Milan's Hack House was built with money from a sugar swindle

The fanciest old house in Milan was paid for with money that should never have existed. The Friend-Hack House on County Street went up in 1888, built by Olive Friend with the proceeds of one of the great Wall Street swindles of the 1880s — and it stands today as the town’s history museum, which is a fitting end for a house with a backstory like this one.

Here is the swindle. In the mid-1880s a man calling himself Professor Henry Friend turned up in New York claiming he had invented a way to refine sugar with electricity. He founded the Electric Sugar Refining Company, raised a fortune from investors, and guarded his miracle machine behind locked doors. There was no machine. By 1889 the whole thing had unraveled as an outright fraud — but the family had already pulled real money out, and some of it built this house in quiet little Milan, far from the New York courtrooms.

The house itself is worth the look on its own. It’s a sprawling two-story frame house in the Stick and Eastlake style — fancy carpentry, a gable roof, diagonal boarding and decorative kingposts in the gables, the showy Victorian woodwork of a family with cash to burn. It’s the best example of that style in town. It later passed to Jim and Daisy Hack, whose name stuck to it, and it landed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1991.

The Milan Area Historical Society runs it now as a working museum, open Sunday afternoons through the warm months. You can walk the rooms of a real Victorian home and know that the floorboards under your feet were, in a roundabout way, bought with a sugar machine that never worked.