Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts

Thursday, May 23, 2013

The Little Town That Could

Savannah, GA?
Stunning Historic District and vibrant downtown.
Charleston, SC?
Beautiful city center wrought with history and charm.
Portland, OR?
Historic districts worth a visit or two.

Jacksonville, FL?
News flash - Nobody wants to see empty weedy lots.

In a city where decisions are dragged out, postponed, procrastinated, tabled, it took Code Enforcement less than 24 hours from hearing about a house with an unstable gable to 'emergency' demolition.

Less than 24 hours.

It is frustrating, heartbreaking and maddening to be living in a city to values what could be its greatest asset  so little that it would rather spend close to $10,000 to demolish a historic structure in a nationally registered historic district than less than 10% of the same amount to stabilize and preserve it (placing a lien on the property to recoup the money).

Tonight, we are one empty lot 'richer' - 129 East Second Street in our historic district was demolished, and our lucky streak of 584 days without demolitions came to a sudden and sad end.

Tonight, give your ol' house a pat on the siding and tell her that you love her. She is special - there will be none like her ever - and she deserves your, our protection.

"We will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed."
 New York Times Editorial (on the destruction of Penn Station)



Monday, February 25, 2013

Let's talk about history

Let's talk about you and me ... and the amazing fact that our house will get to celebrate its 100th birthday next year.
Not only that, but in 100 years it has also come full circle in regard to its owners. How so, you wonder?

I'm so excited to share this with you! When our house was ready to move in for the first time in 1914, the first couple to ever live in the Little Old House - when the plaster had just dried and the paint was still fresh - were Henry and Emma Stukenberg. Both, henry and Emma, were half-German, born to immigrant parents from Germany and the Netherlands who had settled in Indiana in the 1800s.
How crazy is that?!
I'm a born and bred German citizen, and immigrated to the US in 2003 (I like telling people I'm a mail-order bride but that's not quite how I met the husband). Little Man was born on German soil, but thanks to the good relationship between the US and Germany, he holds dual citizenship (and has two passports). After 100 years the Little Old House is again home to people with German roots!
Crazy, isn't it?
I mean, what are the odds?

[This is not an actual picture of the Stukenbergs - I wish I had one!]

Henry Stukenburg was born on June 15, 1868, in Aurora, Indiana, to Herman and Margaret Stukenburg (also spelled Studenburg, Stukenburg or Stuckenbirg). He was the second-oldest of six children and had two sisters (Mary and Lena) and three brothers (Fred, Frank and Edward). His father made a living as a cooper and his mother was a homemaker.
His future wife Emma was born  in either 1869 or 1870 as the second-oldest of five children to Fredrick and Katherine "Katie" Wesler in Lawrenceburg, Indiana. She had three sisters (Maggie, Minnie and Carrie) and one brother (Harry). Her father was a local coal dealer.

Henry and Emma tied the knot on November 17, 1890 in Lawrenceburg/Dearborne, Indiana, and sometime between 1910 and 1920 moved to Jacksonville, Florida, where Henry worked as a foreman for Wright, Barrel & Coal Company.

Their union remained childless, and Henry passed away on October 26, 1929, in Jacksonville, Florida. He was buried on October 30, 1929,  at St. Mary's Cemetery. Mrs. Emma must have loved him very much because she followed him only a short time later, passing away on June 19, 1930. She is also buried at St. Mary's. I still need to go and look up their grave site and bring them some flowers.

And in case you are related to our Stukenburg family - please don't hesitate to contact us! I'd love to learn more about the first family at our Little Old House!

All this information I gleaned from census documents and other records through Ancestry.com and Familysearch.org. I really enjoyed Familysearch.org and had the best results through their site. As an added bonus it's free to use but you might run into finding documents that require a paid account through Ancestry.com. I tried their 14 day free trial but can't really get the hang of their interface well enough to make a full account worth my while - for now.

Maybe when I have more time on my hands .... yeaaaah, right. Like that will ever happen!

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Where in the world is ...

