My Old House

I'm back to researching the house and got very excited this Sunday. I have a pile of library books including the Eugene Area Historic Context Statement and the Downtown Core Area Historic Context Statement, and I found a few more pieces of my puzzle. A map shows the original plats of my neighborhood and although my property is right outside the Huddleston Donation Land Claim, it sits in a section called Meets and Bounds of which there are quite a few. Apparently they are the spaces between the land claims, usually oddly-shaped pieces that were most likely added to the claims cheaply a little later. I cannot find a date on this map but I know one has to be available somewhere. Huddleston's original claim shows on the edge of the earliest map I found, dated 1860, but of course there was nothing like a street back then, so I will have to spend some time looking at the geographical notation to figure out the platted lines.

This later map shows that Huddleston took, bought, and added most of the land in my neighborhood between 1889 and 1908, and I already know that he owned a racetrack on the Fairgrounds property, which he eventually donated to the County for the Lane County Fair. You can see the track on maps and Mae told me stories about some of the men who raced and came to her mother for her famous enchiladas. Huddleston died in 1890 of gangrene but his wife Samantha apparently handled and sold off his properties after his death, and I sent in a request for the building permit records on my property which go back to 1890 I believe. I also got a wonderful book on the Masonic Cemetary, called Full of Life, which has a lot of photographs. I paged through it, finding a profile of Lark Bilyeu, a contemporary of Huddleston, who was a prominent lawyer and political figure who came here in 1862. There is no doubt in my mind that F.G. named his son Bilyeu Vaughan, after this esteemed personage who may have been instrumental in Vaughan's real estate dealings that enabled him to buy some of Huddleston's properties and build the dairy farm and whatever else he built in my neighborhood. Bilyeu Vaughan, of course, is one of the men who wrote his name on the board I found in my kitchen wall, dated 1916.

Then I noticed this picture, one of only a very few from the Settlement Era, which was from about 1850 when the first white guys arrived to take up their lands, until about 1885 or so when the plats were all mapped. This house in the rather low-quality photo of the photo, is clearly made with vertical boards, JUST LIKE MY HOUSE! It has no foundation, which jibes with my theory that the foundations of my house and the one next door were added later to what I am convinced were settlement era buildings.

I don't know if I can prove this, but my theory has been bolstered. Either the houses were built as farm buildings and then dressed up over the ensuing decades, or they were built by the old guys still using the settlement era techniques. My friend Richard told me that when he was working on a back house on Patricia's property, he found the same vertical board construction, along with some square, handmade nails. He thinks it was a carriage house, as Patricia's house is rather grand. it stands to reason that my house and its identical neighbor were also built for carriages or other vehicles from the horse-drawn era...right next to the racetrack, on the property owned by the racetrack owner. The shack that Mae and her family moved into in 1933 was probably another of those remaining buildings which hadn't yet been improved.

I'm excited to see about the building permits, though I doubt Huddleston would have gotten permits for carriage houses, as I doubt it was required. The reports may show remodels of existing buildings, though. If I can date the foundation blocks that will help, and I can crawl under there when this damn foot is healed and measure some of the wood, because my memory is that the dimensions are all true, and the wood is unplaned and rough. I may be able to decide when the foundation was laid under the building. I also have a square nail or two that I found in my dirt.

I am overly thrilled and I feel like I've made a major breakthrough to support my theories. I also noticed that the first sash and door company was established in 1870, so I believe my old doors were made back then, and old 1850's locksets were used, because farmers are thrifty. Huddleston started by owning the first store, established in 1851, which no doubt financed his real estate purchases. He may have done the first remodel of his carriage houses, or Samantha, his widow, may have directed it. At any rate, the several courses of improvements may be traced in the permit trail, or I may be able to date the materials more closely.

I still don't know if Samantha and James Huddleston had children, so I need to get to the Masonic and other cemeteries to find their graves and see who is buried near them. I found a couple of other possible offspring, a Harriet Alice who lived one year 1857 to 1858, and might be documented in the newspapers, and a Henry C. who lived until 1925. He could be the person who made it all happen after his father's death, unless he is from some other branch. There is still so much to find out.

I'd get right on this if I could, but yesterday a giant pile of over 900 shirts landed in my shop, and now I have to really apply myself to that. I think I figured out a way to print by myself, though, so I am going to try that out today and see how much I can do in a couple of hours at a time. My foot is in great shape, and I got a handle on making the boot more comfortable. All of this down time is good for planning and scheming and I think I can get my scooter down the back steps if I set aside my dignity and just sit down on the steps and do it like I remember my Mom getting around when she had a broken foot. I remember well the horror of Mom getting hurt when the boat slipped off the trailer and shot a board right into her foot, which stressed her to the point of a miscarriage, one of those childhood things embedded in visual memory. It was the first time I witnessed Mom having misfortunes that weakened her physically, and I know it was a shock, but she must have handled it well because I don't have any more memories about what must have been a difficult few months. I hope we helped her a lot. We were four little girls I think, with Paula being a toddler at the most, maybe even still a baby. I know I was older than six because that is when we moved to that suburban farmhouse from the downtown duplex. Mom still lives there and it is still impossible to paint the ceiling of that stairwell in that owner-built house. I wonder how Mr. Speck and the history of our life in that house set me up for this phase of my owner-built experience. When I look up at the lack of trim in my impossible-to-reach skylight well, it reminds me of all of that. History just goes around and around.