Wallpaper

I've gotten back to researcing the wallpapers I found under the lath and plaster of my house. This crude almost Kraft paper stuff was pasted right onto the interior, horizontal 1/12s despite the cracks between them...it served as insulation too.


Because it was underneath the floral types, at first I thought it was early Art Deco, but the more I look the more I think it was Gothic Revival paper, which would make it from the 1840's! Any experts out there? There isn't much that resembles it anywhere online that I have found, but the primitive blockprint quality of it lends credence to its age.

I'll keep looking, of course, but since I already decided my exterior was once board and batten, before the siding was put on in maybe 1916, this makes it possible that the original style was sort of Gothic Revival. The house itself doesn't have the usual height for that style, but people who built their own houses didn't necessarily stay true to any architectural plan. If Gothic Revival was in style, that was just external decoration to a degree.

Modifying it to a style more like a Craftsman bungalow would be something easily done with a facelift such as the clapboards and porch columns might add. 

The brown wallpaper was in what must have been the parlor since the front door is there, and the turquoise of the same pattern was in the bedroom. It extended across the back and looked like it was there before the closet was put in, because the closet wasn't papered with the same layers. The closet is where the 1850's lockset was installed. The floral paper was clearly pasted over the blue stuff, which makes it unlikely that the blue stuff was Art Deco. The timing just wouldn't be right.

The blockprint technique and crude design makes it possible that the stuff was produced locally or in San Francisco and not imported. Lots of things were made here, so it is possible that someone had a small wallpaper shop. More perusal of the newspapers and city directories might shed some light there.

Of course proving much of anything is pretty much a guess, since everyone is long gone from the scene. I did figure out who Lycurgus Davis was, Samantha's brother who came with her and her family, the Benjamin Davis family, on a Peek wagon train in 1847. They were the second family to settle, right after the Skinners. He eight and left home at 13 to become a ranch hand, but for 38 years was a carpenter and contractor and built many of the early homes in the downtown area. There has got to be documentation of some of that.

That is a thrilling clue, because he could well have been the original builder of this house. The Davis claim was out on the river road, which we still call River Road, but I haven't pinned down exactly where. They had reportedly good relations with the natives (after a lot of trouble on the way here, in the Rogue Valley) who were still in place when they got here, so we assume still burning off the forests to protect the wetlands camas crops. Apparently Catherine Davis loved trees very much and fought to have two large Doug firs saved from development, so there might be some documentation of that and of their original location. Catharine is quite famous for being a doctor who made a lot of trips to save lives in the hills around here, and raised her remaining five children after her husband died only 11 years after they arrived, when she was only 47. (He only lived to be 50, though he was a locally famous judge.) Curiously, in several censuses and the original records of the wagon trains, Samantha seems to be named Cynthia almost up until the time she got married. Probably this is just mistakes made by the census takers, or people who read their handwriting.

Tiny bit by tiny bit, things are revealed. I think Cynthia wanted a more contemporary name and chose Samantha herself. You might imagine that someone who came west in an oxen-drawn wagon might have some gumption. She was ten at the time. Lemuel, the oldest, settled on the coast and has a little cemetary of his own, south of Newport, the South Beach cemetary. At one point Cynthia/Samantha isn't listed as living at home and that may have been a period when she was working for the Skinners as their babysitter/ house help. 

So many stories. So tantalizing.