Showing posts with label house history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label house history. Show all posts

Kitchen Archaeology

















Gross-ness aside, pulling out the 1970's cabinets exposed the original silhouettes of the first, very shallow, built-in cabinets and the location of the gas stove and its pipe.

All those white stripes on the right corner were supports for the shelves, and also the countertop, covering up virgin plaster. On the left, it seems the gas stove was not moved when the kitchen was last painted and vinyl-ed. So we can see the 1920s cabinets lasted at least until the age of the golden vinyl.

The sink on the right (unseen here) had a high back, judging from the height of the window. The hole for its inlet pipes is still in the ledger board at the base of the inside wall, since they ran up to the sink back from inside the wall.

The sink was bookended by the two built-in cabinets, the left cabinet being the one shown above. Nearly the entire wall above the countertop line was removed and replaced with drywall, two layers in some places, and this is where I assume there used to be the old white subway tile found under the house. When it was removed, it must have taken the whole wall with it. I'm replacing it on a more extensive scale, probably using in-store tile from Home Depot. It's $.23 a tile, and no longer has the wide spacers or rounded edge as it did just a few years ago.

1930 census

We've been stuck inside the house for three days this week during an endless tropical storm. By day two I'd read both my library books, cut two inches off my hair, and had had enough of Monopoly and Scrabble. I took advantage of the electricity and internet we were lucky to have and looked up the 1930 census record for the Mercks, the first census after this house and the one next door were built.
















Many people in the area worked for the "steam railroad" or as clerks. The census taker valued the house at $7000, based on what the Mercks told them was their purchase price, I'll assume. The Mercks were the same age as me (Jason is a bit older than me) when they bought the house and "wife" Marion Merck is listed as "male". A few lines down is the house number for the now-empty lot where there is a storm-water pumping station. And it looks like the poor house next door to us began life as a rental, possibly doomed to stay that way.

Looking down the list most of the wives didn't have occupations outside the house. That Marion went to work as a saleswoman at a drugstore, and not even the one owned by her husband, is pretty cool. Prior to marrying Mr. Merck, she lived with her first husband, listed as a produce salesman, a few blocks from the first Merck drugstore. Here is a 1947 picture of the Merck store when it was located downtown, a few years before closing:


This entry has a lot more info. I found most of it by searching the old city directories at the main library.

House History, Part II

Previously, I discovered the first owners of this house were the Mercks of Jacksonville's Merck Drug Co. I found out a little more about them from online research this weekend. Frank was 26 and wife Marion was 25 when they bought the house for about $7000, some months after they married in 1927. Marion was from South Carolina and was 18 when she married a produce salesman named John, living near the future Merck drugstore in the Springfield neighborhood. Frank was born in north Georgia in 1901, and died in 1983 in Ocala (about 1 1/2 hours southwest from here). Marion died in Ocala in 1988, days short of her 87th birthday. Frank's store partner, Edna Hullinger, was born in 1878 in Georgia and lived in an apt. next to their Main St. store. A theater couple, in scenery and box office, lived in the adjacent apartment. It does not seem Mr. Merck was of the Merck & Co. family; sorry, Mom.

Spelunking..ugh

I took no less than 44 photos during a recent trip under the house. No, I don't use drugs under my house. These photos here are the glamorous, beautiful cream of the crop. They are small in case you are eating.

This rusty thing I found under the bathroom. It's about 8" long and could be mistaken for a faucet except that, it's rusty and the "spigot" hole goes all the way through. Both ends look round but are actually a hex shape. Perhaps it's a bracket of some sort, maybe for the toilet?











Here, it looks like the bathroom gas heater (radiator?) was installed underneath the sink. Does this mean the house had a wall-mounted sink, not a pedestal? Our inspector did say the white PVC should be replaced with the less-likely to freeze CPVC. Luckily this year it was 29 degrees at the lowest, for about 3 hours. And it was a warm 29.









This photo shows rotted wood torn away revealing a 2-3' length of original mesh and mortar tile floor. Glad to see it's so very supported from below. I don't know how much will be salvagable. I would totally try to find green reproduction tile, or if not, buy a kiln and learn to make it, and then sit there and piece the tiny tiles together. I will not give up my obsessive quest. Perhaps American Restoration Tile would know something.








