The 200-year-old farmhouse stands out among the modern industrial buildings at the Hitchiner site on Old Wilton Road. It attracted the interest of chairman emeritus John Morison when the company bought the land in 1951 as the new location for the small precision casting foundry purchased just two years earlier in the historic Amoskeag Millyard in nearby Manchester. Even as the new production facilities were under construction, Morison had his eye on the old house and barn that had once been the property of Nathan Hutchinson, a revolutionary war veteran and one of the town's founders.

"We had one of the oldest houses in town and the question was, what to do with it," recalls Morison, who felt the old house "had a certain charm" despite a previous owner's aborted attempt at renovation. "Someone had made a mess of trying to rehab it," Morison said. "He'd picked up an old house and thought he could make apartments out of it. Fortunately, he got discouraged before he got very far."

Morison's own plan was to restore the building and adapt it to the new corporate structure developing in Milford. The conversion would require patience as well as planning however, as transfer of the house and barn was held up for several years in probate court. When Hitchiner finally took title to the last piece of property on the old farm in May of 1969, the range of possible uses had narrowed to either a company restaurant and conference center or an office building. An architectural firm was hired to explore the possibilities and do the initial planning.

The architectural study should have been the death knell for the old farmhouse. The structure was unsound, the experts said, and even if it could be shored up, the cost of converting the rooms to meet the company's needs would be prohibitive. The architects put the price of renovation at $150,000, a substantial cost 20 years ago, with no guarantee of success.

Undaunted, a second opinion was sought and a third and a fourth. "We had four different architects look at it and they all told us to trash it," the company chairman recalls. "They all said 'rehabbing' the building would cost more than it was worth."

The alternatives left a choice of two things the shrewd industrialist hated to do: waste money or give up what he still believed was a good idea. Both Morison and the company had already been involved in a community-wide effort to preserve historic buildings in Milford, an effort that grew out of a Hitchiner-sponsored study on planning and development for the town. The study "resulted in better zoning laws and just getting interested in zoning laws got people thinking about the community and preservation," said Morison. It also gave the company chairman an added incentive to find a practical use for the historic building that Hitchiner had acquired.

"We were sort of on the hook, talking about preservation and renovation," he said. "It was a case of putting your money where your mouth is."

It was also a case of finding the right builder. As often happens, opportunity grew out of misfortune. After a fire had gutted an old house in Milford that was nearly identical to the Hutchinson House, a local contractor worked with the owners to restore it. The latter were so impressed with the result that they suggested to Morison he hire the same contractor to adapt the Hutchinson farm house for use as corporate offices.

In builder Wano Kokko, Morison knew he had a man of kindred spirit. "I'm a sort of guy that's got old-fashioned ideas," said the 76-year old Kokko, now retired. "I've been kind of frugal all my life and I don't like to throw away or destroy anything, including old buildings."

Kokko took the job and set about converting the building to office use while preserving the look and feel of the old farmhouse. The building is of particular historic interest in the small New England town. Hutchinson had settled on the land in 1748 and by the time he died in 1795, the first stage coach to run along Old Wilton Road had begun its regular journeys past the house enroute from Boston to Keene, NH. and points west. Another house near the same site had been Hutchinson's main residence and later became Searles House, a tavern where travelers would stop for rest and refreshment. The house that Hitchiner had acquired was used to accommodate an overflow of guests.

Its restoration was no easy task. "It was a bit of a challenge," said Kokko in characteristic understatement. "It was a pretty good size house and we had to go over it very thoroughly. It was really run down and hadn't had any work done to it for a long time. It hadn't been occupied for years."

A great many problems had to be overcome before the conversion could be accomplished. For one thing, the chimney, serving all five fireplaces was sagging badly and had to be rebuilt. The accumulation of dry -rot over the years had taken its toll on the logs that had served instead of the usual masonry as the chimney's foundation. It was torn down and the original bricks were reassembled over a concrete block base. A heat pump was installed as the new heating system with its pipes going up through the rebuilt chimney, thereby allowing the working fireplaces to remain as part of the charm and character of the old farmhouse.

