This was my family’s home in Americus, Georgia for several years when I was a professor of history at Georgia Southwestern College ((now Georgia Southwestern State University). Photo by Joe Kitchens.

When the rising tide of the historic preservation movement caught hold during our Bicentennial celebration in the mid-to-late seventies, I was twice bitten. I needed a house and I was teaching a course in Historic Preservation.  I needed the house because I was  recently married and in need of a home for my new wife and her two children, two girls, seven and four. When they moved to be with me in the little college town where I had begun my teaching career as a history professor, we had a choice. For the same $50,000 we could buy a new, three- bedroom house with air conditioning, a two- car garage and two baths. OR, we could buy a 75 year-old Queen Anne Revival house for which a set of much needed draperies or blinds would cost the price of a new Cadillac. Of course, we chose the old house, situated on Lee Street (I am not making this up) that offered antebellum, Victorian and every other imaginable charming example of architecture from ages past.

We were confined to three rooms in the first few weeks of occupation.  The owner had hired an auctioneer to hold a sale of all the old house’s furniture and decorations, all its countless sets of China and silver and its turn- of- the-century prints. When this event ended and we could come out of our rooms where we were guarding our own possessions from this murderous onslaught of  greedy dealers and unsavory looking bargain hunters. Holed up in the enormous dining room with all our worldly goods while the girls went to lunch at the local meat-and-three diner, I ran across the hall to the bathroom and returned quickly to my “stuff.” My new guitar was missing and had sold for five dollars. We had secretly hoped some things would be overlooked in the sale that would remain with the house, such as the doors and windows and the 112 piece Haviland china set we knew to be hidden in the basement in an old cardboard trunk. It was the last thing to be auctioned off-for $25, sight unseen, at the very last minute.

We purchased only one item during the auction-a handmade red cedar four poster. It was thankfully tall enough to conceal our tattered luggage and cardboard boxes full of winter clothes. Did I mention, builders of Queen Anne-style houses felt no need for closets, preferring instead to use beautiful wardrobe cabinets, all of which had vanished in the auction.

We were seduced by the house’s beautiful veranda that began under a cupola and swept across the front of the house, coming to rest under an octagonal “tent” roof. There was no air conditioning, but the lady who sold us the house said the attic fan and high ceilings kept the house cool even on summer evenings. Liar, liar, pants on fire. As spring turned to summer, the monstrous attic fan proved to be powerful , as promised, strong enough to create a hurricane force wind through the windows that knocked  over table lamps and sucked the bedcovers off if you did not hold on tight. And, at night the great fan brought in humid air on a steady breeze that felt water-logged and made for a restless night’s sleep.

Fortunately, there was no reason to repaint the interior walls. They had held up well since last painted in 1937 according to the elderly owner who was retiring and moving to Florida.  She had spent her life alone in the house. “Lead paint is truly amazing,” she told us “Just wash off the mildew every year or two and it looks like new. “Miss Brown,” I will call her, was the first switchboard operator when they set up the telephone company somewhere this side of the turn of the century the small South Georgia city. She benefited from a company policy allowing employees to have as many telephone extensions as they wanted. All three bathrooms and bedrooms had telephones, as did the kitchen, hall and living room.  We enjoyed this convenience and were disappointed when the telephone company finally remembered where all its phones had gone and threatened to charge us a fee for each extension. We rolled back to a single phone contract to stave off poverty.

Believe it or not, we had a surplus of kitchen cabinets. Miss Brown had linoleum tile squares installed in the kitchen in the 1950’s. If a square became stained or torn, she had her friend the carpenter build a new kitchen cabinet to cover the damage. The kitchen was organized like a maze and required some athleticism to get around in. And, she had a huge picture window installed in the kitchen. It took me weeks of rambling around demolition sites to find a pair of period French doors and personally install them where we had removed the picture window. This was a critical improvement because the center hallway did not have a back door. (The back porch had been enclosed to create what became our oldest daughter’s bedroom, putting an end to routine exits into the backyard. With the new french doors (and steps I built), now we could park adjacent to the kitchen to unload groceries and children. It was a real godsend. By the way, for months we were afraid to use the garage we found hidden under shrubbery behind the house. It was apparently not worth burning when the Union army passed through.

Eventually the heat of summer let up and we could  retreat from the porch back into the house after dinner. Evening temperatures retreated into the high eighties.  I contracted a mild case of pneumonia in October brought on I was sure by using a heat gun to take down the tile-patterned pressed board panels in the kitchen. The walls behind were solid bead-board tongue and groove with a coat of paint so thick my paltry little sander could not dent them. I removed them all one-by-one and fed them through a friends plainer. The results were beautiful, but I feared my health prognosis might suffer from the choking sawdust cloud in which I worked for days.

