More of the Mystery

After I spent another day in research which required an additional day to get the virus out of my laptop that I picked up by being online too much, I found out some thrilling things!

Death records are mostly what is available with the people I found in my walls. It turns out that Grace Bowers and her husband Frank have a lovely little stone together in Lane Memorial Gardens. Ironically she died in 1989, when we were just beginning to fix up her old house. She was 103!!! And because they had no children (as far as I know anyway) she didn't seem to have an obituary. Her husband, Henry Frank, did have one and it said they were living around the corner on 12th Street when he died in 1965.

Her full name was Grace Edna Vaughan Bowers. That's right, she was Floyd Governor (or Gouvenir) Vaughan's daughter. He also had three sons, Richard by his first wife, Floyd B., and Bilyeu. Grace and Frank were married in 1911, so one theory is that they all built her a house.

I can't tell if the name on the board is Floyd B. or Floyd G. Old F.G. was born in 1932, and came to Oregon in 1847. That was quite early in Oregon settlement, so they came by wagon. In fact, I found a little blip of information that says F.G. Vaughan's first wife was killed in a fall from a wagon he was driving in 1882, when he was fifty, and had one son, Richard, who was 15. Floyd married his housekeeper and had the other three children with her. So he was quite old when Grace married in 1911. That makes me think that Frank worked with his brother-in-law Bilyeu and their friend Elmer Irwin Van Orden, from Marcola, to put up that board. Maybe one or all of them were carpenters (someone built some really nice cabinets and counters) or maybe Elmer had nothing to do with it and they got the board from him somehow, since the dates on the board are three years apart. And I think Frank did the upgrades, the trim with his name so proudly, himself. I picture Grace doing the wallpaper, especially the florals. But Floyd the elder could have built the original house, or bought it from whomever did build it in the late 1800's. Somebody with adventurous taste put in that turquoise stuff, I think. Back to Deeds and Records for more. I have to find out how many lots they had back then, and I might be able to find out who built my neighbors house where they lived when Frank died. I might be able to find out their professions and other details from censuses, or by paying to join Ancestry.com.

I could find out what all the Huddlestons did with the properties before they started selling them. I could find out the ages of all of the houses on the street and some of their histories. All of which would be what is called backstory in fiction and would fascinate the fiction writer in me. I wonder if Richard's mother dying had anything to do with Grace's life, if that was why she didn't have children. Grace herself has a "delayed birth" record, which means either her birth was difficult or her record wasn't entered when she was born. I'll have to look that up too. Or write a short story about it all.

But the construction of the two sections of the house were so different, I'm thinking that they just remodeled it. They would have been in their twenties when she was married, and her husband was even younger, just 21. If the house was built in 1916 he was 25. Certainly you could build a house at that age and with minimal skills back then before codes and contractors licenses and all that. You can still get some slack for being the homeowner/builder.

But the mystery of when the original two rooms were built deepens. I plan to research the building methods and do even more research on the wallpaper, since I found very little real information there. I steamed some of it apart and discovered that both the turquoise and the brown had the same border, that rather crude block-printed geometric pattern. It's possible that it was locally or regionally made, I suppose.

F.G. Vaughan was a farmer, and I think Bilyeu and his wife Estella were too. There was one purchase of sheep recorded in the county records under Bilyeu. I suppose most people did some farming back then, if they wanted to eat. Eugene wasn't even surveyed by Skinner until 1851. There's a good bit of history in a book I have called Market Days, published by the Lane Pomona Grange, and it's amusing. Apparently "dog fennel" was a hugely problematic weed back in those days and I still have quite a bit of it next to the house. Some things don't change much I guess.

There was a lot happening here, though. In 1867 when there were only 800 inhabitants in Eugene City, there were 13 dry goods, hardware and grocery stores, two photographic galleries, two tailor shops and a milliner, among other commercial businesses. People were working and creative. By 1910 there were paved streets and electric streetcars. Even before the turn of the century there was milled lumber and moldings available from Midgley's Mill. Farmers sold produce by peddler's wagons all over town, and the first filberts were planted by George Dorris in 1900. Hops and mint began around that time too to replace the wheat which was the first cash crop around here. All of those plants volunteer in my gardens and persist in my neighborhood's margins.

I found some interesting moldings over the boards in the back wall, so the original outside surface of my house could well have been those long boards with the molding as battens over the substantial cracks between them. They might be cedar, and are now on the outside of my sauna covering cracks there. The house could have been built much earlier than 1916, and I'm inclined to think it was. Even the front porch, which has a bungalow appearance, could have been added, and the original house could have just been those two rooms. Certainly the back door was much newer than the five-panel ones indoors, some with their old locksets intact. I will continue to research and speculate. I'm having a blast.