But here are some newly found hex and black tiles from below the floor, once buried in rubble and now back together with their mosaic tile friends. I bet the green would be prettier if it was sealed. It must be a border to the hex. The tops of the black baseboard tiles had whisps of white paint, possibly making a match to the scored false-tile plaster board pieces in the rubble, also painted white, meaning there was no water-repeling wall tile when the bathroom was built. I think the white subway tile was installed in the kitchen.













And some mischief with a sleeping cat. If we could train her unconscious to hold a pencil, maybe she'll learn to write!

Bathroom mystery solved!

When I first looked at the marble chunk, "threshold" crossed my mind but thought, it's way too thick to waste as a threshold, and it's also set in wall plaster. I looked at the marble threshold in my sister's bathroom, c. 1926, 6 blocks away, and realized that I could see rough plaster around her doorframe edge. This morning I removed my modern wood threshold, and under the floor layers was a broken bit of matching marble still stuck to the 1" deep plaster threshold base, and also a gouge in that threshold to match my plaster/marble chunk. Most of the plaster surface is flat even with the hallway wood floor, but below the level of the green and white checkerboard tile. I'll guess because the marble chunk is 7/8" thick, it was probably beveled at the sides. I'd probably trip over it frequently. Perhaps people did and maybe that's why it was removed.

Bathroom mystery

In the crawl space below the bathroom is a big pile of bathroom remodeling rubble. The stuff was probably swept down there while the built-in bathtub was removed during two different remodelings in the 1950's and 1970s, because most of the original checkerboard tile floor is still intact. In the pile are large pieces of sky blue, black and creamy white tiles. The white tiles are probably of the time of the checkerboard floor; they are stuck to a thick mortar base and, although not intact, could be of subway tile proportions. Perhaps the sky blue and black are from the 50's. Also, there is part of an old wooden door frame which could be the medicine cabinet or a vanity.

Anyhoo, during one hasty trip under the house, from this pile I recovered a broken chunk of fat whitish marble, 3x4-ish with a smooth face, securely stuck to a full thickness of wall plaster. There seems to be a very thin line of limey white between the plaster and marble. What could this be? We live in a very modest house, barely 1000 sq ft. I can't imagine a marble sink back splash or tub surround here. The thickness of the marble makes me think it was once a much bigger piece and I should try to find more of it, but even that can't convince me to go spelunking in the bombed-out ditch under the house. I'd rather go to the dentist. I'd rather x-ray the walls to see where the patched spots are.

House Owner History

The first owner of our house was N.F. Merck, either Noble Frank or Frank Noble. In 1927, he and his wife Marion lived with Horace Merck in the Springfield neighborhood, in Apt. 5 of a building on Main St. next to N.F.'s pharmacy, "Merck Drug Co." My mom, a nurse, became very excited when I told her about Frank, or Noble, but I don't think there is a connection to Merck & Co., (of Vioxx fame) which patented its name a decade before "Merck Drug Co." opened shop in Springfield. Merck owned this house for 5 years. His wife became a saleswoman for a drugstore chain, Lane Drug Co., at neighborhood store #76. It's possible that the Mercks left Springfield so Marion's commute would be shorter, while N.F. probably drove across town. (Maybe he parked his car in the garage footprint!) Merck Drug Co. moved downtown in the 1930s to what appears to be the block of buildings torn down two years ago to build the new main library and contemporary art museum, by Hemming Plaza. Interestingly, the 1927 directory listing for Merck Drug Co. advertised their slogan as "Drugs with a Reputation", which was then the slogan for Walgreen's Drugstores. I found a photo from 1947, four years before the drugstore ended, and the sign does say Merck Drug Co. All of Mr. Merck's previous residences are now parking lots, and in the 1940's he was just a post office box.

The house has since had many residents:

1934 - Vasco and Ethel Geiger, Vasco was a clerk.

1938-1955 - John H. Webb and wife Miriam. John started in lumber, and moved into poultry. He appears to have had the longest ownership.

1956 -1967 - A series of renters. The Webbs no longer live in Jacksonville. There is a different renter in the house every year for at least 12 years, many in the Navy, one a florist, one a stevedore, one who worked for local grocer Winn Dixie.

1968-1991 - The library closed before I could continue in the directories and indexes. Jason says if I keep this up, I'll open a portal to the underworld.

1992-2005 - Agnes Hogan. I'm not sure how long Agnes actually lived here; by the incoming junk mail there have been many renters in the past few years but Ms. Hogan's name has been on the property taxes as owner AND resident. Probably not legally. The house was purchased from her trust by Mr. Hazouri, the flipper. There is a small handful of infamous Hazouris in Jacksonville, one a mayor in the early 90s. I remember my mom snagged him in a parking lot after his speech at a US Navy event to shake hands and voice an opinion. His keepers looked nervous. My hair was unclean and I was skipping school. But I digress.

