In 1975, when my mother and her neighbor Helen Heckes were working on placement of Oysterville on the National Register of Historic Places, some architects from the state preservation office came calling.  They were especially interested in our family house and in Helen’s house, both of which were constructed using the same plans.
     The houses were built in 1867 (Helen’s) and 1869 (ours) by John and Tom Crellin, respectively.  The Crellins came from the Isle of Man and brought their building plans with them.  This is what Tom’s granddaughter had told my mom and that fact was corroborated by the state architects.
     The proof, apparently, is in the details of the house.  In the normal course of events, the cutting edge plans for Victorian buildings came from England, but slowly – first to New England or the East Coast and then gradually across the continent to the West Coast.  Not so, apparently, with our houses.  The plans came directly from the Isle of Man with the Crellins, not house by house, or builder by builder, or year by year.
     “There are features of these houses that were incorporated a good thirty years before comparable design elements became common on the West Coast,” said the experts.  Unfortunately, I don’t remember (if I ever knew) just what those tell-tale details were.
     But the timing does fit with what I know about the Crellin family.  They arrived on the North Beach Peninsula in 1854 and took out a donation land claim in the Nahcotta area.  (The claim was later purchased by John Peter Paul, a carpenter who subsequently had one of the first successful cranberry bogs in the area and is credited with naming Nahcotta.)  The  Crellin family, consisting of mother, father, and a number of children, some of whom were grown, had been in oystering in England and had heard of the oysters on Shoalwater Bay.  They wasted no time in getting here, house plans and all.
     There are many old-fashioned aspects to the house, all of which I love and try not to take for granted.  In the oldest parts of the house, of course, are the eleven-foot ceilings – a blessing in the summer but a curse in the winter, for they keep the warm air up out of reach.  The doorknobs, too, are different.  They are much lower than on modern doors.  Is that because people were shorter?  I doubt it.  I think it was just the style.  Part of my reasoning is that Tom Crellin, who built our house, was known for his height; he was six foot four or five, a fact that gave him an competitive edge when tonging oysters.
     Electricity, of course, came in a long time after the house was built – almost seventy years after, in 1936.  Even so, the electrical “details” are old-fashioned by modern standards.  Upstairs in the attic the old knob and tube wiring is still in evidence (and still perfectly safe, say the electricians) and, in all but the newest parts of the house, we still use those old push-button switches to turn on the lights.  Often, they are not in the same room with the lights they control which confuses visitors and has caused some funny situations over the years.  For instance, the light switch for the downstairs bedroom is out in the hallway right beside the light switches for the upstairs and downstairs hall lights.  Once, when we had a houseful of guests, someone kept pushing the wrong light switch late at night.  Eventually, his mistake became known and the woman staying in the downstairs bedroom said, “Oh I wondered why that overhead light came on every night around midnight!”  Details!