Well, not Carmen Sandiego, that's for sure. I doubt that fickle lady with the shady reputation ever had a permanent address, let alone one in Historic Springfield. She would, however, make a great addition to our "First Friday" parties, don't you think?


With our first year anniversary coming up in just two more days, I thought I'd share a bit more histoy of our little old house.

The person I was looking for was the builder of our Little Old House and its sister houses to the left. All I knew up until about two weeks ago was that somebody named E.F. Rainey built four houses in Historic Springfield, including ours, at the tailend of the Springfield boom years. Three of those four are still standing today, and all three are inhabitated and in good repair, still sporting at least some of their original features, both inside and out.

After the holidays I wasn't feeling too keen on picking up the trim painting brush again (Surprise!) and instead buried my nose deep in census files, deatLinkh, marriage and birth records and generally went research-crazy over at Familysearch.org .

And guess what?
I found him!

E. F. Rainey is Edward F. Rainey. He and his three brothers moved to Jacksonville from North Carolina in the early 1900s to benefit from the building boom in Jacksonville. In 1920, Edward was 29 years old which means he was a barely out of the cradle and walking when he built those houses, ours included. Kidding.

So, Edward was 23 when he built the Ugly Duckling and its sister houses bringing along his crew in form of his brothers:
Jesse (also spelled Jessie), Edward's older brother by two years, listed as profession "Real Estate".
Virona Glenn, two years younger than Edward, was the painter in the family.
And the youngest, Joseph, must have been barely released from his apprenticeship when he worked as Electrician.

Electrician at 16 - scaaary! Then again, he must have done things right because the houses are still standing and didn't burn down. Lucky us!

Back then the band of brothers lived at Walnut Street, and while I have been able to find both Jessie (Jessie remained a bachelor until at least 1935 and lived at 1644 Main St.) and Virona Glenn (who got married to Ms Hazel Bonnie Southworth on February 25, 1939, in Riverside) in later years , Edward and Joseph have fallen off the radar and are eluding me so far.

I'm really excited to have found out about Edward and his brothers, and hope to dig up more about them to learn more about the people who built our house (and our neighbors' houses). With a little luck I might be able to dig up a picture of the house that has been lost over time. I wonder if it looks anything like the other three?

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Almost 30 years ago

In 1985 a group of people dedicated to the preservation and recognition of the Springfield neighborhood in Jacksonville kicked off a huge undertaking: surveying and cataloging every historic structure in Springfield for the application for National Historic District.


Springfield Heritage Education Center, short "SHEC", is working on making these masterfiles and photographs accessable on their webpage, along with more history, anecdotes and photographs of Springfield through the ages.



Check out the webpage here.



If you like to learn more historic tidbits about our neighborhood and find historical houses and neighborhoods generally squeal-worthy, sign up for their monthly newsletter!




While I haven't been able to get my hands on our house's master file just yet, I was able to find the picture taken in 1985 for the historic district application. Woot!





There it is, our little old house. While the years haven't been too kind to the exterior paint job and it doesn't look as fresh and new anymore, it hasn't changed a lot. The wrought-iron railing had already replaced the original wooden railing (which is a bummer since I was hoping to maybe find a picture with the old railing intact), the Crape Myrtle and funny-looking loquats hadn't been planted yet, the door to the right was much uglier than today's replacement (Thank God for small blessings!) and the clump of lilies at the step-up to the front yard was already planted. Would you believe that these lilies have been there for almost 30 years?? I certainly didn't (and now I feel somewhat bad about wanting to move them).

Other than that, our little house looks like our little house.

After mooning over the old photograph for a ...ahem,while, I did discover one little detail that had me squealing with excitement. I missed it at first, but you know, you have to get a little up close and personal.

Closer.
Closer still.

Do you see it?



Oh MY GOD! Leaded glass sidelights!




While our original entry door, bereft of its transom window, was already on the left side of the house, almost 30 years ago it had leaded glass sidelights! Aren't they beautiful??


