If Houses Could Talk

By Kathy McCleary, HGTV Ideas magazine
Photographs by Ty Allison

When Rurik and Marjorie Kallis bought their Lemon Grove, California, home in 1971, they paid $25,000 for the 1895 Eastlake Victorian and its acre of land, planning to settle down and restore the property. They had no idea that they were embarking on a 30-year odyssey that would include tracing their home's history and doing a complete restoration. Their journey has led them to descendants of six of the home's previous owners, including a Montana congressman, a Michigan storekeeper and a Canadian bootlegger who sold illegal whiskey out of the house during Prohibition.

Figure C--Current owners Marjorie and Rurik Kallis are among the many homeowners across the country who've donned detective hats and jumped headfirst into researching the history of their homes.

"We're still not really finished," says Rurik Kallis, a former teacher who does research and restoration work on historic houses fulltime. "Now we're trying to track down the descendants of the architect who designed it. We've traced them up to 1948 but then the trail goes cold."

The Kallises are not unlike many of the folks seen on HGTV's If Walls Could Talk, says producer Tom Geisen. "Some people are history buffs when they start researching their homes," he says, "but others become buffs after they find something tangible that makes their house's history more than just 'some people' who used to live here. It becomes someone else's life." Researching starts to have the same attraction as doing genealogies, he says. "It's the appeal of putting real facts, real faces and real objects onto what otherwise would be a generic history."

Beyond discovering what your house looked like in 1910 or who may have slept in your bedroom 100 years ago, researching your home's history can provide other payoffs, whether it's the information you need to restore it to its former glory, or a tax break if your home is worthy of designation as a historic property. But it's that feeling of being part of something that's older and larger than yourself that gets most home historians excited, says Geisen. And who can resist the thrill of the hunt: exploring architectural clues, finding hidden treasure in the walls and getting your house to "talk" to you. Here's how to get started.

Figure E--The Kallis's collection on antique bottles and furnishings fits beautifully in their 1895 Eastlake Victorian.

Figure F--Thanks to physical evidence in their house and old photographs they found, the Kallises were able to reconstruct several original porches that had been removed from their home.

Architectural Clues

To find out the basics about your home, track down when it was built and figure out its architectural style. Is it Mediterranean, Tudor, Queen Anne, Craftsman? "Grab a reliable local source, such as city history books or pamphlets, that tells you about building styles in an older part of your city and then just walk around and look at them and see what that means," says Nancy Widmann, a Denver-based consultant in preservation and public history research. Or check the "bible" for many architectural historians: A Field Guide to American Houses (Knopf, 1984) by Virginia and Lee McAlester. Don't be surprised if your house is a mix of styles. "In most American neighborhoods there are not many pure single-style houses," says Widmann.

The style helps date the home to a certain period, then you can look hard at architectural details--the type of wood used, the width of floorboards, the kind of molding--for more clues. Was the house balloon framed (in which the walls are built as a unit and then raised) or hand-joined? How wide are the clapboards? What type of wood was used in construction? In some of Houston's older neighborhoods, for instance, cypress was used until 1880, says architect J.D. Bartell, the preservation officer for his historic neighborhood. When cypress became prohibitively expensive at the end of the 19th century, homes were often built of longleaf pine, and then in 1930 longleaf was replaced with yellow pine. The way the wood is cut is also telling. Two-by-fours that actually measure two inches by four inches predate modern saw cuts, which have been cut at one inch by three inches since the 1950s. Axe marks or pickaxe marks indicate the wood is even older, say mid- to late-19th century.

"Often, the most inclusive clues come from the way the house was detailed," says Bartell. The type of interior trim, window framing, number of panes, molding and width of floor planks can all provide specific indications about the year the home was built. Nails are often revealing too. Colonial and antebellum homes were hammered together with hand-forged nails, which have a different shape and look from nails manufactured by machine.

Signs of the Times

And don't ignore clues that may be hidden within your home's walls or deep in closets or attics. Nancy Widmann recalls one couple who were trying to date their small home in Denver's Baker neighborhood. They hadn't had much luck pinpointing a date until they took a wall apart during restoration and found some old tramway tokens that had been made in the 1890s. "Or very often people find old newspapers with dates " inside walls or under floorboards during restoration work, Widmann says.

After 30 years of detective work, the Kallises displayed their collection of photographs, letters and other records in a show they called "Metamorphosis of a House" (figures G through L).

Ghosts of Past Owners

Once you've figured out an approximate date for your home, you can begin researching your house's biography: who built the house, who the architect was and what changes may have been made as the house passed from one owner to another. If you work hard, you can also find out the really interesting stuff--who lived in your home when, what they did, who they married, who their children were and what the home meant to them. In J.D. Bartell's historic Old Sixth Ward neighborhood, one homeowner was delighted to discover that a previous occupant of the house was the creator of the Betty Crocker cookbook's famous Tunnel of Fudge cake recipe. Bartell's own home was once owned by the grandmother of Mary Kay Ash, founder of Mary Kay cosmetics.

"Every home has a history, but when that history starts having names and faces and not just some names on a deed, it becomes real and exciting for people," says Tom Geisen.

Old Miss Telchow Loved Roses

Don't forget that people can be one of your best sources of information. "Talk to your neighbors," says J.D. Bartell. "An older neighbor may have known prior owners or talked to other neighbors who are now dead who had recollections of your house. Or they may actually know the descendants of those who lived in your house." One resident in Bartell's neighborhood found that an older woman down the block remembered a Miss Telchow who had lived in his home many decades ago. The neighbor recalled that Miss Telchow had loved roses, which explained why the garden was full of so many old rosebushes and why most of the rooms in the house had rose wallpaper. "That's the kind of information you won't get from the library," Bartell says.

Those same neighbors might know more than you think about your home's furnishings. Tom Geisen of If Walls Could Talk tells this story: "A couple from Odessa, Delaware, had bought a house that was missing the chandelier in the dining room. Four years earlier they had purchased a chandelier at a church garage sale and kept it in a closet. They finally got around to installing it in their new house only to find out from neighbors that it was the home's original chandelier--the previous owner had given it to the church!"

The moral: Don't be shy about talking to neighbors or to neighborhood organizations, who may have information about the history of the neighborhood, including your house. Go ahead and call up people who may be descendants of previous owners of your home. "I go through the phone book and if I find a name I know is related to the history of the house, I call them up," says Kathy Flanagan. "Sometimes they even have old pictures of the house."

The Kallises haven't been shy about collecting information about their Eastlake Victorian and have amassed such an extensive collection of old photographs, letters and other records of their home's past that they put on a show in a local art gallery titled "Metamorphosis of a House." The photos trace the home from when it was built in 1895, through numerous changes in paint color, trimwork, even structure (three of the home's four original porches were ripped off at one point). In the pictures, tiny trees around the house grow into giants, die and are replaced by others. It's all given the Kallises a strong sense of their place in the history of their home.

"We're all caretakers of our houses," says Rurik Kallis. "We're mortals, but hopefully the house will go on for another 100 or 200 years."

Kathy McCleary lives in a 1938 Cape Cod in Portland, Oregon. She last wrote Let It Snow, Baby! in the November/December issue of HGTV Ideas.