Old Stone House

Among the shops of the busy main street stands a small, plain stone house with a garden behind, looking centuries older than everything around it, because it is. This is the Old Stone House, reputed to be the oldest building still standing, unchanged, in the whole city.

The house was built in the eighteenth century, around the 1760s, a modest dwelling and workshop of grey stone, and it has survived, almost unaltered, while the city grew up and changed around it for more than two centuries.

Its survival is partly an accident of legend: a story, later shown to be mistaken, that a founding figure had used the house helped save it from demolition, so a myth preserved a genuine piece of early history.

Inside, the small rooms are furnished simply to recall the life of ordinary working people of its early days, a rare window into the modest domestic world of the eighteenth-century town, not the grand houses of the wealthy.

The plainness is the point: where most historic houses shown to the public are mansions, this is a humble home, so it tells the story of ordinary craftspeople and families rather than the rich and powerful.

Behind the house lies a quiet English-style garden, a green and shaded retreat just off the busy street, a small surprise of calm among the shops and crowds.

The house is run as a small free museum, easy to step into for a few minutes between the shops, so it makes an easy, unexpected stop on a walk down the main street.

Standing in its low, old rooms, with the modern street just outside, gives a sharp sense of how much the city has changed, and how little this one small building has.

It sits right on the main commercial street, so it is impossible to miss once you know to look, and it pairs naturally with a wander through the shops and the historic quarter.

Its very ordinariness, a plain stone house outliving everything around it, is what makes it quietly moving, a survivor from the town's earliest days.

Step off the busy street into the old stone rooms and the garden behind, and the modest, early life of the town comes briefly back. When you walk back out into the shops, the little house stands among them, far older than it looks, easy to pass and worth the pause.