A Once-In-A-Lifetime Auction

GASP!!!

I'm finally coming up for air after what seems like an eternity of work. Do you know when you're a work addict? A couple of things will give you away...
-You don't feel like you've been fully constructive with your time if you haven't worked past midnight for several weeks in a row.

-When you have a few moments free, you don't know what to do with yourself.

So there you have it readers, the writer of this blog is a workaholic who is lucky to have an occasional hiatus to pound out Laura's journey in the most nouveau of bites (remember nouveau cuisine from the 80's?).

Construction-wise, the ceilings of the Laura Hawkins house are being replaced totally. The cracks, water stains and large chunks that have been littering the floors demand this. So we're having the ceiling plaster removed and replaced with dry wall and then smooth plastered over, the old-fashioned way. But this is not what this blog post will be about.

I'm switching from posting construction-related stuff for now and treating you to eye-candy. I'm going to show you the furnishings for the innards of this old lady.

First, I'll take you back to last summer when the contents of the Becky Thatcher House were being auctioned off.

The Becky Thatcher House, girlhood home of Laura Hawkins.
The house is located at 211 Hill Street
right across from Mark Twain's boyhood home.

Mark Twain's boyhood home,
located on 208 Hill Street in Hannibal.

The interior of the Becky Thatcher house before the 2008 auction.

In August of 2008, Hannibal was the scene of an auction of the contents of the historic Becky Thatcher house. This was done to make way for a million dollar restoration. Oh, few if any items were original to the house when Laura lived there as a child. Most of the antiques were staging props used to make the house look like it might have back in the mid-1800's (Laura's day).

Nevertheless, Becky Thatcher house items are a real draw for us history buffs and folks wanting to restore a similar house.

The widely-advertised auction held at Hannibal's Quality Inn drew a crowd of locals and out-of-towners alike. I noticed a few familiar faces, such as Henry Sweets (curator of the Mark Twain Museum), Wesley Knapp (new Director of Downtown Development), Barbara Errako Taylor (local artist and author), Candace Klemann (President of the Hannibal Arts Council), other civic leaders and some merchants who would later resell their winnings.

Members of the crowd position themselves.

One fun part of course is the pre-auction perusal.

Even these props were being sold.
This Becky Thatcher mannequin has a very mid-century
(20th, not 19th) look about it. I'm so glad it's out of that house.

That goes double for this prop, supposedly Becky's mother.

This adorable hand-carved baby bed went for a mere $235.
I passed on it opting instead for items representing
Laura's later years as a child and woman in Hannibal.

The auction begins...

I'm a regular at auctions, and when I want something badly, I will keep my head down and continue raising my arm to display my assigned number. Other bidders realize I will get that item no matter what. Sitting in the back of the room and jumping in just as everyone thinks the bidding war is over is also great tactic for throwing off the competition.

Of the two things I bid on and got, this is one of them - a hand-carved youth bed from the early 1800's. Laura Hawkins would have slept in something similar as a child. I won it for $230.

See the rocking chair on the left?
This is a hand-carved rush seat rocking chair circa 1835.
This too will go into the Laura Hawkins house.

Here is the other item - a pier mirror, circa 1875. I got it for $400.

Here's the glorious crown on that pier mirror.

Items went for amazing prices with folks "stealing" deals left and right. In looking back, I wish I'd have bid on more items, but you know what? These are props, albeit nice antique props, and we all know where the best deals for these are.

That's right, good ol' eBay.

For my next post (and I promise it will come very shortly), I'll show you some of the furnishings going into the Laura Hawkins house, compliments of this very popular auction site.

So long for now...

Amish folks are regular visitors and this group visited our town
during the auction, right after the flood of 2008 subsided.
Here they are riding the Hannibal horse-powered "trolley".
In the background is the Mark Twain Hotel
(now a restored subsidized apartment for seniors)
with the open lot about to be infilled by a new theatre.

See the sandbags on the levee in the above photo? The flood had subsided from its peak in June 2008 and the levee gates were left open.

For your entertainment, here's a video by Richard Boggs that I discovered on U-Tube about the flood in Hannibal during this period. The haunting background song is "When the Levee Breaks" performed by A Perfect Circle:

http://vimeo.com/1298431

No Longer That Haunted House on 5th Street

Now that Laura’s house no longer looks like the “Haunted House on 5th Street”, we’re at a stopping point and wondering what to do about a porch. I’ve scoured the library and other resources, and learned that photos of the house during Laura’s day are virtually non-existent.

