The Augustus Peck House was built in 1783 in Connecticut and moved in 2020 to the outskirts of Deary, Idaho. It is now available as a rental on Airbnb.

DEARY, Idaho — Not far from the little Deary in Latah County, Idaho, in a clearing of white pine trees about 200 yards off the highway, stands a home that has no earthly business being here.

It was built in 1783 by a young veteran of the Revolutionary War. It was built before Deary was a town, before Idaho was a state, before this piece of land was even part of the United States.

It is the Augustus Peck House, and it has a fascinating story, all the way from its birth that coincided with the early days of the country to its current life as an Airbnb rental.

The house is a newcomer to Idaho. Peck built it in Middlebury, Connecticut, following his service in the Continental Army under the command of Gen. George Washington. Peck enlisted when he was 16 and rose to the rank of captain by the time the British were defeated seven years later — at which time he set about building his home.

More than 200 years later, Peck’s house was vacant and falling into disrepair. When a fire department in the Middlebury area started to make plans to set the house ablaze for a training exercise, a call went out for a restorer to save the vintage dwelling — and that’s when Kevin Durkin swooped in.

Durkin, 69, has spent the last quarter-century saving such structures, with his focus being historic American buildings from the Northeast, where he grew up. His company, Restoration Living, often moves the buildings to new locations around the country or even elsewhere in the world, usually for the purpose of turning them into homes.

“We do these projects around the world, from here to China,” he said. “I’ve done about 400 projects in most every state.”

Durkin and his company are based in Waco, Texas, but his daughter, Rebeccah Salmeri, has lived in Deary for about a decade. Durkin has done a few projects in the Deary area, and he decided it was the right place for the Peck House when the project started to come together in 2020.

At about the same time, Durkin had gotten involved with Magnolia Network — a TV channel led by celebrity home improvement couple Chip and Joanna Gaines — and thought the effort to move the Peck House to Idaho would be an ideal subject for an episode of the series “Restoration Road,” which is hosted by Clint Harp.

So when workers began to painstakingly dismantle the house in Connecticut, then truck it and reassemble it in Idaho, the TV cameras were rolling.

The episode shows the care Durkin’s crew took to salvage as much of the old structure as possible. Packing up the fireplace and chimney was especially laborious, with workers numbering the bricks in Connecticut so they could be fit back together in Idaho.

The house was reassembled on land just off Idaho Highway 3, about 1 mile south of Deary. Parts of the house were reoriented when it got to its new location and some new materials were used, but much of it is original to the 1780s.

“The Peck House was a tremendous labor of love. That was a lot of fun,” Durkin said. “Actually, in the midst of it, I found out Augustus Peck was a relation to my mom. She had Pecks in her family. He was a first cousin in our line.”

The house is 1,660 square feet and includes two bedrooms, two bathrooms and room for six guests. It costs $200 per night to rent, and the listing can be found at bit.ly/3WsvaAv.

The main room is centered around the fireplace, and the low ceiling the room had in Connecticut is gone, with only vintage beams now in place overhead. People in the upstairs bedroom can now look down to the room below.

The most novel feature of the house is the brick oven near the kitchen, where guests can bake their own pizzas. In Augustus Peck’s day, the oven was used to bake bread.

In the “Restoration Road” episode, the comment is made that this must be the oldest house in Idaho, since it was built more than 100 years before Idaho gained statehood. But Durkin said he later heard from a person who moved a 1750s house from Massachusetts to the Sandpoint area.

Durkin’s daughter manages the Peck House, and it’s not the only restoration rental he has been involved with in the Deary area. Others that can be found on Airbnb are a 1909 train carriage, the Deary Train Depot, a Great Northern Railroad caboose and a farmhouse in Kendrick. There’s also an 1830s barn house that was installed near the Peck House.

A majority of Durkin’s relocated vintage structures have been barns, which he usually turns into residences. He has moved old American barns to Japan, China, New Zealand and other unlikely locations.

”People love Americana, they love American history,” he said. “They love it so much that they want it. And it’s cheaper to ship (a vintage structure) from Texas to Shanghai, China, than it is (to truck it from) Texas to New York. That’s the economics of modern container shipping.”

Moving these history-rich buildings to other locations exposes them to people who wouldn’t otherwise get a chance to see them.

”We really wanted (the Peck House) out there because of that,” Durkin said. “Instead of people traveling all the way out to New England, they can have it right there.

“You can build a new barn, or a new timber-frame house, but there’s something about the character when you look up and say, ‘My goodness, this Revolutionary War soldier lived here,” Durkin said. And he sat in front of the same fireplace I’m sitting in front of now.’ The allure to that is powerful. People love that.”