as seen from our dining room

     It seems to me that every community on the peninsula has its recycling stories – not in the way of bottles and cans and newspapers like our efforts of today, but in the reuse of house parts or of entire buildings.  I am always amazed to hear about the history of places that began in one location and then were moved – lock, stock and barrel.  For instance:
     –The Colbert house in Ilwaco began as a gabled cottage in Chinookville in 1871 and was moved to its present location at the corner of Quaker and Lake Streets in the 1880s.  It is now on the list of National Register of Historic Places.
    –Around 1893 Ferdinand John Katzer built a two-story house on the northwest shore of Long Island near the eroding community of Diamond City.  In 1900, he and his brother bought Diamond City, salvaged the remaining buildings for lumber, and moved the Katzer house by barge to property on Freshwater Creek, south of Nahcotta where it still stands.
     –The first Pacific County Courthouse, no longer in use by 1900, was purchased by R.H. Espy and moved about a half mile south of its original location in Oysterville.  The main part of the building was placed on the west side of the road, was converted into a barn, and served in that capacity until the 1940s.  The Courthouse Annex was dismantled and the lumber used to construct the “Espy Ranch House” on the east side of the road.  Over the years it has had several owners and many facelifts and is often referred to (erroneously) as “The Farmhouse.”
     Here in the village there is also evidence that several of the old houses actually began as two smaller buildings and were joined together to make a more commodious home.  That involved moving one or the other of the buildings – not an easy feat in the horse and wagon days.
     Apparently, house parts, too, were shared.  Tucker Wachsmuth pointed out to me that he has, in his shed, a window identical to our 14-pane dining room/kitchen windows. Those windows went into this house during a big renovation about 1915, as evidenced by my grandfather’s sketch of them made at that time.  We are unsure how one of them ended up at the Wachsmuths’ but our best guess is that it happened when my folks did a kitchen remodel in the early 1970s.
     This past weekend, two more pieces of our house have gone across the street.  This time, the salvaged material involves two doors taken from an upstairs bathroom a decade ago when we were restoring an architectural feature of the house that had been changed, also in the ‘70s..  The doors will be used upstairs in the W.D. Taylor House which is currently going through an extensive remodel.
     I love all this recycling!  But, even more, I love the stories that accompany each reuse. They tell so much about our history and how our lives have intertwined through the years.  And so it continues…