Indian Hill’s Historical Houses: DeMar House

By Maureen Sharib, Indian Hill Contributor

In the April issue of Indian Hill Living, we featured the DeMar House, located at 7700 Graves Road.

Before Indian Hill caught the attention of wealthy city-dwellers as a beckoning weekend retreat at the turn of the 20th century, today’s thriving city/village was mostly the domain of farmers, millers, merchants, and herdsmen when it was settled in 1795. The 1833 yellow DeMar house, located on the northeast corner of Graves and Miami Roads at 7700 Graves Road, is one of the earliest farmhouses still standing in the Village and is believed to be the fourth oldest home in Indian Hill.

Other (older) structures include:

• Elliot House in Camp Livingston 1802
• John Broadwell House 1804
• Thomas Boone Shawnee Run Springhouse c.1799
• Waite Smith House 1782 (moved to IH in 1953 from Watertown, CT, since torn down)
• Log House (in IH somewhere, moved here from outside the village, protected by a private trust)

The DeMar Family

An extended DeMar family, James Thomas DeMar b.1805 and Mary Jane Rawlings DeMar b.1814, which included Mary Jane’s mother and father, William Edward b.1760 and Mary Jones b.1784 Rawlings (married1798), along with two brothers and possible other family members, came to Ohio from Prince George’s County, MD in 1828 and built a cabin consisting of two rooms and a loft. The cabin was replaced in 1833 for a growing family which eventually included ten children, three of whom did not survive childhood and four sons who served in the Civil War. James Thomas died in 1889 at the age of 84 and his wife, Mary Jane followed in 1902 at the age of 88. Most family members are buried at Armstrong Chapel Cemetery.

Upon arriving in Ohio the young family appears to have first resided with Mrs. DeMar’s grandparents, the Revolutionary War veteran John b.1764 and Anne b.1759 Jones family, early Madeira settlers, on the Jones farm of about 150 acres on Kenwood Rd. The farm grew fruit, wheat, and other crops and was located near the present-day Kenwood Country Club.

In 1790, John Jones brought his family to Kentucky from St. George’s County in Maryland and then in the spring of 1798 to Ohio. Many Jones family members are buried in the John Jones Family Cemetery in Madeira, land purchased by John Jones in 1800. Most burials took place between 1830 -1850. There are 23 headstones, nine unreadable.

Both the DeMars and Rawlings were pioneer families of Indian Hill. Relatives built homes on Walton Creek Road and DeMar Road and many later descendants also occupied homes in Madeira. Many in the family were carpenters and contributed to the construction of many Madeira buildings. Their tools included the single bit axe, the auger (for boring holes), adze and plane (for finish work), and maul and froe (for splitting shingles.) A descendant, Marcia DeMar Wykoff, has James DeMar’s tool chest with some of the original tools in it.

The DeMars and the Civil War

Of four sons who served in the Civil War, two survived into old age. Captain James Thomas DeMar Jr. became a lawyer and died at 79 in 1914 and is buried at Spring Grove Cemetery and Private George W. DeMar died in 1915 at the age of 77 and is buried in Armstrong Cemetery. James (Jim) married and raised his family in a home located on Miami Avenue, now the site of the Madeira Library.

Sergeant Isaac (Ike) F. DeMar was shot through the head and killed in the Fort Blakely battle in Mobile, Alabama, tragically held six hours after the war ended, at age 27 or 28 and is buried In Birmingham, Alabama. Another son, John F. DeMar was wounded in the 1863 siege of Vicksburg in Mississippi and was returned home to die at age 23 or 24 and is buried in Armstrong Cemetery as well along with soldiers from nearly every U. S. war, including the Revolutionary War. All four sons trained and were barracked at Camp Dennison. Only New York in the northern states contributed more soldiers to the war effort than Ohio, more than 50,000 soldiers mustered in or out at Camp Dennison in over four years of operations.

A fifth and youngest male son, Zachary Taylor (ZT) DeMar, (1848-1946), became a leading influencer for (and eventual Principal over) the Madeira school system, walking the one+ mile daily from the DeMar homestead along Miami Road to teach in a small schoolhouse located on the southwest corner of Camargo and Miami roads. He also was one of the original 13 founders of the modern-day Indian Hill Rangers.

New Owners

“ZT” and his wife, Anna Rutledge Clason DeMar (1851-1930) and their progeny of three were the last DeMar family to live in the corner house; their unmarried school-teacher daughters Lucy Jane (1875-1973) and Vida Lynn (1880-1972) DeMar becoming the last owners. The sisters finally sold it, after 142 years in the same family, for between $42,000 and $48,000 in or about 1969/1970 to Samuel M. and Doreen V. Smyth. The Smyths then sold to John F. Koons in 1972 for $45,000 who then sold to Sally B. Coffman later that same year. The next sale was to Richard P. Bethel in 1974 who then sold in 2005 to the current owner, Therese Hunolt, proprietress of Just Add Embroidery in Madeira. There have been only six transfers of (different) family ownership in 196 years.

Seven rooms on two stories are situated on an irregular and nearly square lot 250.67 x 239.49 comprising 1.533 acres. The L-shaped yellow frame home has 2,224SF with 1,316SF on the first floor and 908SF on the second floor. It also has a framed porch and pergola, 3 bedrooms, 1 ½ baths, two fireplaces, plaster walls and a detached garage first built in 1880 as a barn. The former kitchens (now the dining room) floor and a guest bedroom floor upstairs are original and reputedly came from dismantled boats off the Ohio River. A deteriorating summer kitchen (off the present-day kitchen on the east end of the home) was demolished by a previous owner (Bethel.) Older buildings included a springhouse and other barns, all now gone.

The one-story kitchen wing addition was built c.1865 at a cost of $100 when the boys came home from the Civil War. This updated structure still has a cellar door leading to what was probably a root cellar used (in those days) to store food crops for winter food supplies. When the present owner purchased the home the house center beam was held up with a limb sitting on a river stone in that cellar, since replaced with an I-Beam around 2020. The space currently houses all mechanicals and little else.

The original main chimney is centered in the home between the front room (the present-day living room) facing south onto Graves Rd. and the home’s dining room, facing north. Tales are told of this front room being used in the nineteenth century for wakes when family members died. It is theorized that sometime in the home’s long history a western addition was added which now houses a sitting room on the lower floor and a bedroom above it. The center hall runs south to north with doors on each end of the hall and a gracious stairwell from the southern Graves Rd. entrance rising to the north.

In 2020 an existing stone patio on the east side of the house was removed, the area leveled and a covered porch onto the one-story kitchen addition was added. An added pergola area is an extension off the porch that runs to the north over where the stone patio existed. Additional landscaping was added as a buffer, and the materials used for the project matched the existing structure.

15 acres of additional farmland was purchased in the 1880’s by the DeMars for $33 per acre. It is thought the original farm extended east along Graves Rd until it met a large parcel known as the Howard Graves Farm. It is also believed the original farm extended north towards Madeira and across the street north towards DeMar Rd., named after the DeMar family, and acreage west across Miami that turned into the Sky Farm (Indian Hill Acres) development.

Ongoing research is set to determine original property boundaries. By the end of the 1800’s, Indian Hill was still a farming community of about 500 residents, many descendants of the early pioneer families.

Multiple reliable sources for this article include first-hand accounts, the Madeira Historical Society, the Indian Hill Historical Society and the Cincinnati Historical Society Library and we thank them. If you would like to share your historic home’s history, email indianhill@livingmagazines.com.