History of a House
The subdivision of our tract occurred between 1900 and 1910, when much of the land area of the city was subdivided for residential development. This decade coincided with the rise in popularity of the Craftsman movement, which spawned the popular building type of the bungalow, so this property reflects that trend in housing. This bungalow, and others like it, represent the entry-level housing type for many modest middle-class communities throughout the country, but was particularly associated with Southern California, where the bungalow dominated the development of the Southern California urban landscape from about 1905 until World War I. Many of these houses were occupied by the large numbers of newcomers to the region.
The building permit for the property was issued the last week in December of 1909 (per listing in the City’s permit log), reliably placing its construction and completion in 1910. The brothers who apparently had the house built are listed in the 1910 census as boarders in another family's house along with their father, 76 and widowed. The brothers, John (26) and Edson (24), worked for a grocery company. Family information posted on the Ancestry web site notes that they were two of eleven children from an Amish-Mennonite family of farmers in Middlebury, Indiana. It’s not clear whether the builders ever lived in the house or whether it was built for speculative purposes (research in the city directories wasn’t as helpful as I’d hoped). By 1930, one of the brothers was widowed and renting a house elsewhere in town for $25 a month and still working as a clerk in a grocery store nearby. The other brother had the same occupation but was living with his family in the next town, about five miles away. He identified himself as a grocery “manager” in 1930, but again as “clerk” in the 1940 census.
After the initial construction, the first building permit on record was issued in 1924 for a driveway. Two years later, in 1926, a garage was built. It’s likely that this structure was a one-car, wood frame garage clad in board and batten siding, which is typical of the surviving garages in the neighborhood. None of these homeowners would have owned an automobile as early as 1910, but by the 1920s it was more common and many garages were added in that period. The next permit that means anything for construction (as opposed to systems or a new roof) was issued for the new garage in 1997. At that time, I assume they also laid the new concrete driveway, which I always say is the most robust thing on the whole property! That’s a lot of concrete.
This is the listing from Southwest Contractor & Manufacturer, a weekly trade publication, announcing the issuance of the original building permit in the last week of 1909.
The brothers were the owners; the address given for them seems to be the address of the grocery store where they worked. Their contractor, O. C. Williams, lived a few blocks away from the project site. The permit is for a one-story, five-room frame residence, the address is given, and the cost: $2,000! That was pretty standard for a basic house here at the time. In fact, our neighbors, when they did work on their house, found in the ceiling of their porch a fragment of a wood crate on which is painted lettering that reads “A $2,000 Bungalow.” This seems to suggest that their house was built from a kit, but kit houses were not that common in town, I’m told by an expert.
This is the page from the City’s permit log showing the permit issued to the brothers on December 27, 1909.
City staff were not even aware of this log! I happened to mention it to someone who researches houses locally and he had a copy that he’d obtained from the public library.
We know of some other mildly interesting details from the prior owners, who were back in town and came by for a visit one day. She was a crossing guard for the elementary school and was often seen walking her big dog, so a lot of people knew her in the neighborhood, where she lived for about 40 years. Her husband worked as a painter for a local university, which I find bitterly ironic since he didn’t take care of his house AT ALL. Our kitchen cabinets are not very stylish but they’re of solid quality and hopefully headed for the garage (like all good cabinets in Southern California at the end of their useful life inside the house!). They were apparently built by folks in the shop on campus. She told me that a prior owner of the house was legally blind, so his family had cut back the supposedly pointy corners of a feature in the dining room so he wouldn’t be injured. She also told me that the original dining room built-ins were replaced in the 1950s, from what she could tell, but she and her husband opened the wall between the kitchen and dining room and removed those built-ins all together (replacing them with a partial wall and a tiled bar-counter. Ugh). These missing built-ins were located on axis with the opening to the living room. Now, due to the open plan that wasn’t intended to be that way, when you walk in, you look straight at the mess of papers and photos stuck to the fridge. Even our 13 year old finds this tacky. :(
There have been big changes in the neighborhood over the past 30 years or so, moving towards a more diverse and more affluent population. These changes are reflected in the enlargement of so many of the houses, sometimes to meet changing expectations—the desire for larger kitchens, family rooms, a bedroom for each child, a separate bath for the parents, etc.—resulting in lots of additions of varying quality. We hope that ours, relatively modest though it is, will stand the test of time and prove useful beyond our years here.