A Little House History

So for those of you who are curious, I thought I would fill in a little house history here that I've found in my digging. The house was originally built for Eugene Ward. How do I know this? Because as I have taken down the trim around the windows, on the back of the top casing molding is written "Eugene Ward, Caledonia, Michigan". This lends credibility to our original thought that this house was a "Sears kit house". Essentially what that means is, around the turn of the century and on into the 30s, you could actually BUY your house from a Sears catalog! You would order the house, and it would come precut and ready to assemble. Imagine going to the train station to pick up your house!!

Sears would actually build their "modern homes" in a lumbar yard. All of the pieces were cut, and assembled on site when the house was ordered. Then, each piece would be marked, crated, and sent by rail or by barge to the location where the new homeowner was. Everything from the wood to trim to paint would arrive in crates, and would be brought by wagon to the new homesite. From there, it would be re-assembled according to plans supplied by Sears. Everything was numbered. For example, the large picture window in our front room has "Eugene Ward, Caledonia Michigan" written on the back of each piece, but there is also a number on each trim piece. There are 14 pieces of trim and casing to assemble the front window, and all of the pieces are marked. Floor joists would be stamped with the Sears Robuck name, so we'll officially know if it's a Sears house when/ if we find that stamp. I may be crawling around in the rafters with a flashlight sometime soon :-)

As best as we can tell, our house was the "Hamilton house" style. The original cost of the house would have been approximately $2000 (it could have been more or less, depending on upgraded options which might have been chosen). I think if you click on the picture below, you can see it bigger in order to view the floorplan.
For those of you who have been IN our house, you know that the upstairs floor plan shown confirms another suspicion of ours- that the room which is now Meg's was actually the original bathroom in the house. And, the 11x14 chamber is now where our bathroom is. When the bathroom was put in, whoever did it made the room smaller and also took out the closet. This created the secret room which we found hidden between the bathroom and Teddy's room (found by cutting into the wall).

Anyway, a little more on the original owner- Euguene Ward was born in Thornapple Township in 1884. He died in 1968 and is buried in a cemetery in Yankee Springs. Eugene and his wife Pearl built this house, and had 5 children (Robert, Roy, Ardis, Edward, and William) during their time in the house (all born between 1915 and 1926). According to the 2007 census, one of them (Ardis) is still alive! Wouldn't it be cool to find them and see if they remember anything about the house?!

One more note on a previous owner. Tucked away in the floor joists, I found several rolled up LARGE arial photographs of Thornapple Township, as well as a 1968 school-sized pull down map of Grand Rapids in 1968. From the names on these (Cal Kooiker), we know that another owner of the house was a graduate of South Christian high school in the 50s who became a surveyor and eventually a local developer. Kooiker Tool and Die is located on 68th street in Caledonia, and I think perhaps since it's not a very common name, that there may be a link to that as well.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed the history thus far. Stay tuned for more as it is discovered :-)