The three-story brick house that Mark L. Vincent and Heidi Scott call home in Rushville has a history that dates back nearly a century — as well as a secret.
Built in 1914 by the A.P. Rodewald family, who used the 7,200-square-foot home as a single-family residence, the house later became the popular Schuyler Hotel in the late 1940s. For 20 years, people from throughout the area would come to stay at the hotel and revel in its third-floor ballroom.
‘‘You can just imagine people in their fancy clothes coming up and dancing the night away,’’ said Scott, a stay-at-home mom to the couple’s three children, ages 4, 3 and 9 months.
Yet, some people found their kicks other ways, heading instead to the Canary Room restaurant in the basement. It was in the kitchen of that restaurant, or rather through the kitchen, that some visitors enjoyed a different, less legal, form of entertainment.
Along one wall was a pantry door with a small, seemingly unnecessary window cut into it. Inside were wooden shelves stocked with dry goods. One shelved wall was curiously covered in newspaper, as if it were hiding something.
It was.
The room hidden behind the Canary Room pantry was a small, purposely discreet gambling room with space enough to fit no more than three slot machines. Vincent believes the room was dug out of a crawl space after the hotel took over the property in 1945.
‘‘You actually move this shelf with food on it to get to the gambling room. If you open the pantry, you wouldn’t notice — you just saw shelves of food,’’ Vincent said.
Clearly, there’s a story there, yet Vincent and Scott aren’t sure of the plot.
They took what they did know, however, and shared it with the producers of HGTV’s ‘‘If Walls Could Talk,’’ a show that focuses on houses ‘‘rich in history.’’ The episode featuring their house airs this spring.
Vincent and Scott married in 2001. A private attorney who runs his practice from an office on the property, Vincent slowly had been converting the home from an apartment complex back to a single-family residence since purchasing the property as a 20-something in 1987.
Before he was too far into the renovations, Vincent said a member of the Rushville community tipped him off about the possible hidden room.
‘‘Some old-timer — I don’t even remember who it was — told me about that, and that’s when I got to investigating,’’ he said.
He found the pantry area and began to notice things that seemed out of place: the wall lined with newspaper, hidden hinges and the pantry-door window, which he assumed was used to make sure all was clear before a gambler re-entered the kitchen.
‘‘It all made sense then,’’ he said. ‘‘The big clue was the way the earth was dug out from that shelf. The crawl space (behind it) was just the right height to put in some slot machines and stand right in front of them.’’
Vincent and Scott have pieced together all they could to learn about their home’s history. Even so, the artifacts found in the basement crawl space which today is the furnace room only indicate the legitimate side of the hotel and restaurant business: old menus, a child’s booster seat, postcards, old keys and guest registration cards.
To Vincent’s surprise, he hasn’t found more than a single coin in the gambling room. He hopes to talk with community members to learn more about the house’s history.
‘‘I know in this city there are people who know about this,’’ he said. ‘‘It was probably the early ’50s when this ended.’’