House histories?

[Miss Tuppence]

I love this thread!

My house in Yorkshire was built in 1756, in the centre of a medieval market town. I'm currently ploughing through the census and have found that the young lady who lived her in the early 1900s was called 'Leake' (yes her Christian name!) and she looked after her father until 1915 when a Sgt Major, some ten years her senior must have caught her eye as she upped and moved to North Yorkshire!
I also know that the young lady who rented after her had two small children and her husband was killed in the great war. I often wonder if she received her telegram 'Regret to inform you.....' whilst standing in my hallway and after all the tears and heartbreak, I wonder if she struggled to bring up her children alone.
Here are some photos of the old distemper and vintage wallpaper in my bedroom.

Wow, Kitty S, such a great story! (off topic- I love Yorkshire too- especially Beverley as my dad use to live there when he was in his teens! Anyway….) I live in a modern house so I don’t have such stories.
That’s also a lovely print on the wallpaper- have you kept it like that, or have you re decorated completely? It’s very much like your very own House Detectives- I loved that programme!!! T xxx

 

[W-D Forties]

My current house is a late 1920's two-up-two-down that has been built on Frankinstein style over the years and is now a 4 bed. Nothing special.

My old house in London was in what was a street of early Victorian 4 story terraces. Then during the war the area was blitzed badly and the street is now a mish-mash of Victorian with 50's-70's fill ins. Our house was built in the 1950's in what was a V2 rocket crater (I think 9 people died in the blast that created it). The funny thing was, they didn't fill in the crater, just built our small row in it, so you had to walk down steps to the front door!

 

[Kahuna]

My old house in London was in what was a street of early Victorian 4 story terraces. Then during the war the area was blitzed badly and the street is now a mish-mash of Victorian with 50's-70's fill ins. Our house was built in the 1950's in what was a V2 rocket crater (I think 9 people died in the blast that created it). The funny thing was, they didn't fill in the crater, just built our small row in it, so you had to walk down steps to the front door!

My house in Yorkshire was built in 1756, in the centre of a medieval market town. I'm currently ploughing through the census and have found that the young lady who lived her in the early 1900s was called 'Leake' (yes her Christian name!) and she looked after her father until 1915 when a Sgt Major, some ten years her senior must have caught her eye as she upped and moved to North Yorkshire!

Amazing stories! Those of you in Europe have an advantage on those in the states in the oldness of your houses. A house built in 1756 must have a lot of stories to tell. When I speak of my house, built in 1947, as being old, it really doesn't compare at all. W-D Forties, how odd that they would actually build your house in a crater without leveling it to the surrounding landscape. I guess they must have been trying to rebuild as quickly as possible.

 

[Kitty_Sheridan]

Sadly only one wall had the paper scraps and I was tempted to simply preserve some of it and frame it! However, some of the original lime and horsehair plaster had come loose and so it had to be redone. I scraped as much off as possible and have pressed it in a book.

I love living in Beverley, but sadly we've lost some of the town character to big retailers, Jaeger, Joules etc....I wish they'd make more 'House Detectives' it was so addictive. Theres a good programme starting soon about the history of some private stately homes. (UK)

K

 

[Big Man]

I started working on some much needed re-glazing of the glass in the windows of my old house this past week, and this window has a story. The small hole and large cracks came from my Dad's BB gun when he (supposedly) accidentally shot it when he was a young boy in the mid-1930's. I thought about replacing the glass since I had the sash out (it's from an upstairs window), but just couldn't bring myself to change something that has been a part of the history of the house for so long.

 

[AtomicEraTom]

Cool story! I really enjoyed this. Always great when you can live where your family lived before you.

I started working on some much needed re-glazing of the glass in the windows of my old house this past week, and this window has a story. The small hole and large cracks came from my Dad's BB gun when he (supposedly) accidentally shot it when he was a young boy in the mid-1930's. I thought about replacing the glass since I had the sash out (it's from an upstairs window), but just couldn't bring myself to change something that has been a part of the history of the house for so long.

 

[W-D Forties]

Slightly off topic, but my husbands dad had a BB gun which he used to make a right nusance of himself alll over town. One night, he was leaning out of his bedroom window shooting at the house next door. Unfortunately for him, the bloke who lived there saw him and shouted that he was going to tell his mum and dad first thing next morning. So in the middle of the night he climbed out of his window, crept over, prised out the pellets, filled the wood with filler ...... and then painted the door to match!

