A Century of Progress

Howard Frank Bowers, Jan. 10th, 1916

This week was so super challenging I felt anxious for the first time in weeks. Generally in the off-season of the Market I feel a sweet and gentle winter retreat, just as if I lived in some snow-covered cabin far away from town. But I live downtown. In a town that is rapidly becoming a city. Have I mentioned that I struggle with development? This week I had five meetings in two days and so many things came at me my head is still spinning.

Tomorrow is the 100th birthday of my house, or at least the signature of two men who signed a board that I found in the wall of my house, and I may say more about that. This little 60x90 property has seen a lot of change in that century, to be sure. In 1916 the houses around me were also new, or new-ish. There's one that was in place since a few decades earlier, and this one is actually much older too, I think. My current theory is that it was hauled here from a nearby farm and fixed up
, but I know that at least two on my corner were built new in that year or right about then. Reconstructing the history is almost as hard as reconstructing the parts as they need it.

I lamented already about the neighbor's fence and it is effectively finished now. I thought to post an "after" shot to balance this before one but really it is too heartbreaking. This photo shows my two houses and the neighbors a few years ago before it changed hands.

My rebuilt house on the right.

My house before I rebuilt it

It looks not at all the same next door today, and now that open space between us and all the many plants are gone. There is a cedar-lined box with a dirt parking space at the back and somehow I will have to adjust. They took out a weedy Bigleaf Maple that was under the utility pole, which pretty much had to happen, though I had pruned it all these years and liked using the branches of it. I saved quite a few of those branches but in the process of scouring the space of any life the overzealous builder-guy actually removed all of the raspberry supports from my five foot strip garden along the side of my shop, as well as the old boards from my OCF booth that I was using to walk on, and a holly log I wanted. Nobody asked me if I wanted help "cleaning" my side yard. I was livid and still am upset, although I recognize that he was probably thinking he was being helpful to the old lady next door (yes, me) and to be fair I was not home that day to ask. I somehow hadn't conveyed the fact that I am not the type of old lady who likes "help" and that I actually wanted those boards right where they were. It is actually a bit miraculous that they didn't level the strip all the way up to the street and take out everything. Maybe I intervened just in time. Once a road, a road forever.

There's another section across in front of that car, now.

But that is probably going to happen anyway. They will next take out the ash that is right next to their house (that crooked one that curves over their roof) and they will take off that bumpout that is the only remaining piece of the century-old exterior and build something there, which will reduce the rest of the easement to a muddy trail they'll use for construction right next to my pear trees. I have to be prepared to just stay serene and adjust to each change even though they seem so invasive to me. Just because I have taken care of their yard for three decades for a succession of renters who didn't, I have no real claim to the space. They are trying to be kind to me as I thrash around with my sense of loss.
You can't really stand in the way of improvements, can you?

So this is on top of the gleeful development plans for the little corner of downtown where I have my other home, the Park Blocks where I spend so much time selling. There will be a building squeezed into that alley just south of the west block, the one I use to enter and exit the Market with my bike cart. I'll need a new route. That I guess I can handle although I hope there will not be any blocked streets or alleys during the construction phase, a vain hope I know. It's going to be inconvenient at minimum and then Kesey Square will also be removed. I know that's a done deal. I know how developers and builders work all too well. They like clean, clear spaces to work with every old thing tossed in the dumpster. The remodel of the house next door was mild compared to what will happen around the Park Blocks. But it is another thing over which I have absolutely no control. At least they listen to my concerns about my garden and my own yard (except for stealing my boards) and respond to some of it. Downtown developers are not going to care what I think.

Me shortly after we bought the place in 1989

Which is not going to stop me from trying to think it. I'm writing a group letter to the city right now trying to articulate Market's concerns for the Park Blocks and Kesey. Mostly we feel that the loss of open space in Kesey will compromise the remaining open space and hurt our use of it. It's hard to separate the projection of our fears from useful ways we can participate and get our needs met. My strategy is pretty much to articulate the fears and then try to link them to city goals and the Master Plan for the Park Blocks, which actually honors Saturday Market quite thoroughly in its visions, and then take most of the fears out of the letter so they can't use that as a way to dismiss our concerns. Our job may just be to get them to tell us before they toss those visions to be replaced by those of the developers, who have a very different idea of what Eugene needs or they wouldn't ask for loans and muptes and waivers and all the things they do to maximize their take and pass their costs on to us, the people.