Not only are they beautiful and I'm excited to have a picture of its past beauty, but this picture will be great proof of how the door originally looked like when we apply for the permission (Certificate of Appropriateness," short COA) to restore it. Woot!


I feel like dancing. How about you?

Thursday, January 5, 2012

Glimpse of the past

Guilty as charged: I'm an old house nut. I love the craftsmanship of bygone times, the love for detail and the sense of history you get living in an old home.

While house hunting in 2010, the husband and I also looked at a number of younger houses. Modern houses outside our historic neighborhood. Not only did it feel like cheating but we were baffled at how, well ... empty those houses felt to us. Now, mind you, both the husband and I have lived in newer homes prior to moving to Historic Springfield in Jacksonville just fine. Guess we didn't know what we were missing, right?

Back to the whole history part.


[The Sanborn Map Collection at the Jacksonville Main Library]


Our darling Ugly Duckling of a house has changed hands many times in its almost 100 years of existence and has been home to even more. If you check out the page called "House History" (find the navigation button at the top of the blog or simply click here), you can find out about past tenants and the bit about the builder I was able to dig up.

So far I have

searched the city directories (check out this blog post here)
checked out the Sanborn map (read more about it here)
investigated the Springfield survey

Over the holidays I decided to take the plunge and signed up for a trial membership in Ancestry.com. I also discovered the site Familysearch.com courtesy of the LDS church and tend to get the better results using their search engine.

What better way to dig through an old US Census than from the cozy comfort of your couch, socks and tea and a cookie nearby?



Best. time. drain. ever!
Well, at least for somebody like me. It excites me to learn more about the men and women who called our house their home and to tease their story from old records.
I have managed to unearth a few more details about the people who shared the Ugly Duckling with us and I just have to figure out a good way to share these story bits.

Every old house owner's dream is it to find an old picture of their house. You know, from the time when the varnish was still fresh and the plaster not quite dry. So far, no luck, but I'm hanging in there. Who knows I might just find that one shoe box with the family pictures taken our street in 1915.

Wouldn't that be cool?

Friday, April 15, 2011

Tour de knobs part I

One of the intriguing and charming details about our Ugly Duckling of a house is the quirky fact that not many of our door knobs actually match. There is even one door that has a different knob for each side! It appears that downstairs has the most original aka historically correct door knobs and most of them have not been painted over. Upstairs it's a totally different story. The vast array of styles and the many layers of paint tell an entirely different story. Brass, oxidized to a beautiful aged patina, would have been the metal of choice but it's hard to tell now. Removing the layers of paint leaves a pretty ginged up finish and so I decided to spray paint the existing fixtures with oil rubbed bronze spray paint. It really looks nice and you can see how it worked out on the door knobs in the guest bedroom here
Here's a first quick look-around at the knobs upstairs

This last knob with its beautiful filigree pattern is actually really surprising. I found the exact same one on the webpage of a store in Chicago that specializes in architectural salvage and it was dated to about 1885 - 30 years before our Ugly Duckling was built.


Oh, the stories this house could tell! If only it could talk ...

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Just a few more pages

... till the end of the chapter!

And just a few more pages until we start - finally ! - a brandnew chapter in our book going from "The long arduous annoying exasperating tiring frustrating exciting hunt for and purchase of a home" to "1001 exciting and not so exciting moments of rehabbing a historic home" followed closely by "The great mystery of paint colors, window treatments and decorative touches" - short and sweet, in a mere 17 hours we are going to become homeowners!
Squeeee!
Today I ducked again into the library to learn more about our Ugly Duckling's history. Researching the more recent history isn't nearly as fun - the books are newer and cleaner lacking the charm and mystery of the rumpled pages of old books gilded with age and sadly, the entries aren't nearly as exciting. Professions aren't listed as regularly anymore, and the names in their contemporary familiarity ring less intriguing.

It's also kind of sad to learn that in its long history, the Ugly Duckling has never really been a long-term family home. Except for the Parnells who lived in the Ugly Duckling between 1941 and 1966 and Mrs Bertha Babcock who lived here from 1971 until 1984, the house passed from tenant to tenant with few of them staying much longer than 2 or 3 years at a time.

