Magee House

John Magee's House in Bath

In 1831, John Magee brought his new wife, Arabella Stewart, from Maryland back to Bath, and build a handsome brick house on the large corner lot where the road from Cameron joins West Morris Street.
Set well back from either roadway, the house has two full floors that are elevated nearly a half-story above ground level. An old print of the residence of John Magee shows the house with a cupola and wide-bracketed eaves. In that picture, it has a delicate front entrance porch with upturned roof corners, almost Oriental in appearance.

        When you enter the house from the front, you go into a central room that opens into rooms on either side. On the right side is a large room extending to the full depth of the house. It has two fireplaces along the outside wall. The hallway which goes only about two-thirds of the way through the house is separated from this room by only two columns. Opposite this long room, across the hallway, is a room that is about the same length as the hall. Here there are leaded-glass windows between the room and the hallway. There may have been similar windows on the other side at one time. The open and the glassed interior partitions allow light from the side rooms into the hall that would have been very dark otherwise. The whole front part of the downstairs is light and pleasant. The house looks to have been planned for entertaining.

        During some work to strengthen floors upstairs during the library’s tenure in the building, two large pulleys were discovered built into a pocket space inside a partition just above the middle of the long downstairs parlor. It is speculated that these pulleys may have been used to raise a partition from between two smaller parlors to combine them into a single large room. The Magees may have wanted more open space when they had many guests.

      There is a smaller room in the back corner on the south side of the house that is thought to have been a dining room. Between it and the back hall, where the stairs are, is a dumb waiter. This must have been used to bring food from the kitchen in the basement to the dining table. In this room at present is a large oil painting of four of the Magee children with a smiling servant boy peering through the doorway. The door frame is recognizable as that of the door opening into the back hall.

    John Magee enlisted in the US Army at 17 years of age, just prior to the War of 1812. He saw four years of exciting military experience, serving in a rifle company at the onset. He was taken captive by the enemy British on at least two occasions. Due to his great skill as an equestrian, he served later as a courier, carrying dispatches between Fort Niagara and Washington. It was at this time, traveling perhaps on the Williamson Road, that he might first have become acquainted with this part of the state.

        After the war, he and his brother Jefferson walked from Fort Niagara to Bath and began work for his brother-in-law, Adam Haverling. Magee soon became sheriff of the county and later went on to Washington as a Congressman. He married twice, first to Sarah McBurney, daughter of the County Judge, Thomas McBurney. Sarah died at a very young age, and he subsequently married Arabella Stewart, for whom he build the house at the point of West Morris and Cameron Streets.

        At this time Magee was active in business ventures. There was his stage line enterprise, followed by the Fallbrook Coal Company that shipped coal from Blossburg, Pennsylvania mines by railroad to Corning, and from there, when the Chemung Canal had been extended, to Elmira, and then north to Havana and Seneca Lake and the whole Erie Canal system.

        Magee was one of the promoters of the Erie Railroad out of Bath. Old correspondence tells of the warring between the canal factions and the railroad interests in the legislature over the issue of state support for the railroads. The Erie did build through Bath, and water from the railroad water tank did supply water to the fountain in the lawn in front of Magee’s house.

        John Magee became a very wealthy man. He established the Bank of Steuben County in Bath, which was located in the building on Pulteney Park which became home to the Masonic Temple until recently, and had a bank in New York City. He and William McCay were the main officers of the Steuben County Bank. Magee had been with Constant Cook in his bank for a while; then later they became rivals, finally each trying to outdo the other in the churches they would build in Bath and Watkins Glen.

      In the political struggle of New York City bankers to wrest control away from Philadelphia bankers, Magee sided with Andrew Jackson against Nicholas Biddle and his bank in Philadelphia. At this time Magee was running for elective office in Bath and was known to support Jackson. Just a few days before the election, a political poster appeared in Bath disclaiming this position, signed by “John Magee.” His opponenets had printed this bill and found another John Magee to sign it. Magee didn’t have time to expose their ruse before the voting, and he was defeated. Whether this ploy confused his supporters isn’t known. John Magee soon moved from Bath to Watkins Glen where he built a church to rival Cook’s St. Thomas Episcopal in Bath.

        Ambrose Spencer Howell bought the house in Bath from Magee in 1863. The Howell family lived there until 1885. The Howells were merchants, and built the cast-iron front building on Liberty Street where the Sports Station is now. When Magee sold the house, he reserved the iron picket fence, two hitching posts, two iron dogs, and two large chandeliers in the parlor of the house. The story is that he never took them. He died in 1868, five years after leaving Bath, leaving an estate of eleven million dollars.

The Howells may have made changes in the house. Its external appearance is now more Federal in style than it was in the earlier print. The wood fireplace mantels in the downstairs rooms have been replaced with arched-top marble surrounds. A brick front entrance vestibule was added that has a half-round window above the outer door which looks very similar to the interior windows on the left side of the hallway. This window and one at the back of the building might have come from the right side of the hallway. A map dated 1873 shows a single story addition to the back of the building, which is no longer in existence. This wing might have housed kitchen and servants at some point in the history of the house.

In 1885 Daniel Howell took the property by foreclosure. He sold it in 1893 to Ira Davenport, Jr. who, upon his death in 1904 left the Magee house, a Liberty Street property, and $40,000 to the library association. The basement of the house, which had contained living quarters for the Magee family servants as well as the kitchen, was remodeled by the library into additional reading rooms along with a room to house the Steuben County Historical Society historical book collections.

A reconstruction program at the library in 1980 included a new roof and gutters, cleaning and sealing the exterior brick work, repair of floor joists, and refinishing of ceilings and walls. The Magee House was home to the Davenport Library until its relocation into a new facility, the Alice and Henry Dormann Library, built on the north western side of the plot of land where the Magee House is located, in 1999. At that time, the house was given over to the Steuben County Historical Society to provide a home for the Elm Cottage Museum, the Davenport Room, and the Chelsea and Liliane Kelly Children's Museum and Library in the basement, and the Historical Society and the County Historian on the first floor. Additional storage for historical documents and artifacts is located on the second floor, along with a room housing the Society’s Military Collection.