I have been a lifelong lover of history and old houses, and I've always been passionate about learning what day-to-day life was like in the past. I didn't grow up in an old house, but I always had the dream to own one of my own. I love the idea of taking care of a place and learning its history, being part of its story and helping it last long after I'm gone. After searching for two years and saving for many before that, we purchased and started moving into our new (old) home in October. Now that we are through the holiday season, we are planning projects for the year ahead. I'm very excited to get started! I have been doing tons of research about the house's history, early 1900s architecture and interior design, and how to take care of an old house.
My goal is to respect the house's history and try to return the permanent features of the house as much as possible to period appropriate from the time it was built in the early 1900s. We are lucky to have most of our original windows, doors, hardware, and wood floors, so we will focus on repairing and restoring them, along with our plaster walls and ceilings, adding back period details that were lost where we can, and making the kitchen more period sensitive and more functional than it currently is. We'll be repairing some of the flooring in the dining room which was previously damaged by termites (probably in the 1980s - there are no active termites now). We recently had the last bit of knob and tube wiring replaced with romex, and all of the receptacles and switches upstairs brought up to modern code. (The downstairs had previously been rewired.) I asked the electricians to leave the ceramic insulators in the attic, even though they removed the old wiring, since they are part of the story of the house, and I'd like to leave it as a clue to future owners that there was wiring in this house in the early days.
The house is fundamentally a foursquare. It has an entry hall with a living room to the left, then beyond the hall is the dining room, with the kitchen to the left. There are 4 bedrooms upstairs with a center hallway and a bathroom at the end of the hallway. As far as I can guess, it was built by the owner, probably not by an architect or professional builder. Although the town was growing so fast at the time that houses were being built quickly. It has tall ceilings (9 1/2 feet downstairs, 8 1/2 upstairs), but most of the details are fairly simple, with minimal ornamentation in the trim, door hardware, etc., particularly for this time period. It has a pyramidal hipped roof like a classic American foursquare, but no attic dormer, and instead has a side gable that extends the dining room and master bedroom past the square footprint of the rest of the house. It has an L-shaped porch as are seen on a lot of Queen Anne's from that period, but doesn't have any towers, bay windows, or horizontal transitions between floors. The porch is supported by columns and has a pediment, borrowing some Greek revival styling. Inside, the staircase seems to have original newel posts, which are square with simple trim capping the top, but the balusters look incorrect for the period, and I think they are later replacements.
What I have learned about our house's history so far: Our neighborhood was subdivided from farmland in 1907, during a period of rapid growth in our town. It was a railroad town founded by two robber-barons who owned the railroad, built the town, owned coal mines and timber operations, and influenced national politics. The property changed hands a few times in the first few years, and the three lots were combined and sold to a single owner in 1909.
The house was built most likely in 1909 or shortly thereafter, by a railroad engineer and his wife, who later worked as a stenographer and bookkeeper. They had 3 children, the youngest being 2 years old, when they moved into the house, and I can't find record of any other children. The husband died in 1929, but his wife lived into here nineties and died in 1978 or 1979. Their only daughter lived at home with her mother in the house until the mother died, then the daughter moved to another address in town. She had also been a stenographer and bookkeeper, working for the same company as her mother did at one point. She also lived to an advanced age, and died I believe in 2003.
The house was sold in '79/'80 to a woman whose parents lived in the house next door. She bought it as a retirement home with her husband, and they remodeled the house in 4 months before moving in. Her brother still owns the house next door, and is a seasonal resident. He told me some of the history when he was last in town. I think this family were the ones to rewire the downstairs, remodel the kitchen, and put in the green wall-to-wall carpeting and matching green and white wallpaper throughout the downstairs, up the stairs, and into the hallway. Her husband died shortly after they moved in due to cancer, and the house was sold again when she died around 2017.
The last family to own the house before us only lived here for two years. They did a lot of work in that time - removing the old carpet to expose the hardwood, scraping the many layers of wallpaper and painting, painting the kitchen cabinets, putting down bamboo flooring in the kitchen and bathroom, putting in a new sink / vanity in the bathroom, cladding the bathroom walls with stick-on wood boards, enclosing the back porch, and changing out a bunch of the light fixtures downstairs. While I'm grateful for some of the things they did (removing carpet and wallpaper is one - although I wish they'd saved some samples of the old wallpapers), I'm glad they didn't have more time here to make more changes. One of the things we loved most about this house were the old details, and I'd love to see what it looked like before they started renovations.
I've heard about this group in some of my research through other folks in the old house community, and I'm excited to build my skills and knowledge and share what I've learned along the way. I also created an Instagram account for our house called SassafrasHomeplace to document the process.
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