Historic House Blog

In 2005, in West Cape May, NJ, a developer demolished the historic Moffitt House, a circa 1770, pre-Revolution Colonial — despite outrage and preservationists’ active plans to save the house by moving it.  A report by Jack Fichter of the Cape May County Herald notes that the demolition of the former B&B proceeded with “most [...]

We usually stick to historic houses here on HHB, but I had to make an exception to write about something disturbing that’s happening today about an hour from where I live.  In Tiffin, Ohio, a county courthouse that was built in 1884 (and has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places) is being [...]

So, it’s Halloween . . . and with Halloween comes ghosts.  And where are the ghosts?  Well, usually, they’re in historic homes!  Why is that?  The answer, in some ways, seems obvious.  Historic houses have been around for at least a couple of generations, if not several centuries.  Certainly, they are much more likely to [...]

Can a crazy neighbor, bored building inspectors, and a complacent city government halt a homeowner’s dedicated preservation efforts— and result in criminal noncompliance charges?  Apparently so, according to the owner of an old house in Lakewood, OH, a suburb of Cleveland.  In a recent posting on her blog, “1914 Foursquare,” the owner, “Nina,” shares the [...]

When making an offer on a house, would you want to know that it was located in a designated historic district?  Especially if that district contained rules governing future alterations of your historic home?  Of course you would.  And the City Council in Mobile, Alabama thinks sellers of historic homes — in these designated districts– [...]

Many-a-time on our road trips between Connecticut and Ohio, we would exit I-80 to stop for gas near a small city named Sharon, just after crossing the border from Ohio into Pennsylvania.   Yet we never really drove into town, feeling we didn’t have time to casually “explore” on such a long trip.  But had I [...]

In honor of Halloween’s fast approaching, we thought we would address the issue of “haunted houses” and real estate.  Ghosts and the paranormal are certainly not limited to “historic” houses.  But let’s face it . . . historic houses almost inevitably have some kind of story tied to them.  Whether it’s a dramatic legend about a murder in the [...]

In an upscale neighborhood in Atlanta, a man named Ruben Jones recently purchased the “Henry B. Tompkins House” (asking price $2 million) and among the renovations, he painted his 1922 Georgian Revival home.  No problem, right?  Except that he painted it ORANGE . . . a far cry from the original GRAY stucco, which, for 88 years, [...]

We’ve written before about “preserving” historic homes through subdivision (for a look at some of these cases, see our article “‘Preserving’ Historic Estates Through Subdivision?”).  Usually, this process involves cutting up a large tract of land (usually a historic farmstead) for the purpose of building a new subdivision, with development approval hinging on a caveat that the developer [...]

At the height of the goldrush, in the year 1849, Daniel Ward left St. Joseph County in northern Indiana in pursuit of gold in California.  Two years later, Ward returned with a “small fortune.”  By the end of the Civil War, in 1865, he had erected a grand Itaianate mansion in Granger for his family, [...]