I am now hot on the trail of the story of our house. Remarkably, it appears to have been occupied continuously since 1906 by someone in the family of the original builder, until we took over in 1978. There was an owner in between, but that was just the guy who bought it to flip, after spraying Navajo White all over the wallpaper and disciplining the floors in a deep rust shag, and he ended up getting murdered in a trailer park in California. So.
But I have a family name now! Miss Jane Farrelly, plucky conqueror of tall mountains, and the never-married sister of Florence Farrelly Kraxberger! An Amazon, she was! Or if she's anything like her younger sister Florence, a teeny tiny Amazon. Even better!
Unfortunately, the trail went cold there. I found nothing on the free genealogy sites about Miss Jane and Florence, or any Portland Farrellys. Except that Miss Jane's obituary mentioned a funeral at St. Charles Catholic Church--at the time, about five blocks from our house--and burial in Mt. Calvary Cemetery. I wondered if I should pay her bones a visit, and checked out the cemetery website. Which led to a photo on FindAGrave of her stone, and the information that she was buried next to her brother Joseph. There were other Farrellys at rest there too. Don't know where Florence went, but other names turned up, including a mother, Anna Agnes Boylen Farrelly, and a father.
Peter Philip Farrelly. The clueless but determined builder of our miraculously still-standing home. There you have it, Dave!
Feeding some of this information back into the genealogy sites, I discovered more siblings. Not all at once, tidily, but in dribs and drabs, with spellings and birthdates varying slightly from one record to another. By the time I unearthed the 1910 census, it had occurred to me that the father simply couldn't remember exactly when they were all born. And left one out. And there were at least nine. Philip, Joseph, Jane, Stephen, Florence, Francis, Frances, Clair, and William. Six of them were born in Pennsylvania. The oldest was born in New Jersey in 1890, a chaste 14 months after his parents' wedding; the youngest in Kansas in 1908. I am hereby assuming he dropped out of Mrs. Farrelly en route to Portland where Dad had been getting the house ready for the big move. Miss Jane was born in 1895, and appears as "Jennie" in the census. She was no older than 23 when she climbed Mt. Hood, stood atop, ice axe aloft, and thundered I am JANE!
I'm not sure if there were any children after William. In my research, they just kept showing up one by one, and I'm sure Mrs. Farrelly felt the same way.
But Pennsylvania?
Our fine local neighborhood historian, Doug Decker, once looked into the story of our 15-block plat, the Foxchase Addition. He discovered that it was filed on April 1, 1889, five months before the Farrellys got married, by a land speculator named J. Carroll McCaffrey. A Philadelphia native, he lived and traveled between Portland and Philadelphia frequently. Advertisements for lots in his new plat, located on a high ground of fields, forest, and dirt roads, began to appear in The Oregonian--and presumably back in Pennsylvania as well: "FOXCHASE: BEST BUY IN PORTLAND, $100, $5 down, $5 a month."
Fox Chase was a fancy neighborhood of mansions in northeastern Philadelphia, and McCaffrey's name choice was designed to entice prospective buyers. One of whom was the newlywed Mr. Peter Philip Farrelly, who purchased his Western dream. All but two of his children were born in Woodbourne, Pennsylvania--fifteen miles from Fox Chase. The hopeful Mr. Farrelly snapped up our two lots, bless his soul forever, and hove out to new territory with nothing but a dream and way too much confidence in his building skills.
Meanwhile Mr. McCaffrey, the speculator, was convicted and sent to prison after having been charged with fraud enough times he couldn't afford a bondsman. His wife filed for divorce. When he won an appeal on a technicality, he fled back to PA, sprayed his wallpaper Navajo White, installed dark shag carpeting, and ultimately took his own life.
Why do I care? Why have I spent hours on this endeavor? We want to draw a line through our own lives. A tether to somewhere. The future is opaque, and the only thing that we know will happen for certain is something we'd rather not think about. So we throw a line and a hook into the past, hoping it snags on something. And then we hold on.
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Maybe I'm a wee bit judgmental (ya think?), but I'd say that anyone who sprayed wallpaper any color a/o installed shag carpeting achieved poetic justice by being killed -- and in a trailer park, no less.