When the bloke came over in a rage the next day, my FIL just denied he'd shot anything - and the man had no proof!

He also has tales of making home-made explosives with chemicals stolen from school. Oh, and blowing up a barn with a WW2 machine gun. And we complain about kids these days!

 

[Kitty_Sheridan]

Genius! ha ha can imagine the chap blustering about the damage then struggling to find it..
'it was right here, I swear!'

 

[Big Man]

... And we complain about kids these days!

I laugh about what my children and grandchildren DO NOT know about me.

 

[W-D Forties]

The post war flat I grew up in didn't have a particulaly interesting history, but the park next to it did. It used to be the Liverpool Necropolis, and was only changed into a park in about 1912. The flats were kind of on their own as the area was blitzed during the war and my little block was the only thing built on the block after it. It always felt quite isolated and creepy living there knowing that there was an ex-necropolis next door, especially when someone told me the circular flower bed was a plague pit. When the park was created all the graves were moved, or not. When the road at the bottom of the park was widened years later some remains were found.

At the other side of the flats was the Maternity Hospital, originally a workhouse for the poor. During the war it was bombed with such great loss of life (many of them new borns) that it was impossible to remove all the bodies and they had to be concreted over. Such sadness within a few hundred yards.

Needless to say, I really hated living there as a child. It was like Halloween all year!

 

[W-D Forties]

I have just done some further digging and found out that none of the bodies were moved! Aparantly if it's not going to be built on they don't, they just move the headstones. I think the park may be officially still concecrated ground. Aparantly there are over 80,000 bodies under there.

No wonder I used to get goosebumps walking the dog there at night!

 

[Kitty_Sheridan]

Oh wow...that's so sad. I recently found out that a relative of mine was killed as a toddler in an incident in Kent. Her parents placed her in a nursery nr Westerham and it was bombed. I'm currently raking through the archives to learn more.

No wonder you get the chills there!

 

[Big Man]

While doing some work on my old house yesterday I found something interesting. I've been working on re-glazing the windows, and in doing so have been carefully removing the window molding and taking the upper and lower sashes out to re-glaze them. Not only has this made the re-glazing process easier, but it has given me some insight into the early (in most cases the original) color the windows and casings were painted.

When I removed one of the windows in the front room, on the back side of the molding I found written "J.B. Howell Nebo, NC". Mr. Howell was the man who built the house in 1907. He sold the house to a Mr. Gettys in 1916, and on March 30, 1917, my grandparents bought the house (and we've been there ever since). I don't know if Mr. Howell wrote his name himself when the house was being built or if his name was on some of the lumber that was brought in to the building site during construction. But, whatever the case, it made for an interesting discovery, and one more "link" to the past. Who knows what other interesting finds are there waiting to be discovered.

 

[Shangas]

My house isn't that old (not compared to some in this thread), but a couple of years ago, dad and I were cleaning out the study and in the back of the closet, we found all these old scrolls. Dad said the real-estate agent had given them to him when we bought the house, but he hadn't looked at them in over 15 years and had forgotten all about them.

My dad and I unrolled them and read them, then we rolled them up again, put them back in the original sheath and put them back in the closet.

What were they?

The original blueprints for our house when it was built in the mid 1960s.

They covered every single room. My bedroom is on there. So is my dad's room, brother's room, study, bathrooms, living-room, dining-room, balcony, front porch, kitchen, laundry...And you learn stuff looking at those old blueprints.

For example, before we read them, we didn't realise that our billiards room downstairs was originally going to be the garage-space. But then the billiards room was built and the garage was moved elsewhere, which gave the plot of land more usable space, and a swimming-pool was sunk into where the driveway would've been. There's dozens of those scrolls, detailing EVERYTHING...even the built-in closets where we found them!

EDIT:

Rather than just yak on and on about the plans, I thought I'd show them to you.

Now there are dozens of scrolls detailing absolutely EVERYTHING about the original plans for the house (according to the prints, the house was originally built for a Mr. & Mrs. Leslie Cohen in the early 1960s. The dates on the plans range between 1964-1965).

