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They fell in love with the house right off. It was late Queen Anne in style, sadly needing repair, minus modern conveniences, its kitchen fallen in, and the beautiful pine paneling in the remaining rooms covered with 200 years of paint. Itching to bring it back to its former glory, the Nicklins immediately agreed on a bargain price, paid it, rolled up their sleeves and got to work.

"Everybody thought we were crazy. It was a real mess," Mrs. Nicklin reminisces happily, "but we found out it was built in 1678 by Cornelius Comegys, a Dutch Quaker from New York. He was his own architect, and his house was like no other in the world. It had a wonderful cat-slide roof, and there was even a secret drawer in the wainscot." Besides the charms of the house itself, there were five running miles of Lankford Bay shore with it, a muskrat marsh, ducks and oysters, plus four acres of asparagus, fifty acres of tomatoes, and seventy acres of grain crops.

FILLED WITH amateur fire, the Nicklins contracted with available local workmen to rebuild the crumbled kitchen wing from a word-of-mouth description of its former appearance. While that was going on, a man was hired to scrape the paint from the woodwork. When after several months of labor with a two-inch scraper he had completed about four square feet, they were ready to quit. Luckily they learned in time about a quick homemade remover: lye, lime, soda and hot water. That did the job in a few hours, and it's been their standby ever since.

That done, the wood was finished "natural" with applied turpentine, linseed oil and wax. The rest of the restoration was merely a matter of patching plaster walls, pointing brick, opening fireplaces, installing plumbing and picking up appropriate period furniture to fill the rooms.

Delving into local history, the new owners even came up with the house's original name. As "The Reward" (and how!) it ended up two years later as a showplace on the Maryland Garden Tour and in Hulbert Footner's "Rivers of the Eastern Shore," where it is described as "a dream house for the lovers of the antique." As Mrs. Nicklin explains it, "Thank goodness, we didn't have enough money to do anything wrong to it! We just put it back on its feet, the way it was originally, and it turned out charming. We couldn't afford an architect, and now we realize the only architect we knew would probably have put white columns on the front."

The house wasn't all, though. In no time at all the Nicklins had added a boat-house to the property, complete with boat, a new tenant house for their recently engaged tenant farmer, a milk house, and a 100-foot shed for implements. Eventually getting around to moving the stable, they had the bad luck to choose for its new site what must have been the ancient family burying ground. When the plumbers began digging down to hitch up the water supply, they quit work for obvious reasons after the first few tries and refused point blank to go on, swearing "no good'll ever come of living in this place!"

They were wrong. Like all city people turned loose for the first time in the country, the alleged desecrators went wild. In due course they had acquired a dairy herd, pigs, turkeys, chickens, horses, and were trapping muskrats, besides growing vegetables and feed for the stock. Those were depression days, with turkeys selling for 13 cents a pound and wheat for 60 cents a bushel, but labor was proportionately cheap too.

Though not making money hand over fist, the Nicklins would probably be there still—if one day a real estate broker hadn't knocked on the front door. "I can get you a mighty fine price for this place if you'll only let me sell it," he said artfully. When he actually mentioned the price, it was so staggering the Nicklins felt they had no choice.

They listed the Reward, and sat back waiting for the new owners. Times being hard, the new owners were inordinately slow appearing, and after a year even the broker left for other parts. The Nicklins were determined to sell now, however. They were dying to start work on their next old house—which the crafty broker had already sold them before he left!

IN 1940 the Reward sold at something less than the staggering sum first quoted, but still at a comfortable profit. With that, the Nicklins moved immediately into "San Domingo," a beautiful Federal farmhouse in Talbot County, Maryland, built by Joseph Harrison in 1803 on the banks of picturesque San Domingo Creek. Although this was also a going farm complete with tenant, wheat fields, soybeans and sheep, there was only one hundred acres of it, and the Nicklins prepared to relax a little.

The house itself had narrowly escaped extinction. The last owner, who had built herself a new house right against it, had abandoned the old one immediately, promising to sell it to a local gentleman who would tear it down for its bricks and $100. Luckily for the old house lovers, the gentleman died before the deal was consummated.

The first thing the Nicklins did, of course, was tear down the ugly new house. Then they set about restoring the old one, which they sold and were out of in three years, because by this time they had caught the bug for good and no single project could ever satisfy them again for long.