Hopefully we will be able to break that spell and give the Ugly Duckling its if not forever family at least a long-term family that will take care of it (funny, I think of the Ugly Duckling as 'her' most of the time even though she's not one of the Grand old ladies of Historic Springfield) and cherish it. And no, we have no plans on renaming the Ugly Duckling "George"!

Enough sappy babbling - more tomorrow!

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Of all places


"Why on earth would you move to Springfield?"

6 years ago when the lease for our 2-bedroom/1 bath apartment in a run-of-the-mill apartment complex was up for renewal and after many tours driving through Historic Springfield, hubby and I oohing and aaaahing over the beautiful old houses, we took the plunge and set our signatures under a rental contract for a humongous 3 bedroom/1 bath apartment in an almost 100 year old home overlooking an inner city park. Not only did we fall in love with our landlady who is just the sweetest but we knew the moment we set foot into the apartment, seeing the light-flooded airy rooms with the high ceilings and glossy hardwood floors, that this is how we wanted to live.
[A house in Historic Springfield - no, not ours]

Our friends weren't quite as excited. Frankly, most of them were utterly flabbergasted that we would consider moving into this neighborhood. You see, Springfield, as most urban core neighborhoods, looks back onto years of rough history and these times are not yet forgotten with most residents. Springfield carries somewhat of a reputation for being a rough, tough and tumble neighborhood and at some point this reputation did ring true. Then, gentrification began ...

One by one dilapidated homes were bought and rehabbed restoring houses and the oak-lined streets of the historic district to their former glory (well, the ghost of their former glory - it will take many more years to get anywhere near Springfield's original beauty). Neighbors banded together, cleaned alleys and parks and worked toward turning the neighborhood around. When we moved in Springfield had already come a long long way, the shared love for those old houses bringing people from all walks of life together.

Is everything peachy-keen now? I'd be lying if I said it were :o) Springfield is, like its century-old houses, a work in progress but it's definitely well on its way. Sure there are still a few rough patches around, as an urban core neighborhood we experience homeless people roaming, break ins and our fair share of other inner city crime but this neighborhood has improved by leaps and bounds. I feel safe, I know my neighbors look out for us and we for them and I can't think of a tighter knit community.

"People come for the houses, and stay for the people."

People tend to fall in love with the charm of the historic homes but what sucks you really into the 'hood are the people. They come from all walks of life and are as diverse as you'd expect from an urban core neighborhood. And they -do- stuff: we have a Mommies group, a women's club, a community garden, an animal rescue group, a garden club, and, and, and.
We rope off an entire block for First Friday neighborhood parties and cart our children in groups of 20-30 around the neighborhood on hay rides for Halloween. Santa Claus rides through Historic Springfield on a fire truck, we have cook-offs and Dog Days in the Park, and so much more. Springfield never gets old![Truth be told, hubby and I toured a few houses outside of Springfield at the beginning of our house hunting adventure but every time we ended up realizing we were not willing to give up Springfield and all that it comes with.]


[Historic Springfield map: New Springfield is actually Brentwood - don't let it fool you ;o)
Historic Springfield has very clearly defined borders]


Soo, what's the deal with Springfield?

Historic Springfield is a small historic neighborhood in Jacksonville, FL, just north of the downtown core. The district contains 119 city blocks, an area just shy of a square mile, with approximately 1500 structures representing building styles such as wood frame vernacular structures, some examples of late 19th century revival and romantic styles, including Queen Anne, Colonial Revival, and the Stick style. 20th century types include Prairie School, Bungalow, and Mediterranean. You can find the occasional brick pavers and granite curbstones, carriage stepping stones and wrought iron fences scattered throughout the neighborhood, hinting at the turn of the century origins in the shade of the large oak trees lining the streets. It was added to the National Register of Historical Places in 1987. You can find the entry here