I feel that people like me are being pushed aside because we don't want to fight against change, that we tend to just feel helpless and resentful in the face of the takers. When they started this fence project next door I clearly told them what the map said about the seven-foot easement but the builder complimented my "pretty hair" while I tried to convince him to scale back his plans. They were hoping to put that fence right on my line, which is, thankfully, right in the center of my pear trees and runs right through my blackcaps and raspberries. I've pulled my plants back really far out of the easement over the last two years, but the fence would have been so oppressive as to kill all of my plants. So I did get a huge concession when they located the fence on their side, in fact, way inside their property line. If they hadn't put in the parking space it wouldn't look as bad. I guess it is the change from jungle to scoured wasteland that upsets me. Fortunately plants will grow and I can make it okay back there in a couple of seasons. Downtown, once the open space goes, it won't be back.

Interior of the old place, pretty untouched since the 1940's. 

 

 

So, whatevs. Fears are generally not realized in quite the negativity that they are generated. Maybe the new building in the downtown alley will greatly improve my access to and from the Market. Speaking up now could help that cause. All things are possible. My house has been here a hundred years, and if Grace Bowers and Tillie Van Harken could see what I have done to it they probably would demonize me too. Those kitchen cabinets were hand-built by somebody and me using the wood to hand-build mine doesn't really bring them back.

I know I gave this house another fifty years at least by all the work I did on it over the last twenty. If I could go back I might make different choices. It doesn't really matter in the big giant picture, does it? Responding to change is something we do every day and cultivating some grace around it is the challenge of all of us, especially old people like me. It isn't going to stop. Fortunately, I have a lot of tools to work through it. One of the best is satire and I got the best little movie in my head last night about the Jell-O Art Show possibilities. Think of The Wiz and sing along as we "Move Kesey down, Kesey down the ro-oad,". Stay tuned.

Windowsill Project

Another great illustration of my creative process in all of its clunk. This will be day nine of the project. I spent all summer procrastinating replacing this half-rotten exterior sill on the old part of the house, south side. My main fear was that the whole wall would be rotten and I'd never get it all patched up before the rains. When we got the sunny stretch I finally dove in.

It took two days to get the sill out, including a bit of online research and a tool survey. It had been a long time since I did anything resembling fine woodworking, so I had to drag out a lot of things to find my cats paw and blades for the reciprocal saw. The jigsaw was missing the set screw...a dumb mistake to let that thing drop without picking it up sometime in the last year or so. I do have a backup jigsaw. Most of my tools are leftover ones from exes who abandoned them, though I bought some Bosch. It didn't take me long to see that I did not have the proper tool to cut clapboards, but I got started, then went to BiMart.

I got a cheap flush cutter, but since you can't say that in public without some scary looks, I will have to find a better name than Multipurpose Oscillating Tool, perhaps Mabel. This turned out to be such a useful item I got some attachments and am quite fond of it already.With that and my reciprocal saw, I bravely cut around the edges of the sill and got it out in one piece. About a third of it was completely gone, but there was not much rot around it, if you don't count the missing end of the king stud with the termite damage. I convinced myself that the damage was old and there were no active bugs in my wall, as there are no other signs.

This does explain the questioning look I got from the window contractor about fifteen years ago when I told him to just put the window trim back on the way it was, without really taking a look at it myself. He pointed out a couple of the worst pieces. I remember making another window sill on the north side, and I know I made sills for the windows I installed in the new part, but I didn't do a great job on those and if you know anything about trim you can tell who made them.

This one is different. I know more now. I know to put a kerf in the underside to keep water from running back into the house, and I know to make sure the front surface goes a bit downhill. I know to use some kind of water barrier under the sill as overprotection. I saw that on This Old House and with some effort managed to get such a product at Home Despot, a place I don't enjoy but which is within biking distance of me. It is a nine-inch wide self-adhesive asphaltum product that smells extremely toxic but looks awesome in place if you don't see the wrinkles and folds. It's very sticky. I have a lot left over even though I installed it twice.