IN THE meantime, a near-by gem Mrs. Nicklin had had her eye on for a long time came up for sale. This was neglected "Troth's Fortune" on the Choptank River. It was built in 1667 by William Troth, a Quaker locally famous for having been nearly killed at his own fireside by a drunken Indian called Poh-Poh-Caquis whom he had allowed in to warm himself one cold night.

Before the Nicklins' tenure, its 100 acres of beautiful apple trees had been turned to soybeans, the house and road were in bad condition, and on hearing of its sale a neighbor commented straight out, "Well, if they paid more than $3,500 for it, they're stuck!" Although they paid easily twice that, the Nicklins were far from stuck. They look back on it as their favorite showplace, and it's in the over-$50,00O class today. Sporting a graceful gambrel roof and a stair-tower, which architects know is very special in America, this house also landed on the Maryland Garden Tour and in Mr. Footner's book, besides being featured in a slick home magazine where the owners were dubbed "authorities on old houses of the region."

The Nicklins began restoration here according to a now well-developed formula. First repairing the shingled roof so workmen would at least keep dry, they jacked up sagging and tilting floors so it was possible actually to walk through the house without falling. This involved partly replacing rotting flooring with old planks salvaged from a previous restoration and inserting a few brand new supporting timbers where they were too far gone—meanwhile flushing out several families of bats, snakes and birds who evidently had lived happily together between the joists for years. Electricity was installed next, furnishing not only light for further work, but the power for sanding equipment used on floors and some woodwork. This being wartime, the local electric company could furnish no extra outside wiring, but luckily the Nicklins discovered an old line which had led to an outdoor packing shed at one time when Troth's Fortune had been run as a commercial orchard. It was re-routed to the house and supplied current there for the first time in history.

These basic remedies applied, the Nicklins could begin thinking about making the house beautiful, authentic and comfortable. First of all the porches were torn off and the roof of the little wood wing lowered to its original story-and-a-half proportions. Marks of its former shape could still be discerned against the brick wall of the main house. These were followed exactly, and a dormer window inserted.

At the same time (the Nicklins often have as many as twenty workmen all going at once), a well was dug and the too-shallow brick-floored cellar excavated to accommodate a new furnace. This operation brought to light numerous pre-Revolutionary buttons, figurines, Indian artifacts, bits of blown glass and an old adze-like trail blazer which are now part of a permanent collection. A prehistoric sacrificial bowl hewn from solid stone which turned up nearby was so heavy it later had, to be sold with the house.

Plumbers installed pipes and kitchen equipment in the downstairs of the wing and "borrowed" space for a bathroom from a main upstairs bedroom. After insulation of the small air-space under the roof, only minor repairs required. Besides plastering (wherever old plaster was sound, it was left intact) this consisted mainly in restoring broken or missing parts of the woodwork. Carpenters turned out replacements on the spot with hand tools, using original mouldings for models.

Large stovepipe-holes made in the paneled overmantels by previous tenants had to be plugged with wooden discs cut to size. Once the holes had been securely inserted, seams were puttied and the holes painted over, leaving an unbroken surface. To beat the wartime shortage, most wood used was mined from large redwood water tanks outdoors, left over from the previous orchard days.

The small glass panes of the original window sashes had been replaced by some well-meaning owner at the turn of the last century by the large single-pane uppers and lowers so popular at the time. Luckily one window had been overlooked, and it served as the model for bringing the others back to their earlier date. Old bricks from fallen outbuildings were used to patch walls and chimneys, and one found marked "1752" was proudly inserted in the doorstep. After indoor and outdoor painting (mostly plain white, thank you!), Poh-Poh-Caquis himself would have found only Troth's Fortune's new "conveniences" at all unfamiliar.

WITH THE completion of this house, the Nicklins' hobby was so out of hand it was hardly a hobby any more. They lived it every minute. When not actually engaged in active restoration, hiring workmen or entertaining prospective buyers, they were in and out of libraries and bookstores building up what turned out to be a specialists' reference shelf on Early Americana and a private scrapbook which travelled with them. At, the same time they rummaged through antique shops wherever they went, attending any auction sales that promised to yield atmospheric period furniture. This led to collecting a library on old furniture, which in turn led to trips to museums, the restorations of Williamsburg, Virginia, and numerous garden tours—all sandwiched in between endless jaunts up back roads in search of other old places to restore.

