This seems like an especially appropriate time to pick up the thread again after 3 months of being out of touch. Did I say fresh start? Last week's Presidential election seems to have given the nation a new lease on life after a long, dark chapter in our history. I just hope that the nation doesn't blow the opportunity that we have to get back on track. It's going to take a while to undo the damage that has taken place over the last eight years.
Progress on the house has been substantial since my last posting: the attic space is 99% complete. Our bedroom was moved up there while construction on the second floor master suite/bath and my office are being finished. The demolition was the hardest part of the process for us, the noise, dust and trauma of having our living space sledgehammered into oblivion took a toll and so far has been the most stressful part of the renovation. Now that the framing and sheetrocking have been done on the second floor, with new hardwood floors installed, the next phase is finishing the baths.
Click photos to enlargeWe made some discoveries in the attic and second floor while opening the walls and floors up for the HVAC and demolition. Billy, our air conditioning and heating guy, found two full, sealed cans of Royal Baking Powder in the attic floor, which look to be from the 1910's. One of them has instructions written in German in a thick Gothic script alongside the English text on the back. I would think that the politics of the day would have precluded on that in later years, given the country was engaged in two wars with Germany, the first from 1917-1918 and again from 1942-1945.
Click photo to enlargeAnother find, in the dead space under the attic over the stairs going to the first floor, was a legal notice dated September 24th, 1913 to let someone know that if they don't pay up, they're going to be sued. Was the defendant, E. O. Smith, the resident of this house? Was the owner of the house an attorney who practiced in the State of New York, where the legal action was filed? The house, to our knowledge, wasn't built until 1915 - I checked at City Hall - but the couple who sold it to us said it was 1913.
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Also: a pair of pilots' wings from the WWII Army Air Corps, found along with the baking soda in the same area of the attic. We have been told that a Colonel lived here at one time so I would imagine that they belonged to him.
So that's it for the finds so far. Nothing that really qualifies for "If Walls Could Talk" but another rumor put forth by the former owners has a diamond ring hidden somewhere in the fieldstone mantle in the den. I don't know where that came from, I asked the son of the family who lived here before them and he wasn't aware of it, so... but maybe that's not such a bad thing, considering this story of a windfall treasure found by a contractor while working on a house.
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It's funny how things that seem long past can surface to remind us that maybe the more they change, the more they stay the same. The very first artifact that we found in the attic was a copy of the New York Times dated June 9, 1968. The majority of the pages we found were written about the assassination of Robert Kennedy, only 4 days earlier, a champion of equal rights whose life was tragically cut short, along with Martin Luther King two months before. Who knows what the country would be like now had he won the Democratic primary and campaigned against Richard Nixon in the 1968 Presidential election.
Forty years later, equal rights isn't just a phrase, it's a reality. I hope this time the promise isn't cut short by bigotry and hatred the way it was then. The last few weeks and months during the 2008 campaign sure made me wonder.
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