The first owner next door, in 1929, was JC Rawlins, a cashier for Cudahy Packaging Co.

Also, in the 1800s this southern part of the neighborhood was a cotton plantation.

There are still many more leads to follow, especially with the Merck Drug Store. Was he a black sheep in the American Merck family to be living in this small house, barely incorporated into the city, or a distant relative, or was he unrelated? It's all very interesting, and I haven't dug into any city-owned paperwork like tax or business records yet.

Some ugly photos!

We don't use the fireplace very often, only twice this winter, and when we do, it's with a candelabra and some pillar candles stacked on bricks. Browsing through the Lehman's catalog, I saw this, # 600 Castable Refractory Cement, meant to replace missing firebricks. The product claims to last five years, so I might try to source actual firebrick and then use this to patch around the brick. Since our chimney is also uncapped, (what were they thinking??)I found a top-damping chimney cap . Most of our house improvements are DIY, but I don't know if these additions would make me comfortable enough to really use the fireplace. Having a hose and bucket handy may make it mentally easier in learning more about my fireplace while it burns. And of course, the whole thing needs to be cleaned and professionally inspected, & trees pruned back.

Continuing on the theme of "free", none of this is, but I'm sure it is much cheaper than having a professional insist it's entirely failing, not that it is at all, and is $4000 in repairs. Human beings have had fireplaces like this for several hundred years. In areas without a mason, handy people had to figure these things out for themselves. Why couldn't we attempt to improve the situation ourselves with lots of research and product assistance?

Here is the clay lining. The dark stripe is from today's rain. There is water damage, obviously.










There are several types of firebrick in the box. The Stevens Volcano (H. Stevens & Sons Co., Macon, GA? **see below) seems to be more brittle. All of the mortar, especially in the liner, should be tuckpointed, if not redone.














See? we do have a brick house!














Water damage, from open chimney. We have soft, water soluble bricks all over our house. Again, what were they thinking? This was built around the time of the stock market crash-maybe that's the reason?














**November 15, 1927 Atlanta Constitution
Milledgeville Pottery Plant Damaged by Fire; $50,000 Estimated Loss Milledgeville, Ga. Nov. 14 (UP)
"Fire which started from a stove in the molding room of one of the plants operated by Stevens, Inc., at Stevens Pottery, nine miles from here, partially destroyed the smaller plant owned by the company. The loss is estimated at $50,0000 by Walter S. Stapler, president of the organization. Stevens, Inc., which is owned and operated by heirs of the late W. C. and J. H. Stevens, manufacture firebrick at their two plants at Stevens Pottery. Mr. Stapler said that the fire will not materially affect the company as the larger plant was not damaged and plans will be made for the rebuilding of the destroyed plant as soon as the board of directors can be convened. The company has its own fire apparatus and firemen were at work soon after the flames were discovered. It was only due to the work of the employers who aided in fighting the fire that the damage was not greater, Mr. Stapler said. The building was partially covered by insurance. "

Being at one with nature

Here is something interesting. For me, at least. Looking online for an older map of my neighborhood, one from around the time the house was built, I found this USGS one from 1918, pre-development. Holy cow, we're a swamp! Thus, the 12" of water to our front step is meant to be there and who are we to stop it?

X marks the spot.

Incidentally, the Florida Military Academy moved across the river into a hotel the year our house was built.

Down in the Catacombs


J and I today went under the house to clear out the pile of bricks left from the 70's house-lifting. We aimed for the useful whole ones. Many of them still had the mortar on them from when they were dislodged from the foundation, which, kinda scary because it's the same mortar on many of the foundation bricks, just brushed off in chunks. I don't feel compelled to leave them under the house so the foundation can be reconstructed; I've seen many older houses in Jacksonville on piers 6-8 ft apart. We took them outside and put them in the garden paths.

While we were down there (it's only my second time, it's not my favorite place) we took photos of the floors underneath the bath and kitchen. I was suprised to see the bath subfloor much worse than the kitchen; it looks like the original checkerboard mosaic tiles were on a bed of steel mesh that held moisture well and thoroughly rotted the floor around the tub. And I was right, the subfloor is completely gone under a section of the tub. The WDO inspector had shown us photos but their geography was hard to understand. The original tile floor is under the tile, subfloor 2 and the vinyl! Maybe it's salvagable! Or not! It's neat though!

