Our Old House

Our town is a National Historic District and it's a beautiful place. Our limestone house, built about 1865, is one of the older homes in our state. We live in the western United States and our state was settled by non-native Americans in the late 1840's.  By the time our home was built in a rural area of the state there was a thriving city up north, but Spring City was the frontier; the wild, wild west.  

12 Pioneer families were sent to our area to settle in 1852.  They were burned out within one year by the native Americans who lived in the mountain range near by but they returned in 1853, only to be driven out again.  In 1859 they returned again with many more settlers and eventually built sturdy, permanent homes. The builder of our home arrived in 1860 and first inhabited a 2 room log cabin one block west of the rock house. Around 1865, Orson Hyde built this stone home of local oolitic limestone rubble.  

Our town has a heritage home tour once a year to raise money for historic preservation and occasionally we open our home for the tour.  The sheer volume of visitors take a toll on the house but the effort paid off when a great niece of the third owner of our house stopped by on the tour and offered to lend us a much earlier photo of the home than anyone new was in existence.  We were able to make a copy of the original thanks to her generosity.

She also provided the name of her great uncle in the photo and we were able to look up his genealogical records and date the photo by the age of the baby in his wife's arms. All of the six children on their pedigree chart are accounted for in the photo, enabling us to date the photograph. 

In 1909, the George Crawforth family documented their abundance and wealth by posing with not one, but three horses, in front of their home in this photo taken by a traveling photographer.  Often rural families would have their "picture made" to show relatives they left behind how well they were doing financially out on the frontier. Our home was the onetime Deseret Telegraph office in town and we noted that someone has moved the telegraph arms  from under the west window on the third floor to the east window where they are now.  The photo also proved that our porch was built sometime between 1909 and 1915 when it appears in the next known photo.  What a great gift we were given with this photograph!

Here's our house and property today, after lengthy restoration.   

The wooden hay barn collapsed under heavy snow during the winter of 1983 .

All that remains is the stone stable on the left, seen in the photo below

 from the north where the missing barn and wood stable used to be.

We've restored the ice house next to the stable

 and the Granary on the property as well .  

 Here's how it looks today as our guest house.

From our old house to yours....Have a good week!