ReplyDeleteI'm finding that a number of people I know in our age demographic are turning to history now. Either by looking up their own ancestry, or -- as you are doing -- the ancestry of your house. Probably a combination of feeling one's own mortality and more time on one's hands due to the pandemic. Paul's sister even phoned him after about 15 years of not talking to us. She is looking into their ancestry and wondered about pictures we might have. We had a long chat, and it was nice to not feel like persona non grata anymore, though I doubt we will ever be "buds." (She and her husband don't drink. We do. With enthusiasm. I gather that she was afraid that we might turn her precious children into -- gasp! -- drinkers. In yet another example of poetic justice, it turns out that her college-age daughter hits the bars with her boyfriend. So apparently, she didn't need any help from us.)
I'm going to look for pictures next. I have two remote possibilities.
DeleteI loathed history at school. It was taught as dates, battles, rulers - to the exclusion of 'ordinary' people. And how I wish that things had been different. I came to a fascination with those ordinary people (and their far from ordinary lives) late in life. And fascinated I am.
ReplyDeleteI always hated “history “ until I got a professor who taught cultural history. It helped too that my college career started at 40.
DeleteI had the same problem. One serious regret is that I did not ask my parents more questions. I didn't care, I guess, and they didn't volunteer anything. But either one would have answered my questions honestly. They were both gone by the time I turned 28.
DeleteChrist, Murr! Your parents died young! I mean, I know that they had you later in life than most folk -- as with mine -- but, still. I'm glad that I at least had the conversation with my mom on the front porch on a summer evening, about how I came into being as a complete person in just four months after my parents wed. (I led into it by saying that I could do math.)
DeleteI think they died young too, but they were 68 and 72.
DeleteI love all this history that you've uncovered! How the heck did you learn that Mr. McCaffrey sprayed his wallpaper Navajo White and installed the shag carpet? Perhaps this was in his obituary? Am I out of touch with Obit trends? Should I revise mine to "Ed Downs installed low-voltage recessed lights in his living room, replaced the old heat-pump, got hit by a truck and died."?? If this is indeed a new trend, all I can say is that it gets harder and harder to keep up...
ReplyDeleteYou should definitely revise it in just that manner. And yes, McCaffrey was all over the shag carpeting in 1895.
DeleteOh, that would be a great obit, except for getting hit by a truck part. Maybe think of something less painful?
DeleteA real FAST truck.
DeleteHa!
DeleteOh wait, now I understand. That is the condition in which you 'inherited' your house, oh so many years ago. (Duh)
ReplyDeletePerhaps we should be more respectful of poor Mr. McCaffrey's idea of good taste -- I think that Navajo White walls and brown shag carpet are due to come back into fashion in a season or two.....
I think it was Oscar that said, "fashion is for those who have no sense of style." And if he didn't say it, he should have.
DeleteShag carpet should NEVER come back.
DeleteThe house I grew up in, having been built in 1955 (and ourselves having been its first tenants), had no history to speak of. The most interesting old artifact I found in it, in the attic, was a 10-year old glass milk bottle left by the builders' crew, with a few ounces of milk still in it, in a condition I think I'll just call "predictable."
ReplyDeleteBut I note you are not calling it "cheese."
DeleteI'm glad you have been able to find out so much of the history. I was able to discover the flats I live in were built in 1950, specifically as Public Housing and won an award for the design.
ReplyDeletePrecisely Dave's vintage!
DeleteI took history (read: demoted to history because of fluking maths) in high school and that was strictly NZ and European from when Victoria sat on her gilded chair. So, sod-all real history.
ReplyDelete[looking up "sod-all"]
DeleteSpeaking of glass bottles found by occupants, a girl (who attended the same primary school as my kids) found some old glass bottles under her parent's rented house in Nevada City (a local mining town, once a prime contender for California state capital, and owner of the name "Nevada" before the neighboring state co-opted it). Her parents wondered how she found bottles "under the house". Turns out the porches' support blocks were now floating above a caved-in entrance to old gold mine tunnels that the girl had explored. The shocked parents were relieved their daughter hadn't been entombed during the exploration. They expressed their relief with understandable, if not understanding, harsh words at their child's dangerous descent into history.
ReplyDeleteTHAT, my friend, is a perfectly good beginning to a cracking novel.
Delete...and here's the end: So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
DeleteFSF