I sent out a call to Steve Chou, a local historian on Hannibal. You may have read two of Steve’s books displaying photos of Hannibal during the late 1800’s and also mid-1900’s. If you haven’t, these are musts for even the most lukewarm of Hannibal buffs:

Hannibal: Bluff City Memories

This book mostly shows photos of Hannibal in its Heydays
(late 1800’s to 1929) when it was a wealthy, bustling town
in a lumber and steamboat economy.
Buy a copy.

Hannibal: The Otis Howell Collection

Otis Howell was a photojournalist with the Hannibal Courier-Post from 1945 to 1980. In this book are shots of buildings, street scenes, and scenes from everyday life in post-war Hannibal. This book should be part of the library of every Hannibalian baby boomer and folks who are interested in the Midwest during the years after WWII up to 1967. Buy a copy.

As a former bonafide local (I went to high school and junior college in this town), I like referring back to the photos of places that continue to exist – and there are many despite the local pastime of demolishing historic structures. This urge to destroy has left gaping lots in much of downtown Hannibal which are now being slowly infilled.

So, a quick e-mail to Steve (easy enough to find through Friends of Historic Hannibal) asking him to delve into his vast collection yielded this response:

"Nora;

I have watched the work progressing on the house and have been very impressed. I am so glad to see Hannibal's historic past preserved.

I have looked through my archives and unfortunately have not come across any photos that would be of any help to you. I am, however, always coming across new material, and will let you know if I find anything of your house. Residences are a lot tougher to find images of; I have quite a few photos of old homes in Hannibal, but the chances of having an image of one specific house is, as you can appreciate, somewhat remote. I thought I might see part of your house in views of the old YMCA, or in panoramic shots, but so far no luck.

You might contact the YMCA - they might have other photos of the old Y which might show your house; it's worth a try.

Good luck, and as I said, I will continue to see what I can find.

Steve Chou"

So, until I can locate old YMCA photos, I’ve decided to search Google images for houses similar to ours. This will be the topic of my next post.

In my research on Victorian porches, and this one in particular, I learned that porches were not necessary built with the house. From my research on the original house plan, the Laura Hawkins house was initially built without a porch.

The same went with our chateau next door. Remember our chateau from previous posts? That porch was not built to the house until two years later. This view is strong evidence of that…

Note how the originally built stone facade
is obscured at the top by the newer porch ceiling.

So our journey now takes us through the annals of historic photos and of course through eBay, a good and major source of 1800’s architectural buys. Stay tuned…

The Saga Continues

Work continues to progress on the front part of the Laura Hawkins house, and we will let these photos speak for themselves…

As we continue from our last episode...

Remnants of an old planter are getting ready for a haul.


The front door, especially, gets the treatment.

Well Hello Laura. It's so good to see that turret back
where to it was - after being covered for over 70 years.

In the middle of our job, community service calls. Hannibal was fortunate and smart enough to create a new position of "Executive Director of Downtown Hannibal Development". Our new director Wesley Knapp hails from Galveston where he was immensely involved in that town's restoration efforts. Wesley made a call for volunteers to help on a nearby house being rehabbed.

This particular project is part of the HeRo program, a "Dream Initiative project in Hannibal. Backing up here, the "Dream Initiative" is a statewide program that provides selected communities technical & finanancial assistance needed to revitalize their downtowns.

The HeRo program (funded by the Missouri Housing Development Commission) provides funds for an assortment of renovation work for qualified homeowners. For 2008, $119,000 in state dollars were received locally through the HeRo program and allowed work to be undertaken at five homes within Hannibal’s DREAM area. This is one of the houses, which is located a block east of the Laura Hawkins house, on 4th Street.

The crew. That's Wesley in the light green shirt.

The house had already gone through nearly $20K of lead abatement and now volunteers were needed to remove the very dilapidated porch. The porch would be stored as reclaimed wood.

Ron, our guy, examines the porch
for the best way to bring it down.


We'll do this one board at a time.


And thar she goes.

There's no shortage of projects like this needed throughout Hannibal. The town needs so much of this and volunteers who can help make it happen. Back at the ranch...