However, Springfield is best experienced than talked about. For us, hubby the city crawler and me the country gal, it's a fantastic compromise between living right smack in the middle of town while being surrounded by green.
I pulled up a couple of links, in case you'd like to see and read some more. It's getting late and the excitement over our closing on our own piece of Springfield on Friday is wearing me out for good :o)

Friday, January 14, 2011

Something bigger than google maps

Much much bigger, in fact. And much more fun, although I must confess I love google maps street view feature.So we enjoyed another Thursday at the library downtown. This time I trekked out with the munchkin and three of his neighborhood buddies and while they enjoyed the afternoon kids program, I ducked into the Florida collections for some quality time with a few maps I'd wanted to check out ever since I heard of them.
The Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps
Then created as a tool used by insurance companies and fire departments to assess the risk of fire for neighborhoods and properties, they are now a great tool in your research of your property's history. You can find out whether your house changed shape (a porch added or enclosed, an addition built, etc.), if it had outdoor buildings at some point (a garage, a shed, a carriage house, etc.) and what the surrounding neighborhood looked like.
Our library has actually digitalized a great deal of the Sanborn maps (check it out here) but unfortunately not enough to show the street with the Ugly Duckling. So off I went to wrestle the maps in person.
And wrestle them, I did. Boy, they look nothing they today's AAA maps! Nothing at all.

(Meet the Sanborn Map Collection - yes, they are that tall)


(Loooove those rumpled looking yellowed pages)

(Yep, that's my hand. You need two of these to carry one of the maps)

The librarians working the special collections upstairs are always incredibly helpful and nice and I feel quite at home up there. So while they put out the call to find the librarian who could answer my question on how these maps are set up, I decided to simply try my luck.
I'm a very visual person and a hands-on approach usually works much better for me than listening to or reading instructions of any sort. 3 misses later, I scored my first map with the right street. Woot! Granted, waiting for the librarian to point me to the right map would have been a little easier on my back and kept me from toting 3 heavy (40-50lbs is my guess) maps back and forth between their shelf and the table that's big enough to hold them.

(Our neighborhood in 2924 - the different colors indicate building material (pink is brick, yellow is wood frame, etc.)

So, there you go. That's how you find out if and how your house changed shape. We were able to go back to 1924 and confirm that the utility room with outside-access only had been a porch in the early years (the drywalled-over window was a dead give-away too, heh) . I was surprised that that was pretty much the only area that was enclosed and added to the structure at some point, even though I still think that the upstairs kitchen/future master bathroom was an open porch. I'm sure future demo will help us solve that riddle.
Way back there was a tiny garage in the Ugly Duckling's backyard but other than that, it has stayed in a rather unaltered state. And if we have any say in it, it'll remain on the map for a number of years to come :o)





Thursday, January 13, 2011

History

The year was 1915.

Woodrow Wilson was President.
World War I, then known as the "Great War" was
in full swing in Europe, though the United States
would remain neutral for just a little longer.

The RMS Lusitania, a Cunard ocean liner turned
auxiliary cruiser at the beginning of the war, was sunk by a
torpedo fired from the German subamrine u-20 just off the coast
of Ireland - an incident that sparked arguments until this day.
A little closer to home, the Mexican Revolution was ongoing.
In the US, the struggle for women's right to vote was at its peak.



The automobile was rapidly becoming a common means of transportation.
For entertainment, Americans went to the theater to see Vaudeville
shows and silent movies. If they opted for an evening at home, there were
many musical selections available for the acoustic disc phonograph, which was now a fixture of many American living rooms.
In January, the first transcontinental phone call is made.


And construction began on the Ugly Duckling.

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Don't know much about history

What a wonderful world this could be ... if everybody had a rocking main library like ours :o)

Like every Thursday we trekked out to our main library downtown right after school yesterday, and while the munchkin enjoyed the awesome afternoon program in the children's department I sneaked ...snuck ... well, hurried upstairs into the Florida collection for some geeky house history research fun. And this time I brought my point and shoot camera along!

