DANVERS — Town Hall is not the only historic building in town undergoing a makeover.
Last week, contractors were busy installing six new windows at the historic Rebecca Nurse Homestead at 149 Pine St., a 25-acre property owned by the Danvers Alarm List Company and associated with Rebecca Nurse, an important figure in the Salem Village witchcraft hysteria of 1692.
The $6,000 project, half of which was paid for by a grant from the Essex National Heritage Commission, fixed windows at the back and at the sides of the saltbox house built around 1678.
The windows' sills had rotted, the glass had become fogged and the lead holding the panes had deteriorated.
"You can see the windows that are pre-restoration, and they are in pretty bad shape," said Alison Hardy, whose Topsfield-based business, Window Woman of New England, restores old wooden windows. While Hardy did the woodwork, Cathryn Blackwell of Jamaica Plain put in new lead holding the panes of glass.
Curator Kathryn Rutkowski and tour coordinator Candice Clemenzi said the windows probably date back to a restoration done in 1909 by Joseph Everett Chandler.
While there is no way to know if the window panes contained glass original to the home, Clemenzi guessed some panes were old because they had the purple tint of amethyst glass.
Each window costs $1,000 to restore, but Hardy said vinyl replacements would not be a money-saving measure, besides not being historically accurate.
"The difference ... is even though they (the windows) were in horrible shape, they can be fixed and last another 100 years."
Staff writer Ethan Forman can be reached at 978-338-2673, or by e-mail at eforman@salemnews.com.
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