When the walls in the attic were removed to expose the chimney, the marks of the original roofline could be seen on the bricks. The house apparently had been a one-story building, with the roof later raised and a second story added. That renovation most likely took place in 1807, the date found on a plaque by the front door.

In the rear wing of the house, a summer kitchen and a two-hole privy were removed and the space now accommodates the company's secretarial pool. In the long ell, leading to the east of the main section, a series of small rooms were connected, railroad car fashion, by a door in the center of each. The rooms may have been sleeping quarters for family members or farm hands or may have been used as guest rooms for overnight travelers. Since this was an impractical set up for the new offices, the doorways were moved to the front of the ell and a hallway created to allow easy passage through the wing.

The large rooms in the center of the house, each with an original fireplace, now serve as offices. To create more working space, some of the stairs were reset and roofs raised. The attic was paneled and floored and the space used for more offices and computers.

Most of the original hand-planed paneling and doors have remained and the original windows, painstakingly cleaned, are also part of the corporate headquarters, though with storm windows placed over them to conserve energy. Granite steps and bricks from other parts of the farm were used to construct a formal entrance to the newly restored building. The nearby barn, meanwhile, has been converted to a lunch time restaurant for employees and visitors.

"You approach it step by step, face up to it and take care of whatever needs to be done," said Kokko. "It's simple enough to do as long as you're interested in that kind of work. Most people don't have the patience for it. There's something about working with old wood and brick and things that you just have a kind of feel for. It's totally different from working with new material."

Kokko's enthusiasm was shared by Morison's wife Olga, the unofficial architect for the project. "She was the one who really said what to do and what she liked," Kokko recalls. "It was really her ideas about restoring the old building and bringing back the original. There wasn't any new design work. It's just a matter of how far the customer wants to go and how thorough they want to be. Sometimes you have to make some minor changes in the plan, like moving a stairway to accommodate the new use of a building."

Mrs. Morison also did the interior decorating and furnishing of the building to complete a project that her husband describes as "amazingly practical." The restoration of the house and barn have given the company a cheerful blend of aesthetic and financial rewards. Not only were the buildings restored to their early charm, but the renovation has given the company a new facility at a price well below the cost of new construction.

"We have 11 offices and the layout is one that has been adaptable to a variety of people, jobs and functions," said Morison. "Basically, it's an administrative office building." The practical economic advantages of preserving and adapting old buildings, have become increasingly apparent as the costs of new construction have soared, Morison said.

"Certainly there are better materials available now for preserving things, but it's largely in the minds of people who are anxious to preserve. Thirty or forty years ago, people were tearing everything down. Now that it costs so much to rebuild, they're saying let's go back to the old. Look at all the old textile mills that have been rehabbed into office buildings or residences."

The farmhouse-turned-office building stands alongside the company's modern research center, Metal Casting Technology, Inc., providing a vivid contrast of the old with the new. In front of the center is a thoroughly modern structure, a stainless steel fountain, a monument to "Imagination in Metallurgy," consisting of two truncated prisms pointing skyward.

"They never reach an apex," Morison explained. "The prisms never reach a final point, just as we hope our research will never end." Finding new applications for the 5,000-year-old art and science of metallurgy is one kind of challenge Morison finds fascinating. Preserving old buildings is another.

"You've seen some of the condos that are built cheaply and put together fast so the developer can go on to the next one," he said, comparing the old house he works in to some of the homes built today. "This has lasted 200 years and its in better shape than most of those built two or three years ago."

Though different in style from the modern sculpture that adorns the research center, the "White House" at Hitchiner might also be seen as a monument to the life and industry of a small New England town. The stage coach is long gone from Old Wilton Road, but passing motorists may ponder the contrasting images of a company and a community reaching toward the future, while preserving the best of the past.