Anyway. This is just one of the scrolls, in this case, detailing the electrical system. The little symbols indicate the placement of light-fixtures (white circles), light-switches (lines leading away from white circles) and power-outlets (black semicircular symbols with crosses)

The house has changed a lot since these plans were drawn up nearly 50 years ago.

DOWNSTAIRS:

The "driveway" at the back is gone.

The "garage" is now the rumpus room/billiard room/home gym/guestroom (yeah we do a lot of things downstairs).

The "driveway" is now where the garage and swimming-pool is.

The room leading off the "garage" (to the right) is now our storage-room/junk-room.

UPSTAIRS

All the flourescent lights (apart from one) have been replaced (flouresecent lights are marked on the plans as thin, white rectangles, as opposed to regular lights, which are marked as white circles).

The bedroom for the live-in maid (marked "MAID'S BEDRM" on the plans) was first my grandmother's bedroom, now the study.

The placement of the bath and the vanity unit in the master bedroom has switched sides (the bath is now on the right as you enter, instead of on the left as shown in the plans. We had the bathrooms renovated).

The bench-tables (in bedrooms 2 & 3) have been removed. (Bedroom 3 is mine, Bedroom 2 is my brother's. Now a guestroom).

 

[Angus Forbes]

Our house was built mid-1920's (we are the second family to live here). One day I looked in the county tax records and found the name of the original owner, entered his name into Google, and found that he had donated a collection of historical papers to the University of North Carolina library at Chapel Hill. The library put a synopsis of the donor's bio on-line, so I was able to learn about him in some detail (he was politically connected, and had an interesting life).

 

[Kahuna]

Shangas how cool to find blueprints of the original layout of the house! I'm interested in the way houses evolve over time. Provided you don't have some kind of homeowners association dictating what you can do to your house that's the way that neighborhoods develope character. If you visit developments where houses were virtually cookie cutter copies of each other 50 years ago, some of the houses are very different now. I'm of two minds on the whole building restrictions issue as I've seen some perfectly beautiful vintage houses be destroyed in the name of modernization. But small changes over time can lead to some interesting changes in places that were pretty boring originally.

 

[Marzena]

The house I will describe is now only used as holiday cottage, so perhaps , strictly speaking, it is not "the house I live in" but it has an interesting story to it.

It is the last house before the bridge , and indeed, the part of it which today is kitchen, was built at the beginning of 19thC to be used for toll collecting . It was in a sense "an office" , so it did not have much space or frills to it. Then, in 1880s tolls were abolished and the little hut was bought by my great grandfather, the village blacksmith, at the time of his marriage. He added another room. At the time of WW1 , Italian soldiers (serving in the Austrian army) helped build another extension, one more bedroom with adjacent shed/cellar. After 1920s it became my grandmother's house - my Father's birtplace. In this tiny cottage seven children were raised! plus two who died in infancy. The family was very poor and in Spring 1939 the house was to be auctioned off for debts. The date was already set and my Grandmother pencilled curses on the attic walls, condemning those who would supplant her to the life of misery (those writings are still there, but I would not be able to decipher them any more; it was my aunt who told me what they were). Strangely enough, the auction never happened because just days before it was due, the auction was staved off by the President, because Grandfather fought in the 1920 Polish-Bolshevik war, therefore had certain rights of appeal. The debts were still not paid, but WW2 soon put an end to the sale anyhow. In 1945 as soon as he received his first wages, Grandfather went to pay the nominal sum of his indebtedness, what with the post war inflation, it was just a ridiculously small part of the original debt. That ended the problem though.
The cottage is nothing special to look at - just typical East European coutry cottage, part timber, part local limestone, the woodwork painted dark blue. Many original features still existing in my Father's childhood were lost when the house was shelled in 1945, among them a very old stove (in the oldest part of the building) made of rough clay inlaid with flat, white stones from the river. But the high thresholds and the carved ceiling beams are still there. The garden still contains lilacs and rose bush planted by my Grandmother as a young girl, it has very delicate, palest pink flowers.
Nowadays this house is only used for holiday stays but my aunt is seriosly thinking of moving back there with her son and his wife, as it has amenties installed now. So, after more than 40 years it will be lived in again.