Local history blog

I've been careful never to mention where The House actually is, but this local history blog by Dan Tate is too fine not to post. We're in Richmond, Indiana. So there.

Historical film

One of the neighbors clued me in on the existence at the public library of a short documentary of the neighborhood ("perhaps one of the finest still remaining in the Midwest" and that's the closest description of our location you've seen on this blog yet) and I gave it a look.

The house looked pretty much the same in 1989 as it does today, except the odd green color of the window trim was not yet in place and the porch was in better shape. It's shocking to realize that's been twenty years ago already.

At any rate, there wasn't much new information to be had, except that the house is a "typical Italianate of the type built between the 1870's and 1880's" and that the owners at the time, probably wanting to remodel due to the new Queen Anne houses being built, added the porch in that style around the turn of the century.

In terms of house building, it's been quiet on that front, hasn't it? Basically, it's the same plan today as it is every other day, Pinky: masonry and plaster. I did manage to get the bathroom sink anchored to the wall, but the drain pipe is clogged, so it's still not functional. But on the masonry/plaster front, things are rather nice, as I've been working on the east wall of the carriage house and getting rather good at it, in my humble opinion. I'll take some pictures soon.

Construction history (1896 and 1909)

So the main insurance company in this state kept records of the construction of each and every house in most towns and cities - to the level of having diagrams of floor plans, every five or ten years. And the library has all that on microfilm.

I'm pretty sure some of my scans are of the wrong street, in retrospect, because they don't match any of the houses around me, let alone mine. So I screwed up (I did the first scans pretty early on, and I was still a little confused as to the street number, it appears.)

But I got May, 1896 and April, 1909. Here is the house (and carriage house!) in 1896:
And here it is in 1909:
Between 1896 and 1909, the dining room was built out on the north, and the porch added on the east. A larger porch was put on the south side (where the sunroom is now). The 1909 plan indicates that the upstairs above the dining room was frame, not brick as it is now (that's where the master bath is) - but I think that's inaccurate. The attic stairs go up there and the attic structure sure looks continuous. So I think that little square there was part of the original structure of the house, as is shown in the 1986 plan.

The back porch is where there are two small rooms now. Since those rooms are divided by a wall that was external at one point (I can tell from the siding in there), that porch has been removed, then replaced, sometime after 1909. I'll poke around some more later.

Then (1905) and Now (2009)

Specifically, summer of 1905 or thereabouts (the pictorial history was published in 1906, reprinted in 1991 by the local historical society, and the photography was taken for the edition, so we're talking the previous summer, I figure).


Here's a shot as close to that as I can make it. Notice the back porch where today's sunroom should be (which matches the historical plans I've found so far) and the fact that the carriage house had already been built (which contradicts the tax records). I had been assuming 1909 for the carriage house, but it looks as though they'd already built it by 1905.

The porch and trim were brown! I don't care for that myself; I prefer the white they show today. There's no railing on the front stairs, and no wall around the yard, and their gardener was clearly better than mine.

But what really amazes is that the house is basically identical, but today's massive sycamores had not yet been planted. Wow.

History

Roy across the street was the maintenance man for this entire street when it was owned by one lady (except for four houses). He did sole maintenance for 363 apartments, six of which were in my house: two downstairs, three upstairs, and this carriage house apartment. (He would mow them all at once, in one 8-hour marathon, moving steadily down the street and stopping only to refill the gas tank.)

My sunroom was a barbershop, cuts for twenty-five cents. The front upstairs bedroom was the apartment of an elderly interracial couple (he was black, she was white, perhaps one of the first such couples, if not the first, in town). My kitchen was the bedroom of the downstairs apartment, the dining room was the kitchen, and the yellow room was subdivided into two halves, one being the living room of 304, the other the living room for 302. You can see where the floor has been repaired.

This is giving me a taste for more; the library has some records.