Amordale, also known as the Bell Farm, was built by Benjamin Mitchell around 1807 on land he bought from John Waite. After his and his son, Benjamin Jr.’s deaths, the homestead passed to his daughter, Sarah Fogg Mitchell, who married William Seabury and had four children, one of whom was Mary Adelaide “Addie”.

In 1895, Addie bought the homestead from her siblings. Addie Seabury was first married first to Captain Philip Gorman, with whom she had her only daughter Mildred. Philip passed in 1885, and she remarried in 1888 to another sea captain, an immigrant from Sweden named Oscar Charleson. Captain Charleson was the master of several schooners over his career at sea, and in 1889 he took command and part ownership of the newly built schooner Addie Charleson, then the largest vessel built at the Russell shipyard in East Deering. Her first voyage would be to South America.

After retiring from sea, Captain Charleson and his wife opened their house to summer boarders and named it Amordale which translates to “Cupid Valley” in Swedish. The larger part of the house, with the wraparound porch, was built around this time. I believe the construction may have been done by Howard S. Hamilton, as he worked on several west end houses around 1900. There was a windmill for the well, and the pond was dug and dam built in 1916.

Amordale started taking visitors just after the turn of the century but had stopped by the middle of the 1920’s when both Oscar and Addie had passed away. The homestead was then passed down to the daughter Mildred Gorman Bell (Married in 1906 to Arthur Weston Bell). Throughout the 30s and 40s, the descendants of the Mitchells and Seabury’s continued to visit and stay, but it was finally sold out of the family for the first time in almost exactly 150 years to the Kauffman family in 1955. Mildred Bell passed away two years later in 1957, her only son Donald then in 1963.

Today, the house is owned by Ellen Goodman and from what I’ve been told retains much of its historic charm and character. The old cart road, that starts off South Road just east of the Island Commons and goes down through the woods, was built to reach this house as John Small was not built then. The stone wall we see if we continue towards Rose’s Point separated the two Mitchell homesteads, Benjamin’s (Amordale) and his brother James, which would later be owned by Robert “Bob” Rose. Bob moved to the island with his parents, sister, and four brothers, from Block Island in 1869. This house burned in 1935 when Bob attempted to burn over his blueberry field and the fire spread too rapidly.