Past to Present

As we work on packup of rooms, I wonder what the house looked like when it was built and over the years. A neighbor showed us the top photo, which is undated in the database where he found it. It does appear to be not too long after it was built, however, because of some significant differences.

First, it does not have shutters, however the ones on the house now are currently in pretty sorry shape, indicating they have been there for decades. Second, you can see a screen porch on the back of the house (on the far right in the photo between the house behind ours.) We had no idea the house ever had a screen porch and there is no indications of anything like a foundation remaining. I also can’t imagine how they accessed it unless it was to go outside first. That does imply that an owner after the Welches left in 1958 might have built it. In the current photo, quite mature trees seem not to exist in the early one. The tall bushes on the sides of the front door grow like weeds so much so that we have to hack them back by several feet each year.

When the Welches had the house built in 1936, the original developers had had to dissolve the Coquillard Land Company, which built many of the houses in the development, after the Great Depression. When the company began developing the area in 1925, there was great public interest in the neighborhood, according to the South Bend Tribune. Hundreds came to see the first house on Ironwood and Cedar streets and they had to extend the open house for two more days! Here is an ad for the first house built in Coquillard Woods:

A few years ago after I had been researching the history of the neighborhood for a while, Dan and I moseyed by during a walk and I noticed that the current owner of this first house was outside and I asked her if she knew that hers was the first house built in Coquillard Woods. Not only did she know, she had a whole notebook full of information about the owner! (More on that in a future blog.) As we started to leave, she asked me why I was doing this research. I explained that we had moved into a house on Esther near McKinley and were interested in learning about the area. She asked, “the grey house?” I had kind of thought it was an ice blue color, so I was startled, but knew that no other house nearby could be called “grey” except ours. I said yes and then she said that she grew up in our house! Her family had finished the attic so that it’s an extra bedroom–if with difficult stairs. That renovation included a laundry chute to the basement. She told us that she and a sibling would repeatedly drop their toddler sib down the chute. (I shudder). Their work was done in about the 1980s, according to her, but there are no building permits that can help us document that.

Any guesses on the year of the first pic?