So here's the lovely view of the shelves that hold the city directories (think "phone directory/ white pages" even if in the beginning there weren't any or many phone numbers) - your first stop for quick and easy research of the who is who in your house's past:


Their covers might look different (ranging from green Naga hide to faded red hardcover and everything in between) and their individual parts can be arranged slightly different but it all boils down to
  1. street directory (usually found in the front in the early publications and in the back of the more recent ones and printed on colored paper)
  2. name directory
  3. glossary, etc.
Meet city directory 1967


(Don't be fooled - this book weighs almost as much as your firstborn)


So, armed with your address you want to look up you find those colored pages with the street directory. Note that if your street doesn't have a name but is an actual number like say, 3rd St, you will discover that at the beginning of the 19th century these were spelled out so you'll have to look under "T" for Third St. In more recent years, numbered streets are listed by number in order before "A".

Word to the wise: You don't want to start nilly-willy looking up years. Tracking past owners/occupants of the Ugly Duckling was very straightforward and easy and the biggest 'problem' are simply missing years of city directories. When I tried the same for the Triplex (remember this one here), picking a random date sometime between the year it was built and today I couldn't find the house number in the street directory anymore! It had vanished! When I finally backtracked year by year I discovered that at some point the entire street had been re-numbered and that what is today house number 1832 was house number 2032 50 years earlier. So while sometimes you might be able to look up the first occupant/owner right off the bat, if you can't, start at the beginning and track back year by year toward the year it was built to solve the mystery :o)

Anyways, back to our city directory. Find the colored pages for the street directory and hunt down your address


(Don't forget to enjoy the ads in the margins!)

Woot! You found a name! Easy, peasy! Before running off to run it through the Census, however, you can squeeze just a teeny tiny bit more information from those city directories. Go into reverse and look up the name in the name directory part of the book.

(A glimpse into life in 1967: a clerk, a retiree, a saleswoman, a waitress at
Lee's & Eddie;s Restaurant, a clerk at Blue Cross-Blue Shield, a maid, a widow ...)


If you're lucky you'll find the name of the spouse or whether the spouse passed away (and what his name was). You can also occasionally find information about the profession or even the place of work - little bits of information that help you piece together the history of just who your house was home to in past years.

There you have it! That wasn't so bad, was it? I have to admit I was sneaky. I spent all of 10 minutes with the city directories this time because I was busy with some humongous maps - I'll tell you all about it in my next blog entry!


Thursday, December 30, 2010

If walls could talk ...

Ever since discovering the first Young Reader book about the history of Egypt I've been hooked on history. I'm a history nut geeking out over archeology, old books, books about old stuff, barely legible documents and ancient tomes, recipes and patterns, and more. I'm even a member of a group that recreates the Middle Ages and dabble in calligraphy and illumination, medieval cooking and other assorted medieval crafts.

It wasn't really a long step from that to trying to learn more about the house we're about to make ours in just 19 more days! *keeps fingers crossed*

Fortunately and much to my delight, the main branch of the local library houses a treasure trove of resources for the genealogist and Florida history lover. Up underneath the roof in the Grand Map room is where I can be found when the munchkin participates in one of the awesome kids' programs. For about an hour I get to browse the old city directories for glimpses into our house's past. I have yet to swing by the property appraiser's office to track down the actual past owners but so far I've had too much fun digging around in the old city directories for information on who lived in the Ugly Duckling over the past 95 years.

From what I've gathered so far, our house appears to have been a kind of modest starter home: Few occupants stayed longer than 2 years at a time and most held rather modest Middle-Class jobs. Hubby, of course, is tickled pink that the first ever occupant's name is "Mead". How befitting for a hobby brewer to soon be living in "The Mead House" ... heh.

I've added the Ugly Duckling's genealogy as a separate page to the top navi bar - I'll update it as my research comes along. We're planning on ducking into the library again this afternoon so I might have more to post tomorrow or Friday!
Enjoy!

Update:
Well, so I couldn't wait :o) I added a few more years to our house's genealogy of occupants. I also got the library clerk to show me to the Sanford maps and the prospect of finding a map with our house has me giddy with geeky excitement. Next time I'll bring the camera. Promise!