Rachel made a shadow box in honor of our house and all the ancestors and spirits of place. Her description of the contents: The wooden planks that help make up the back panel are from the house itself. I gathered them from the attic. The printouts are from newspaper clippings. Updates began with the Owens getting permits to build the house, and ending the week they moved in. The prickly seed pods are from the sweet gum tree that the Elliots planted.
I’ve added “The Owens House” as a blog category to contain all posts about the history of our house. This will interest exactly one reader of this blog (Rachel)–who will also not like the fact that I’ve called it the Owens House. But I like it, and it’s my blog, so there.
I recently wrote a bit about the Schroers, who were the second family to live in our house. Over the weekend, there was a tour of some of the local historic churches and one of them was First Presbyterian, where Dr. Schroer was a deacon. We definitely wanted to go to that one because we knew from this news clipping that his wife and daughter donated a baptismal font after his death:
Thankfully, it was still there:
We were glad to be able to give the members of the church a bit more background information on their baptismal font in exchange for adding a couple of images to our house lore.
Today at the historical society’s research library, we discovered that our house was built in 1908—two years earlier than we had been told.
Rachel and I are continuing to research the lives of our ancestors of place. Today we looked into the Schroer family, who were the second family to live here (1939-1971). Dr. William Schroer was a chiropractor who moved to Bedford from Poland, Indiana, in 1927 to open a practice. He and his wife Delzena had one daughter Florine.
Dr. Schroer was a deacon of First Presbyterian here in Bedford. The family seem to have been socialites: very active in various clubs and committees. Dr. Schroer was a Mason and his daughter was a member of the Order of the Eastern Star.
We also visited their graves in Poland, Indiana, a little over an hour from here. They seem to have had deep roots in that little community, which was heavily populated with German immigrants.
This is just a sketch for the moment. I plan to write a more complete history of the house after I gather more information. Rachel and I were saying today that we have thought so much about our house and its history and people that it’s beginning to feel like a person in itself.
Young Schroers:
Older Schroers:
You never know what you’ll find when you pull up the carpet on a 114 year old house. Someone covered a hole with a peanut lid. We plan to leave it; the bookshelves will cover it anyway.
We found the graves of the first owners’ of our home today. We put some flowers from our backyard—theirs and ours—on the grave.
I read through the abstract for our house this evening and worked out the history of ownership. The property that includes our house began as a grant of 160 acres from the US government to William Carmichael in 1818. For the next century it was sold off in pieces and parts and was the subject of several lawsuits. One of the owners was Dr. Winthrop Foote—doctor, lawyer, and founder of the local limestone industry.
Our particular lot took its current shape in 1907 when John and Laura Owens purchased it. From there is goes as follows:
All told, we’re the fourth family to live in this house. The three previous families all lived here 30+ years. We plan to keep that tradition.