Under the bathtub corner:
The meshed area is the original floor under the bathtub; the white speckly thing center is the corner of the tub.
Very thankful there's not much damage to the joists here, and some stuff was replaced by the flipper.


Selections from the pile of tile under the bathtub. The whitish tile is sky blue, and the mosaic is less gross than it looks.
Under the kitchen we found vinyl and linoleum scraps and this uncracked glass. We also found lots of vintagy bottles, toy dumptruck parts, a small plastic horse, a fishing pole, green plastic christmas tree stand, old bicycle basket, a bucket of joint compound that unfortunately was not a Bucket of Gold, 70's Busch beer cans, and Pepsi bottles. When I was sifting through the bath rubble, the world's tiniest frog jumped out. I thought it was a baby cricket. It was 1/8" square when sitting, a dark brown color.

House Tour

The house is set up in an H, with public places to the right of the front door, and two bedrooms and bathroom on the left through a privacy door and hallway. The French doors between the living room and dining room were removed when those rooms took on wallboard to cover the wall cracks from the sinking chimney in the 70s. The only evidence of the doors is the metal plate in the floor meant to catch the sliding door bolt. It looks like a smiley face.
The house is a block from the Miami-Washington D.C. train tracks used by Amtrak, the I-95 of the East Coast train world. Once I counted 23 autotrain cars while waiting at the local 8-way intersection, so the autotrain popularity is better than I thought. I hope Amtrak can stay afloat, I love the thought that I could jump on the back and ride to other places. And think of the celebrities who came through here in the 1920s and 30s! Jacksonville was a happening place back then, on the tour for most major music acts and movie stars.
Major renovations were done to the house in the 1970s, both interior and exterior, with an eye for respectfully keeping similar fixtures and features as the originals, while seemingly saying those features were incompatible with modern tastes, like the fireplace wall sconces. This is understandable, most people don't want to live in a museum; like all restorers I just wish stuff had been moved to the attic instead of being discarded. I am grateful they cared for the house, though, and didn't alter too much. I too like dishwashers, central AC and 40-60 watt bulbs, but as long as the spirit of the 1920s can be maintained, I'd like to make it so, despite my affection for modernist concrete.

There are two electric outlets per room, except for the 7 in the kitchen. There is no attic ventilation except for one gable-end's louver panel. When this 1047 sf. house was built in 1928, there were 12 doors, two phone outlets, and 2 or 3 electric circuits.

Butler's pantry/breakfast nook (no seating in the nook). The dining room is beyond. In the breakfast nook the area above the pantry and adjoining bedroom closet has been walled-off, and in the attic it is a cut-out in the attic floor.
















The dip is made with plaster and lath; maybe an original alteration to the house? There doesn't seem to be a reason to have subtracted this storage space. The pantry in my last apartment, c.1914, had doors and shelving up to the ceiling. It's interesting that the pantry shelves are held up with top sections of the original baseboard molding.


In the kitchen, a popular 1940's green color is behind the top cabinets, and a peeling, paler 30s color below, where there are stripes from the shelf supports attatched to the wall. You can see by the patching ghosts that there was a chair railing around the room, the first layer of paint being olive green above the rail, and tan-gold below. The same green is the first layer on the bathroom walls (although substantially altered by light and time by the fact that it does not match the bath floor tile by any stretch). The gold is the same color as the first paint layer on all the house woodwork- and is possibly milkpaint. Also, there is an ironing board alcove with top and bottom doors; no ironing board exists but it has a shelf for the iron. An original phone outlet is directly below. The wall with the two windows above was altered sometime to be 2 1/2" fatter, maybe due to plumbing or wiring modernization.

Here is what seems to be the original kitchen layout:

The cabinets currently are really inefficient with tiny shelves and doors, especially the 4" door above. And partially rotted. We don't open those two doors under the sink.

There used to be a swinging door between the kitchen and breakfast nook. Sometime a pass-through was cut between the walls so that there would be more light in the nook, and the door was removed. Its post swivel is still in the doorframe.

One of the first kitchen floors was linoleum in a beige color with sparse blue and red thread-like streaks. Underneath it is the same wood flooring that continues throughout the house. The diagonal subfloor strips and finished floor were laid down before the interior walls were framed, so you can follow a board underneath a wall and into an adjoining room.

Volunteer kitty John Quincy Adams sitting in our excavated driveway ribbons. They need to be re-done.


