Island Profile: Looking for an old house? This can-do lady has inventory

Not many people live in three houses at the same time, houses that were joined together in the historic district of Shelter Island Heights more than a century ago. And fewer people own even more, many built in the Victorian era. Carmen Hoge Bissell does. Victorian houses are her career — she buys them, restores them, sometimes lives in them at least for a time, and then sells them, moving on to the next. Her current inventory of houses includes one in Greenport, three in Vermont and four in Florida.

Her fascination with the past began in childhood with weekend visits to her grandmother’s farm. “My grandmother had a home in Ohio, right over the river from our home in Wheeling, West Virginia, where I was taken every weekend as a child. It had been in the family for over 300 years,” she said. They loved that house, she added, “and the weekends and the treasures there — jewelry, bibles, you name it, they had it.”

She attributed her passion for saving old things to those long-ago family visits. “I have my mother’s things, my aunts’ things, my grandmother’s treasures too. I’ve always loved looking at houses and changing them. I think I’m a frustrated architect. I love to walk into a home and see what you can do with it.”

But her childhood horizons shifted when her father, a physician at Jefferson Medical Center in Wheeling, died and her mother, a Cuban immigrant and one of the first women pharmacists in America, moved the family to New York City. She loved the city, roamed the museums, went to a small private school and found it a wonderful place to grow up. She went on to Barnard College, graduating in the class of 1956.

“The head of the college said we could do it all,” she remembered, referring to the dean, Millicent McIntosh, “and I think I’ve done it all” — two marriages, four children, nine grandchildren, at least two careers and more than 30 renovated houses.

She married for the first time the year after graduation and had two daughters, Caroline and Barbara, and a son, William, during the following nine years.

Three years after that marriage ended, in 1969, she married her current husband, William Bissell, a physician and pathologist. “It was a lot to take on for a guy who’d never been married,” she remembered, “to take on three children and the dog,” but it worked. “They adored him,” she said. The couple went on to have a fourth child, a son, Brad.

Her “buying and selling” career began almost by accident in Windham, in upstate New York. The family was there to ski and they were staying in an 1885 inn, looking for a ski house on the mountain. But the inn felt like home. “I said, ‘I don’t want a ski house on the mountain, I want this old inn.’ It reminded me of my grandmother’s home.” They bought the inn and use it as their ski house.

“We skied out of it for 20 years. It had seven bedrooms and we had all our friends up skiing and had a wonderful time. Then we sold that and when our son was at college up in Pulteney, New York, we bought a house there for him and he rebuilt it and lived in it.

But the one next door was from 1797 and we bought that one, too. It had the original roofs and we restored them. I never decorated the houses but I made sure that they were heated properly and I tried to save all the windows that I could and did any structural repairs that were needed.”

At the same time, she was managing her husband’s pathology laboratory. Based at Brookhaven Memorial Hospital, he had hoped the hospital would sponsor a lab but when that plan failed to materialize he opened one himself. It was called Bay Shore Medical.

“He wanted someone to monitor the lab and I said I would do that if he wanted to pay me because I wasn’t going to do it for free,” she said. “xThen I wouldn’t be appreciated. So I became a partner.” She ended up doing that for 17 years. “I did all the hiring and firing and built an entire lab out of space that I designed and it worked and it was a very successful lab,” she said. When the pharmaceutical giant SmithKline made a move to open a lab in Suffolk, “We couldn’t compete against such a huge company,” so she helped with the negotiations and they sold the lab to the company.

They bought their current home, the three conjoined houses behind the orange gate on Wesley Avenue in the Heights, 35 years ago. Her husband was at ELIH in Greenport that day “and I had nothing to do so I took the ferry and there was Freddy Dinkel and I asked him, ‘Are there any great houses around?’ He said to go right up the hill and I bought the house without going in.” They were living in Bellport at the time and the Island was only an hour away. “But it was a delightful change” and served well as a weekend home — and, she thought, it would be a wonderful place to raise kids.

Retired now, and on Shelter Island in the summer and into the fall, the couple lives in Florida near Palm Beach the rest of the year in a house built in 1923 and on the Historic Register. Still very busy maintaining her “collection,” she does seem, in Dean McIntosh’s words, to be “doing it all.”

She said she wonders how many other Barnard alumnae might be here on the Island. She’d love to start a group, so if you’re out there, she wants you to call — she’s in the book.