Thursday, August 04, 2016

#701 House on the Move

Historic photos of our Ozarks Bungalow are hard to find but we just keep looking.  Sometimes the stars align.

Until recently, the earliest photo we had found is this 1937 photo from Lawrence County in Pictures, published 23 years after the house was built in 1914. 

At the most recent meeting of the Aurora Historical Society, Bill told us about his family's early-20th-century house-moving business using horses and a winch.  It worked something like this...

From http://www.searshomes.org/index.php/2013/12/17/moving-houses-in-1916/

Lucky for us, Bill still has a circa 1920 photo of a large white frame house moving west down the center of College Street with OUR HOUSE IN THE BACKGROUND!

With a closer look, we see more detail about the upstairs window (previously hidden by an awning in the 1937 photo); we can see a lighter paint color in use on the top floor; and if we use our imagination, we can almost make out the outline of the outdoor porch lighting. The porch visible to the left of the horses belongs to our neighbors Bill and Denise.  The porch visible to the right of the horses is ours.

Yours in appreciating historical society meetings, family archivists, magnifying glasses, and the spirit of house movers,
Mary

No comments:

Post a Comment