08/04/2026
Some Thoughts on the Women of the Ayers-Allen House... from the current "Hausfrau"...
In the nearly 30 years we’ve owned the house, I have often thought that the reason it is still here after 288 years is because of the women who came before me.
In a history of Metuchen written in 1870, the author interviewed Deborah Bonham Ayers – reportedly the village’s oldest inhabitant at the time at age 90 – and her younger sister Eunice Bonham Ayers. The sisters never married and lived here for many years together. I can imagine them sitting in the parlor, which we call the living room now, in rocking chairs smoking their pipes and telling Dr. E.M. Hunt all their stories. In his book he says they told him:
**In the house, since enlarged, lived a Mrs. [Catherine] Allen, and on it was a sign, “’Allentown’--Cake and B**r Sold Here.” Between the long [church] meeting which, according to New England custom, was held morning and afternoon, with half an hour or an hour intermission, it was not unusual for the young men to get a ginger cake and a glass of b**r at this famous restaurant. In these days women as well as men sometimes rode to church on horseback, and now and then voted at town elections as was their privilege.**
A business, run by a woman in the late 18th and early 19th centuries – and I’ll bet she was one of those who voted in those town elections, too. Then it was inherited by mostly women, including the Ayers sisters mentioned above. When it finally passed out of the original family in the 1920s, it was the Wale family who bought and “modernized” it (by adding utilities and bathrooms). Margaret Wale operated a gift shop here, from what is now the music room, and ran it for many years, and her daughter Katherine wrote stories about the ghost that also supposedly lived here - and was married in the Living Room.
Soon after the Wales moved on, Louise Neill King and her husband Sam bought the house. She was from West Virginia, worked as a teacher, and lived here for many, many years by herself after Sam died in the early 1960s. She was very protective of the house, and worked with local historian Marion Stone to get the home listed in the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places, with the hopes it would somehow protect it from being demolished. While she lived here, she allowed a ghost hunter and a very famous medium named Ethel Meyers to come and investigate – but not disturb - her ghost.
When Mrs. King died, her niece Nancy steered the realtors – two more women – towards selling the home to people who would appreciate it. My husband and his family were not convinced, but my family knew we’d found a little bit of New England here in New Jersey and supported me in insisting this should be our home. Over the years I’ve learned more and more about the house, including that the Aunt of the builder was hung as a witch during the troubles of 1692 near Salem, just like some of my ancestors had been. And, we’ve found links between the Ayers/Allen families and my own early European colonizers.
And for those of you wondering about the ghost, or ghosts, some say there is a Hessian soldier roaming about here. Maybe there is. But I’m fairly certain that if such things as ghosts exist (and who am I to tell them don’t, even if I don’t believe), then it’s Catherine Allen, the Ayers Sisters, Margaret Wale, and Louise King lingering about with me. Hey, and maybe I will "linger" about here someday as well. Boo!
