Why a couple moved Geneva's 180-year-old Miller-Gully

One of the earliest houses built in Geneva has a new address after a painstaking move Tuesday.

The 180-year-old Miller-Gully House is sitting on beams resting on a new foundation on East Side Drive, about 1½ miles from where it was built in 1839.

It cost Heidi and Adam Gibbons about $80,000 to move the two-story house, which they bought for $2. That does not include the cost of the lot, which they purchased in 2014, or of restoring the house.

And the couple won't even live in it. They already have a home, an old historical one, elsewhere in Geneva. They just hated seeing the empty house, at the top of a hill leading to downtown Geneva, fall into disrepair over the past 11 years. When a developer bought the site and offered the house to anybody willing to move it, they quickly stepped up.

“Something he (Adam) was so passionate about, I support,” Heidi Gibbons said Tuesday. “He just wants to save all things old.”

The house was built for Hendrick Miller in 1839, for $17 and 20 bushels of wheat. The first occupants were John, Ann and Susan Dunn. There was once a distillery on the site.

Homeopathic physician J.B. Gully bought it during the Civil War.

It was designated a local landmark in 1981.

The house was lifted off its foundation in October, but there were some delays in finalizing the permits for the move.

Mover Robert Hallet of R.J. Hallet House Moving Co. of Beloit, Wisconsin, said the house — which is missing siding where a wing was removed — is one of the oldest he has moved. “It may look ugly, but it is in good shape,” he said. He marveled at its construction: It is so old, it has beams of hand-hewn oak. And he noticed saw marks on the siding that indicate how old it is, because the lumber was cut with a reciprocating saw action, not a circular saw.

Spectators included Nancy Hill of Batavia, whose uncle Bob Smith lived in the house for several decades until he died in 2001. Smith was a public works director and a deputy fire chief for Geneva, she said.

“It was a showplace when Bob and (his wife) Geri lived there,” she said. Her uncle, who restored antiques, worked on the house. Under subsequent owners, some of the items in the house, such as a banister, were removed, she said.

The move took several hours longer than expected. Gibbons said ComEd became concerned about lifting an internet/cable television service line into the electromagnetic field generated by a ComEd electrical line on East Side. So the movers had to wait for a ComEd crew to come out and cut power to the electrical line.

The Gibbonses have to install a sill plate on top of the new foundation before the house can be lowered into place. A new wing will replace the one that was removed. Salvaged windows and trim will be reinstalled, Adam Gibbons said.

They hope to sell the house, ultimately, to a buyer who will finish renovations with historic preservation in mind.