The priming of the old girl commences.
Remember that burned out part of the turret?
This will receive the board and shingle treatment.


The primer job goes very quickly.


The finishing crew.

It's looking more and more like the original Laura all the time.


Before the shingle restoration & priming,
Laura's home looked like a haunted house.

INTEGRITY

Forgive us if this post comes across as a sermon. This is Sunday after all, and it is also our way of venting on a particular issue. So, here goes with one of our first commandments of historic property restoration…

When one restores a historical piece of property, one adopts the role of “keeper of culture”. Wittingly or not, this role automatically implants itself in those who step up and subsequently, INTEGRITY becomes the moral dilemma that confronts each task and each phase of a restoration project.

Integrity - NOT! This was an unfortunate eBay purchase.

Bad packing aside, the method of casting iron did not preserve

the build integrity of this stove.

Merriam-Webster defines integrity as the “firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values”; Wikipedia expands on this definition as “a consistency of actions, values, methods, measures, principles, expectations and outcome.

Throughout our work on the Laura Hawkins house, we’ve weeded through much misguided advice and agendas and have become sufficiently schooled on the value of integrity. At the very least, we’ve learned some of what it constitutes and what it does not...

THIS IS INTEGRITY	THIS IS NOT INTEGRITY
Putting the construction of the property back to its initial and intended state. This means the Laura Hawkins house should be removed of later addition asbestos-cement shingles, casted slurry, or aluminum siding. It also should have its dentils or other original features replaced if they were removed to accommodate the above added facades.	Masking or destroying parts of the property to make it something it is not.
Taking the time to understand the methods used in constructing the property and then, empathizing with this during restoration.	Ignoring the time-honored methods used in constructing the property. This means removing an original porch and replacing it with a flimsier, newer one. [There’s a reason why many older homes have lasted as long as they have.]
Reveering interior features and doing everything in your power to retain them.	Converting interior features to accommodate certain lifestyles and in the process obliterate or destroy those things that make the house what it is. This means sawing into door jamb moldings to accommodate glass shelves. This also means tearing out fireplace mantels to sell them to the local second-hand store down the road - Yes, these things actually happened and we will discuss them in a later post. Meanwhile, here are photos of the dastardly fireplace mantel thefts...

Parlor Fireplace.

Fireplace in the adjacent "Green Room".

With that out of the way, we will now proceed to our next adventure in the Laura Hawkins project – the daunting task of restoring the original shingles on the front of the house. First, here is some bad advice we decided to ignore:

-Cover the exterior with aluminum siding. This is not worth commenting on except to advise you to run, not walk, from a contractor who would advise this for a historic home.

-Pressure wash the exterior and then paint it. Bad, bad, bad advice. Pressure washing would deeply embed moisture into the wood and take a very long time to dry. Meanwhile, painting over this treatment would severely reduce the life of a paint treatment.

-Leave the upper shingles alone and paint over this. From ground level, I can see the crackling and flaking of the original paint on the very top shingle on the third floor. Can you imagine what this would look like painted-over?

From our perspective, there’s no “Easy Button” to press when it comes to restoring the shingles. Each shingle must be individually removed of paint and then sanded to accept a new coat of paint. Badly deteriorated or missing shingles need to be replaced with high-quality exterior shingles constructed of the same material – in this case, cedar.

So with a crew of four, we delved into our weeks-long project…

One shingle at a time...

To restore each one of them.

A heat gun and scraper certainly expedites things.

Good 'ol wood putty patches up the holes.

Most of the shingles remained amazingly intact.

Even the window moldings get the treatment.

Wonderful, is it not?

Those 1947 planters on the ends of the porch have to go.
I enjoyed doing this!

The turret area on the north side needed a complete overhaul...

First comes the new braces...

Ron, our man, is up to the task.

And things go uphill from there.
New, high-grade luan is used for replacement shingles.

Voila! Now aren't you glad we got rid of that
obliterating, &@*# planter?

Scaffolding is set up for the upper areas.

Getting out to the top of the scaffolding was easier once
we removed these boards from the Palladium windows...

And then crawled through. Here's me at the top.

The secret to staying up is to not look down.

So far, so good.

Stay tuned to our next post showing our final work on the front of Laura’s house.