WIlliam Warren Mack House

If you enjoy looking at post cards of local scenes, you may have seen this one, or some much like it. The house was so over the top, that it attracted a lot of attention, at least from the photographers. All the cards say "Mack Residence" or "Mack Estate". So who was Mack and what happened to the house?

The house was on Main Street just north of the Erie Canal. This map from 1904, shows the house to the east of Main Street, and that Mack also owned the land that is now the baseball fields on Green Street.

Mack was William Warren Mack, who was born in Ira in 1821. The Mack family is a prominent name in Weedsport history, being the owners of many businesses and even a bank. Some obits even say that the family lived in "Mackville", which was located just south of the village of Weedsport. The family had an interest in Mack and Company, a tool manufacturing business in Rochester. His wife was Laura Jane Peck, of the Camillus Peck's, and who were very distant relatives of a Peck family who lived in Phelps. 

The 1875 map shows the owner as C G French. The newspaper reports that Mack purchased this house in 1880 from HB Baxter. Baxter was a local banker who was ill and seeking treatments at nearby sanatoriums. The paper says the sale was for $9000, or about $212,000 today. The paper called the sale a real bargain.  All the furnishings came with the house. An article in the 1914 Port Byron Chronicle details a fire in the home that burned off the third floor. In it is says that the house was sixty-one-years old, placing it's construction in 1853. The style of the house we see is Gingerbread Victorian which means it may have been remodeled. The article notes that the house cost $40,000 to build and that it sat on twelve acres of lawns and groves. It was said that Amos was going to rebuild the house as it was. The house was the summer home for the Mack family. When William Warren died in 1901, his son Amos Peck Mack took ownership and continued to use it as his summer home.

The next mention of the house that I can find is that in 1919, the Reid family moved into the house. Amos died in 1923 and in 1925, George and Lettie Perkins of Pelham, NY purchased the house and property with the intention of building a new house in the style of their home in Pelham. The Mack house was to be torn down.

The house that is there today is the Perkins House. It has barn like feel to it and the lighthouse is in the front yard. The house was willed to the school and used by the school for a number of years. More on this in later posts.