Bathroom, between two bedrooms; walls and floor retiled by flipper.





The original green and white 1" checkerboard tiles are underneath old vinyl, underneath the new tile, making a 3", step-up sandwich. The floor's bottom layer of wood subfloor has halfways rotted away, especially near the tub pipes and toilet waste pipe. I'm thinking PO was allergic to plumbers. The first tub was a built-in, however, this one is new.

Based on the wall patching, it looks like there was a light on either side of the medicine cabinet, and possibly one above it. Parts of the original medicine cabinet are in the crawl space below the bathroom, in a pile of sky blue and black 50's tile fragments. It appears to have been an inset cabinet above an alcove, like this one:



This alcove shelf matches exactly our phone nook shelf. We probably had a similar sink and I don't think our walls were tiled, either.


Living room; bookcases used to have doors. The hinge ghosts show the same style as the pantry hinges. It appears the bottom shelf was filled in with drywall. Hearth tile was taken out and replaced with edgeless, cheapo field tile. I'd like to replace it with some from here. There is no chimney cap but it does have a clay liner.

The fireplace mantel is two layers of the original crown molding. It's hard to tell if this was an original detail or something done when the house's style became "modern" in the 70's, perhaps recycled from the molding which was removed from the dining and living rooms. Original-esque baseboard and crown moldings need to be reinstalled. The flipper's men did a horrible measuring job on the new baseboard and didn't even bother patching it. It was installed after we'd put a contract on the house.

The wall sconces seem to be a modern (70s), simplified version of the common 1910's-20s sconce with an arm and shade.

Back bedroom, identical measurements as front bedroom, flipped. This closet ceiling (door on the right) has been closed-in and the cedar siding has been drywalled-over. The original baseboards and crown (picture hook-supporting) molding are in here.

Back bedroom looking toward dining room door. Little Moroccan-looking phone alcove in hallway.






Lilly, intentionally planted at the front left corner of the garage opening. The one-car garage still existed in 1951, according to the Sanbourn fire maps, but is long gone. Its deep concrete-block foundation still exists, and we think it had a wooden floor.

Archaeology

In the backyard we're going to knock these out and put in an elevated open deck area (obviously not period but popular in Florida) with pergola. The steps are too narrow, a little scary when you're carrying stuff.
















Shed location. The lawnmower is now in the dining room. J is measuring the backyard in human scale, like when you see a quarter on an object in a photo. Where he is standing there is a garage foundation that's well entrenched, cinderblock 3 feet deep but no floor. There are driveway ribbons in this photo, buried under 5" of St. Augustine grass and dirt. We've removed most of the scrub trees here in time for hurricane season but the big dark one still leans over our neighbor's house. One mystery is all the plastic and metal tent stakes we've found in the back/side yard.












The POs seem to have had no regard for tree placement and maintenance. Every tree on the lot is growing, whether planted or volunteer, in a strategic location to the power, phone or cable lines, or into the foundation. Two months ago the city came and did its chop job on the ones under power and phone lines, cutting all heck out of one tree. It now looks like a stick with a saucer on top, they left so little of the limbs. Not the tree's fault of course but of the PO who allowed it to start growing there. I'm not sure if the historical ignorance of these trees is what led to the wall crack in the house fixed in the 1970s. The house is actually brick but due to 1. the sand/clay soil or 2. naughty trees a large crack developed in the living room exterior and the house started to separate. The solution was to wrap the entire house in steel mesh, tack it down to the brick, and cover it in cement-type stucco (tho it's not waterproof stucco and the mesh sometimes rusts through). This fix seems to be fine though there is a mess of bricks in the crawl space as one section of the wall was removed. Above the porch the stucco/mesh is the only thing separating the attic from the wide world.
In any case, it's tough to dig anywhere in our yard from the dense network of roots. Glorious trees:















Next on our list:
Paint house
Expand vegetable garden, build elevated beds
Path through yard (front thru gate to back?)
Build shed
Build deck
landscaping of some sort
re-work the kitchen. House was a rental, and poorly maintained. No one realized that the kitchensink/dishwasher greywater was going through the wall and onto the joists instead of out through a pipe. One day I was watering the tomatoes outside the kitchen wall while J was washing dishes and I heard trickling and dripping and called the home warranty people. The rot hole in the joist/wall is big enough to stick my head and a family of rats and a legion of cockroaches through. And also we have cramped cabinetry in the kitchen.
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