While recovering from a mild case of pneumonia, I stayed home Halloween night while the kids and their mom set off joyfully to go trick-or-treating. I turned off all the lights and sat huddled in a blanked on the front porch, watching the kids walk by in costume in clusters or with parents. I must have dozed off because two little girls dressed in Disney character costumes as “princesses”, ignored the ominous look of my darkened house and made their way up to the front door and twisted the old mechanical doorbell that sounded like a fire alarm. Startled, I leapt from my porch rocker and let loose an exclamation, best left unwritten here. The girls screamed and flew down the steps and back to the safety of the sidewalk where the parents, who had witnessed this scene, offered a few expletives of their own, remarks harnessed to accusations of cruelty to children and comments about their new and loony neighbor.

Cooler weather also gave us a chance to really enjoy the porch. Toward Thanksgiving, nighttime temperatures fell in the evenings into the high seventies, so refreshing after the one hundred degree sunsets of August. Oh, and with the great attic fan turned off for the season, we were able to hear each other talk during dinner.  

We actually hosted a couple of  house parties with drinks and dinner for our friends in our very impressive dining room, serving from the small butler’s pantry-all wrapped in curly pine paneling and boosting elegant plate rails (empty of course). Impressive. Students from my Russian History class took on the challenge of preparing traditional, pre-Bolshevik Russian dishes. It was all great fun and we at last began to feel that the house, with all its faults, might serve us well—once we could afford blinds or curtains.

It was to be the winter of our discontent. Sure, we had noticed that there were gas heaters in every room, you know the old- fashioned ones with ceramic reflector panels with dimples that glowed red in a decorative pattern when they were heated.  It takes a long time to heat a room with a fourteen-foot ceiling and absolutely no insulation. Mornings were frantic. The alarm would sound and one of us would rush to the kitchen to light the heater so we could close that room and turn on the oven, leaving the oven door open. Lighting the heater and the stove could be an adventure. They had to be lit by hand using matches and-if you were not skilled in the process-a long, tightly twisted piece of yesterday’s newspaper. Turn on the gas. Light the paper. Apply the flame to the jets spewing gas. Hesitation could result in a mishap. Cover your eyes and back away! More often than not, one or more of your eyebrows was singed off or your hair was set ablaze. But after an hour or so the kitchen would warm up and the girls could enjoy their breakfast without shivering or complaining about the jam being frozen.

Every day ended with going home to a repair project. One of our first real victories was opening the new French doors and tossing out the 1940’s dishwasher. It was a monstrous thing, bigger than a modern kitchen range and used about fifty gallons of water to wash the smallest load. Hard to imagine in today’s world, but we were so desperate we bought a table-top dishwasher for about $25. It was virtually useless and amounted to no more than a way of recirculating dirty water. By the way, despite the symptoms of Restoration Mania, we managed to find ourselves expecting.

My efforts were focused on getting the house in good enough shape to receive a new child. The first challenge would be the antiquated bathrooms which lacked showers, and filling the over-sized tubs elicited calls to and from the water department about the size of our water bills. On the day of the blessed event (the birth of our new daughter) , the process seemed to grind on slowly. Finally, the doctor felt I should go home and return if I received a call before the next morning.  I got out of my regular overalls and filthy tee shirt and ran a tub full of water.

 I laid back in the old claw- footed tub, absent-mindedly touched the chrome and porcelain control with my big toe and it fell off. The fixture, not my toe. The faucet and both hot- and cold- water faucets clunked into the tub, releasing a powerful stream of water right into my face. I screamed but there was no one to hear. Dripping wet,  I knew what needed to be done. I threw on my robe, grabbed a wrench and flashlight from my toolbox and headed to the sidewalk where the meter box was located. Did I mention that my old plumbing systems had no shutoff valves on any of the fixtures? The answer to every water leak or break in the pipes was to shut the water off at the street.

 It was night. I was head down in the meter box when the police arrived in a car with flashing red lights. (Called by a startled neighbor? I get even with them later.) One of the policemen got out of the car and shown a light on my… well, I will not say where, but I am sure it was illuminating. He asked with a snicker, “What’s going on here?”

My response was a torrent of complaints that included descriptions of the fate of those who worship at the throne of historic preservation, the nerve- racking delay in the delivery of our child, the broken plumbing and just about every other damned thing that popped into my mind. He left without offering any assistance or even issuing a citation. I could hear the cackle of his laughter as he offered an account of my situation to his dispatcher and drove away. The new jail might conceivably have offered me respite, I mused. Instead, I sawed off the end of a broom stick, whittled it down to fit in the bathtub supply line and hammered it home. Then I turned the valve back on in the water meter, half clean and mostly dressed, I went back to the hospital to await my daughter’s arrival. Thank God, there was air conditioning in the waiting room. I had forgotten what it felt like.