Any house over 125 years old can qualify, the Nicklins say, provided it has enough intrinsic architectural merit to warrant the three years of time and money usually required to bring dwelling and grounds into "show" condition. Above all, it should be relatively unspoiled. The prizes are those whose owners have fortunately been too poor or slipshod to "improve" the premises by tearing down old partitions and cabinets, modernizing woodwork and blocking up fireplaces.

"Our best houses have been located at the end of roads nobody else would dare go up, and we've been warned against almost every place we've ever bought," Mr. Nicklin says. In spite of their friends' forebodings, the Nicklins have usually landed bargains and always sold at a profit more than large enough to buy again and defray restoration expenses on their next project. Everybody now agrees they must have a special knack, because property values seem to rise mysteriously wherever they settle.

BY NOW, the Nicklins are pretty much in the groove, but it's still fun, because every house presents its own peculiar set of posers. They have a few rules of thumb, however, and these are followed strictly. First of all, they insist, the essence of proper restoration is restraint. Small, charming houses should never be saddled with wings and porticoes that never belonged, in an effort to turn them into imposing mansions. The result is neither fish nor fowl and a horrible botch. Any house should be allowed to be itself, and stick to its own period.

In achieving this, the Nicklins use local labor exclusively wherever they are, Mr. Nicklin often working right alongside, with Mrs. Nicklin supervising or running to the nearest hardware store for supplies. A large part of the job, they find, is persuading skeptical workmen that they really don't want new flooring instead of "that ol' splintery pine," would rather have the original rat gnawed six-panel doors than some fancy made to order millwork, and prefer small panes in the windows to large, more practical ones.

"We know we must seem crazy," Mrs. Nicklin acknowledges, "but we think restoration really means restoration—bringing a house back to what its builder intended." This doesn't allow much improvisation (beyond hiding a few utilitarian pipes behind bookcases, for instance) and that's why they feel they don't need architects. These, besides robbing them of their fun, have a way of imposing their own ideas and seem to have an overpowering instinct to make houses modern and convenient rather than authentic.

"We never had enough closets, you know," Mrs. Nicklin says. "We can't bear to spoil the shape of pretty rooms that were never designed for them. We've never had a picture window, although some of our views have screamed for one. Sometimes our radiators aren't as big as they should be, because we won't ruin a well-proportioned wall." Modern baths and kitchens are put in as unobtrusively as possible.

Fancy wallpapers and tricky decorating schemes are never used, nor are floors sanded if cleaning and waxing will do. By now, the Nicklins have evolved a favorite color scheme, variations of which figure in all their houses and furnishings. Walls are flat white, with woodwork and accessories ranging through a gamut of greens and yellows, touched with red accents.

They have gathered an Early American furniture collection much too large for any ordinary house, ranging from formal mahogany and walnut pieces to informal pine and poplar. They have a selection of oriental and hooked rugs, brasses and silver, iron pots and earthenware, primitive oils and Lowestoft china. On moving day, they install the pieces suitable for that particular house, and store the excess until needed for a later restoration.

ON SELLING Troth's Fortune in 1946, the Nicklins ran out of material on the Eastern Shore and went to Virginia. There they've tried their hand on a stone house in Loudoun County, a brick house in Waterford village and another stone one, "Shenstone," near Leesburg, eventually getting to the Blue Ridge Mountains and "Lynnfield," their present happy problem, built around 1770.

Shenstone before restoration

Shenstone after restoration

Mr. Nicklin got off to a fast start on this one by falling straight through the roof of its long wing while inspecting it for repairs, but equanimity before the unexpected is one of the Nicklins' most valuable assets. They insist they lived happily with ghosts in two of their former houses. One, a crying baby said to have burned in its cradle two centuries ago, bothered them only occasionally. The other was a chain pipe-smoker who filled the living room with tobacco aroma whenever the non-smoking household was out.

Besides this friendly attitude toward "ha'nts" the Nicklins find their twenty-year-old hobby has netted them a host of friends in out of the way places and an inexhaustible repertory of stories. Last but not least, the financial return has been such that any large-scale farming on their part is now unnecessary. Each time moving to smaller acreage, they find themselves at present with a mere twenty-one acres and two cats.