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The Granville Historical Society Oral History Project 2001 - 2002
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12) The Buxton Inn
Major Buxton Buys the Inn (Orville Orr) Major Buxton bought the inn in 1865. He had five children and they all lived on the block. The Buxton children took down the barns, put in houses and filled the rest of the block in early 1900s. And they each lived in them and then later they sold them off individually, after Major Buxton and his wife had died. So these are basically 1900-plus homes, except the brick one at the corner which dates from 1815. And the one next door, which is now attached to the brick on the corner is what we call the Victorian house. It was constructed about 1830 as a separate house. It was not connected to the corner building originally. The Pink Color of the Buxton Inn (Orville Orr) The Buxton Inn had not been painted any other color but white since 1900. After we painted the inn pink, someone took a pencil and wrote on the outside of the building, ‘This is an ugly color’, and then they took off. Then Horace King, whose background was art of course, did some research over to Williamsburg. He said ‘well, let me tell you, your color is authentic’ because in colonial times they used cochineal beetles to make that pink color. The backs of those beetles are a deep, deep red, magenta kind of color. The beetles would nest and die up in the trees, and then the colonists would find them and grind them up and that would be the pigment. And they’d mix it in with sour milk to make the paint.
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