924, it was moved up Livingston Avenue next to the New Brunswick Free Public Library. Over time, the roof and other parts of the building deteriorated. In 1992, the city and the New Jersey Historic Trust funded a major exterior renovation. A new roof, repainting of the mortar, and other repairs prevented further decay and today the Guest House is mostly used for meeting rooms.
Famous quotes containing the words guest and/or house:
“And here the precious dust is layd;
Whose purely temper’d Clay was made
So fine, that it the guest betray’d.
Else the soule grew so fast within,
It broke the outward shell of sinne,
And so was hatch’d a Cherubin.”
—Thomas Carew (1589–1639)
“Time, which shows so vacant, indivisible, and divine in its coming, is slit and peddled into trifles and tatters. A door is to be painted, a lock to be repaired. I want wood, or oil, or meal, or salt; the house smokes, or I have a headache; then the tax; and an affair to be transacted with a man without heart or brains; and the stinging recollection of an injurious or very awkward word,—these eat up the hours.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)