At first glance, the advertisement Tom Gorin recently held in his 79 E. Putnam Ave. real estate office could come from Greenwich Time's real estate pages.

Pictured are 14 large houses, a promising location, sweeping views and the latest technological improvements to its targeted audience of wealthy New York City residents.

Instead, it's a 1910 advertisement by a then year-old Greenwich company called Franklin Edson, Raymond B. Thompson Co.

This year that company -- now Cleveland, Duble &amp; Arnold -- is celebrating a century in business, with an overwhelmingly residential focus.

"We have been able to survive and to do well, even during rough times," the owner, Gorin, said about the company he joined in 1973. He wryly noted that he joined during a difficult economic time, the "oil shock" of 1973, when Middle Eastern oil-producing countries cut off oil shipments to the United States to protest the country's support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War that October.

The early 1970s also were a much different time for home buyers, he said. Many mortgages offered by banks were limited to a maximum of $40,000, and women had a hard time getting them, he said.

"Women's salary was often not counted, or if they were, only counted for half, because they would have children," Gorin said.

Walter Molony, a spokesman for the Washington, D.C.-based National Association of Realtors, said the real estate market has changed dramatically for women.

"In the early 1980s, single women were 10 percent of the purchasers," he said. "That doubled to 20 percent in the 1990s." Molony did not have numbers for this decade.

The industry also has become more professional, Gorin said, in the century since Edson and Thompson began operations on the second floor of the Smith Building at 289 Greenwich Ave.

"It was probably just two guys with a card table. You didn't need any licenses to become a broker," Gorin said about those wide-open days.

The company's telephone was 729 -- that was the whole number -- that later was changed to 866.

"We still have that number," Gorin said noting the firm's current number is 869-0866.

The company stayed in the building until 1968 when it moved to 12 E. Putnam Ave. Its current location is down the road at 79 E. Putnam Ave.

Edson went on to found his own firm, Edson &amp; Edson, a few years later -- Gorin said those dates are lost in history -- and Thompson took on two associates, Henry Banks and Clement Cleveland.

Edson &amp; Edson produced the Edson Report, "the Bible for Greenwich real estate for decades," Gorin said.

At some point, Banks and Cleveland took over the company and renamed it Banks &amp; Cleveland, Gorin said.

In 1934, during the depths of the Great Depression, a Kentucky-born woman decided she wanted to sell real estate.

Eleven years later, Therese Landsdowne Duble, and the only other female broker at the firm, Barbara Arnold, became partners, to join Cleveland, and changed the company's name to Cleveland, Duble &amp; Arnold.

It's the name the company has been known by since. Gorin said he's resisted changing it.

"That's what people know us as through all these years, so why change it?" he said with a shrug.

Anne Young, archivist with the Historical Society of the Town of Greenwich, said real estate is more than simply about buying and selling homes. She said the documents used to market homes and the sale history of those homes are a precious tool for historians.

"They're wonderful," she said enthusiastically. "All the material that is given to us really does get used."

The care that agents use to document homes and properties makes research into them far easier, she said.

Part of the town's history can be seen in the 1910 advertisement. In the top corner Gorin points out what is today the Woman's Club of Greenwich at 89 Maple Ave.

The year after it was advertised, William Decker sold the property to Edward W. Packard, according to land documents in the basement of Town Hall.

In 1939, after Packard's death, Helen Packard Stillman and Dewey D. Ellis were listed as "tenants in common" of the property. In 1941, the Weston Corp. of Greenwich acquired the land and it was sold the following year to William MacRossie. He sold it to Blanche Austin Rockhill in 1949. Three years later, in May 1952, the property was sold to the Woman's Club of Greenwich and has remained in the club's hands ever since.

The approximately three-acre property had been sold to Decker by William and Mary Bouchelle in 1899.

They bought the property from Ann Eliza Woodruff in 1884. She received it from the heirs of Joseph Brush in 1873.

No earlier information was available, as those land transfer books were not available at Greenwich Town Hall.

In spite of the pace of technological advances that saw growing numbers of automobiles, telephones and airplanes in the pre-World War I years, Greenwich was still largely a rural area in 1909, Gorin said.

"It was mainly farmland and mills in the surrounding towns. No one had money to buy those homes," Gorin said about the properties that targeted wealthy New York City residents looking for a place in the country.

The town's agricultural background was seen in restrictive covenants for land sales in Belle Haven just two decades before Edson and Thompson joined forces.

Buyers had to agree not to have any "permanent accommodation of manure or fertilizer except under cover," according to the sale document for one Mayo Avenue residence.

But Greenwich's real estate market -- in many ways -- is the same today, right down to the style of homes, Gorin said.

"It's remarkably similar, even in the architecture," Gorin said as he looked over the 1910 advertisement. "The homes have shingles and porches much like many of the homes that are being built now."
