Our progress since the end of January has been exciting, but my posting frequency has been abysmal. My apologies - mainly to Michael, who continues to check this website for pictures. In that vein, below is a teaser photo of the family room bank of windows, fully stripped and glowing in all of their richly-stained glory.
I've been waiting to update until I can post photos of the family room COMPLETELY finished, with pictures on the walls, crown moulding holes puttied, and the new sash hardware adorning the lattice window, but since it might be another 3 weeks until all of those little details signify the Finish Line, I'm going to switch gears and start updating this website more frequently to reflect my original intention, which was not only to keep our friends and family aware of our progress on the restoration, but also to provide some insight into the history of our house and the architectural and decorating style of the time period during which it was built. As the King said in Alice in Wonder Land, "Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop." Since I've failed to abide by this sage advice so far, let me remedy that infraction now with a little intro:Begin at the Beginning
After the sales contract on our house was accepted by the Sellers Who Shall Not Be Named, I had 4 months' worth of idle time to twiddle my thumbs, which were itching to peel back the layers of history in the house and unearth all of the wonders that we've found since moving in (and we HAVE found wonders, which I'll do a better job of documenting in future). Anyway, I was bemused beyond measure that we had landed a stone house in the boro with some real history. How many stories had those stones witnessed since their first placement in 1930? Fortunately for me, Centre County is a friendly community in which people are actually willing to personally assist you when you call the county court house requesting old deed records, and the records are amazingly detailed, including both the names of the sellers and buyers, as well as a lat/lon description of the property and a summary of the previous sale. It became a scavenger hunt, trailing the ownership of the house back through the years, and once I'd discovered the home's lineage, I was more interested than ever to find out about the people who lived here. Who were they? What did they do? Why did they move here and why did they leave? Sometimes the answers were predictable, easy, like the families (4 of them) where a father either attended graduate school or worked as a professor at Penn State and left when new prospects arose in other locales. Other stories, like that of the original owner, Dr. Charles Dietterich, were more murky. Why did Dr. Dietterich have to buy back his own house from the State College authorities in a sheriff sale? Why did his 1941 draft card list Jessie Dietterich, his wife, as his primary contact but a newspaper article describing a car accident decades later lists his wife as Clara (Owens) Aitcheson, who lived right down the street from him on Foster Avenue around that same time period? An intra-neighborhood affair, perhaps, or just a third marriage? And why does a 1928 Mathematics Society bulletin list 526 E. Foster Avenue as the primary address of Clara's parents, Drs. Frederick and Helen Owens, when the original deed for our house is dated 1930, and the lat/lon descriptions on all subsequent property deeds clearly indicate that our house has retained its original address?
A few trips to the local county archives, a subscription to the Centre County records database, and some research with the Special Collections staff at the Penn State library helped me unearth the answers to a few of these questions, but some are still hanging in the ether, waiting to be answered when I find the time to follow-up on leads that I've gathered. In the meantime, I'll devote the next few posts to weaving together the past of our house based on newspaper articles, draft cards, yearbook photos, deeds, obituaries, and lucky internet searches.
