01940 Winter 2022

WINTER 2022 | 17
sale, the Pelletrinos, who had six children,
knew that they had to jump at the chance
to inhabit a home with so much history.
When the Pelletrinos began researching
the home, they realized that not only was
the spacious property the perfect place to
raise their big family but it also had many
layers of history.
Built in 1846, the home, constructed
from red oak and maple trees on the
property, was used as a hideout for slaves
on the Underground Railroad. Slaves were
hidden in secret rooms in the home’s attic,
which Pelletrino explains is the size of a
“big apartment.”
“There were two bedrooms and then they
were two smaller rooms. One was used as a
kitchen and one was almost like a storage
area and if you go into that one it was
going along the eave of the house. If you
go into that one … there was a panel that
was on top, it looked like just the regular
wall. But if you pulled it out, there was the
hidden room and it was big enough for a
couple of people to be sleeping in there,”
said Pelletrino. “When we were buying
the house, the real estate agent said when
they first opened that up, there was a straw
mattress in there.”
Pelletrino and his family owned the
home for more than two decades, beginning
in 1998. He and his wife sold the
historic residence in 2020 after all of their
kids had grown up and left, leaving the
couple with a need to downsize.
Pelletrino said living in a home possessing
an intricate history is a rich experience.
At one time, one could walk from the
home to the cemetery down the street
without ever going above ground, courtesy
of a number of underground tunnels.
As Pelletrino tells it, the tunnels were
sealed by police in the 1970s in an effort to
quell juvenile delinquency.
“Our house there was a driveway next
to it from another house that our tunnel
connected up to so the tunnel from there to
the cemetery was blocked off because kids
were getting in there and they’d go up in
the crypts, and be smoking and drinking so
the police decided for safety purposes they
better just close down the tunnel so they
filled them all in but there was in the basement
… one small room that was a root
cellar,” says Pelletrino. “You had a dirt floor
and in the corner of that there was this
built in Cabinet and the walls were granite
stones. So if you look at the cabinet, a great
amount of care was taken into taking wood
and cutting it to the contour of the granite
so there would be no openings behind the
KING, continued on page 18
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