Whose House Was This, Anyway? (July/August 1991 | Volume: 42, Issue: 4)

Whose House Was This, Anyway?

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Authors: Heather Lockman

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July/August 1991 | Volume 42, Issue 4

When it comes to owning old houses, some people have all the luck. They discover polished oak floors beneath a ragged shag carpet or turn up a missing chandelier in a shed behind the garage. They can even answer a knock at the door one day and find the first owner’s daughter—spry as a schoolgirl and full of old stories—standing on their front porch. That happened to Andrew Ward, who wrote in the July 1990 issue about his historic Northwest house.

If it happens to you, count your blessings. The rest of us need patience and the skills of a private detective to piece together the history of whatever house we call home. When my husband and I first moved into our 1920 bungalow, a few blocks from the state capital in Olympia, Washington, we cursed everyone who had lived there before us: the jerks who had wallpapered (repeatedly) over the sandfinish plaster, the fools who had “fixed” termite damage with masking tape and paint.

But then, while stripping the bedroom walls, we found a sweet antique nursery paper of castles and longlimbed fairies. And suddenly I wanted to know who had put it there. Who had owned this house when it was new, in the days right after World War I?

Lloyd, the man who sold us the place, gave us one hazy clue. “You’ll notice,” he had said while showing us the overgrown garden, “there are some nice plantings here. We’ve heard that a capitol grounds keeper lived in this house at one time.”

Since the state capitol and its immaculate grounds had been built in the late 1920s, I wondered if our little house could have belonged to one of the very first capital gardeners? Better yet, the boss of the crew? It might be enough, in this government town, to land our little bungalow on the local register of historic buildings. All I needed was proof.

I began at the county courthouse, in the assessor’s office. It didn’t take me long to find our house in one of the loose-leaf “field books,” the notebooks appraisers use when they come around periodically to reevaluate properties for the purpose of figuring taxes. Along with square footage and dollar amounts, field books often contain brief comments jotted down over the decades. “Renting for $80/month” someone had written of our house in the year I turned sixteen, information that made me feel slightly historic myself.

Also included was a list of past owners of our house. We were down at the bottom, with Lloyd’s name directly ahead of us and above him a stack of strangers, each one a step toward the past. Unfortunately no dates appeared alongside the earlier entries. But logic suggests that the name at the top, L. L. Swaney, was that of the original owner. Not bad for a half-hour of research, I thought.

My next stop was at