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The Hamilton JournalNews is committed to coverage of the local community — from schools and our local history to business and news. Each Sunday, reporter Richard Jones tells the story of the people, history, places and events that make Hamilton unique. Have an idea for Richard? Email him at Richard.Jones@coxinc.com.
Maybe it’s the high ceilings or the ornamental wood work and wooden floors.
Maybe it’s just the lingering history of the house and the spirits of those who have lived there for the past 170 years.
Whatever it is, Pete Davidson knows it’s there in the house at 230 N. Third St., a building that seems to have been made for music.
For the past few years, with an interest in mobile recording, Davidson said he visited some of the older homes in Hamilton’s historic districts, imagining what a rock band would sound like playing inside them.
This house, he said, found him.
There are small rooms on the first floor to give lessons in, a nice big parlor for a retail space, and the upstairs is perfect for recording — with three isolation rooms, a control room and a tracking room.
More importantly, the acoustics in older houses tend to be inviting for musicians, especially acoustic musicians.
“For years, I’ve been drawing sketches of an imaginary place, the perfect place to have a music studio, and this house matches the best drawings I ever came up with,” he said. “So I got some fellow musicians to help me out with plans and designs, and we all contributed what we could to get this place going.”
Davidson and his collaborators, which include Eric Hayes and David Hisch, spent last summer renovating and exploring the house, especially the upstairs portion which had been untouched for decades to create 3rd Street Music.
“We wanted the business to have a comfortable feel to it,” he said. “The phrase we used was ‘cool vibe,’ so every time someone comes in here and says ‘cool vibe,’ and most of them do, we start high-fiving each other.”
So far, seven bands have recorded at the home, including 90 Proof Twang, Buffalo Killers and One Mississippi, and are in pre-production talks with Sohio, who found inspiration in a movie about one of the most famous house-turned-studio, the Band’s Big Pink in Woodstock.
The house was built by John W. Erwin, a native of Delaware who came to Hamilton in 1835 to work as a surveyor on building local highways, according to a 1999 column by historian Jim Blount.
In 1837, he was the resident engineer on the portion of the Miami-Erie Canal that ran through Hamilton, and the year before Erwin built the house, which was originally numbered 228 N. Third St., he was hired by the state to supervise the reclamation of the Big Swamp south of Hamilton into productive farm land.
He was also politically active and not without controversy. He was a Democrat and the editor of a newspaper called The Free Soil Banner, and one morning found a hangman’s noose on his front porch as a warning for something he’d written.
Hamilton native and author William Dean Howells wrote about visiting the Erwin house in his book “A Boy’s Town,” where he went to spend the night with one of Erwin’s five children, but admitted that he got homesick in the middle of the night and went home.
From the 1930s to the 1990s, the house was the office of Dr. Thomas Leyrer.
“There were surgeries in the tracking room and babies born here,” Davidson said. “All of our isolation rooms have sinks in them, and the drum room was the x-ray room, which is perfect because it has thick walls and is far away from everything else.”
While neither Davidson nor any of the musicians working there have yet reported a haunting, “Some people say that as soon as they come in here, they feel something like that.”
There is a three-pronged approach to 3rd Street Music: Lessons, retail and recording.
“Most of the gear is used but we go for a unique style of gear that’s not run-of-the-mill,” Hayes said. “We like vintage and tubes.”
They do offer digital recording, but recognize a big difference between using a mouse and turning the knobs of an analog console.
They use a mixing board from the early 1980s and a reel-to-reel tape machine from 1979, but also offer the latest version of ProTools.
The mixing board, in true analog fashion, is over seven feet long and weighs over 400 pounds.
“And it’s extremely fragile,” Davidson said. “It took four guys gingerly going up one step at a time to get it here, all wrapped in pillows.”
He said that it’s important to him that the teachers who work there are all full-time working musicians, including Dave Sams, Sonny Moorman and Dave Cornett.
“I love to open up the place for people,” he said. “It feels right to me to have people in here creating records as if they’re just sitting around playing music.
“I’ve been recording for 20 years and teaching for 22 years and I noticed there are a lot of musicians in Hamilton and they don’t congregate because there doesn’t seem to be a place for them to congregate,” he said. “So I wanted a comfortable and interesting place for musicians and student musicians to talk music, share music, learn music and make records.”
Davidson is well-known to Hamilton’s youth as “Mister Pete,” mostly through his 10-year association with Head Start, travelling between Butler County schools “playing criss-cross applesauce,” referring to how the children surround him cross-legged on the floor.
He first started teaching drums at Weaver Music, which used to be on High Street near Ohio 4.
“I didn’t think I was going to like it,” he said. “I was just doing it as a favor, but once I gave my first lesson, I knew I would never stop.”
There’s a special joy, however, in working with pre-schoolers.
“I will never stop doing that,” he said. “The 5-year-old mind is just developing, and music helps them make connections and everything they experience is brand new.
“Music has the potential to open anyone’s mind to new knowledge,” he said.
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