The good news is that now I don't need those cedar spacers I was going to use to fill in the inside gap...the vinyl tape does that job. I might have to cram the nicely fitted sill in since I made it to fit exactly. That is the problem for today. I did completely prime and paint the sill and it is ready to go in, but if I have to shave it a bit I will have to repaint, possibly. We'll see. I'm refusing to work on it until the fog lifts each day, because I work for myself and I am suffering enough being tied to this project for over a week already. It's sort of suffering...I do hate sanding and I am focusing intently on this thing, standing on concrete, for hours each day, so I'm not riding my bike or taking walks or the many other things I am supposed to be keeping up with.

I don't have a table saw. To get the 2x8 board to resemble a sill, I had to remove some wood in some tricky ways. I decided this was the perfect opportunity to polish my skills with hand tools, the kind that use elbow grease for power. I used a backsaw, two planes, some rasps and scrapers, Mabel and the Skilsaw, and lots of straight edges and clamps. I did things wrong, but I can do that just fine when no one is watching. I got the plane to sound right as it turned out pretty shaving curls. I figured out ways to make the edge straight without the table saw and make angled cuts with the skilsaw without losing any appendages. I wasted some hours, but the sun was out and the sky glorious against the amazing colored trees and early on I had decided to enjoy the project above all.

My fall-back was that if I messed up this blank that I made from a leftover board, I could use it for a pattern to make one out of a new, nicer piece. I might have saved myself a lot of work, but the old board turned out to be a solid beauty and I am proud I saved it from the wood rack, where a squirrel is trying to nest and chewing up the ends of all of my wood. (Evicted, at least temporarily.)

So the front edge is still a tiny bit wambly. I worked on it for hours and hours but a bad start makes for a bad finish. There are probably fifteen table saws in my neighborhood and it would have saved days if I had asked to use one to make the initial cuts. I didn't though. It looks slightly handmade still, even all shiny with white enamel.

But I love that about it. Every part of this house looks handmade. I call it my first draft house. I plan to get to the edits with about the same efficiency of the original builders who put it here around the turn of the twentieth century. Houses are really not finished products in the last-century mode in which I live. To my thinking it would feel tragic to throw up a new, finished house in a few months at the huge expense of materials and cash necessary for that modern type of construction. I relish the lifetime project I am involved in with my tiny property and its two tiny dwellings.

I am having a problem with the prospect of aging and diminishing abilities to do things like the roofing I considered and then scheduled for next summer. It might be my last big project, or not. I fantasize about a lot of mostly decorative improvements and things I really do want to finish from my last few edits. For instance, after three replacements I might just decide wooden front steps are not practical, at least as presently designed. Winter is almost here, and most of the things I would like to do will not get done now, but in the next few years, the next decade, I might just do a lot of projects, or delegate them, or leave them for the next owners.

But that's fine with me. I found that the expected rot was not so invasive and terrible as I feared, and that is probably true throughout the houses. I am on a slow time scale, the time scale of a house that is already almost a century old by almost all accounts. This house time


is slower than the human time scale, but tied to a lifetime. The Vaughans are gone from the property, but still tied to me, and every piece of work I do on this old pile of carefully arranged fir connects me with the pioneers and my town's history.

I'm in love with the mystery and extension of it, in both ways. I picture my son practicing his hand-tool skills on replacing some of my work, maybe living in the houses with his own kids deflecting their demands for skylights and balconies and secret cubbies. He will shake his head and marvel at some of my stupid mistakes, and make a few of his own perhaps. I will definitely document the history of the house with and without me, have a story to seal up in the walls for the future, or in the library for the community, or just to enjoy the process of building the documentation as I have built up the property.

Every time I garden, building the soil or nurturing the trees I rescued, every time I fix something or add an improvement, I am participating in a sacred, fulfilling and basic quest for shelter that is comfortable, durable, and beautiful. It has been a lot more than a windowsill project this week. Maybe I am taking my time with it because I can, but it feels intentional. I love looking inside that old wall.

I must remember these emotions next summer when it is roof time. It is fun. This is my kind of fun.

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.