Old buildings are not ours. They belong partly to those who built them, and partly to the generations of mankind who are to follow.
— John Ruskind
Sixteen owners of old homes gather on a Saturday morning at the DuPage County Historical Museum in Wheaton for what Dave Meyers, the museum’s educator, introduces as the “fourth, non-annual home history seminar.” Their mission: to find out when their houses were built. Their guide: Mark VanKerkhoff, St. Charles-based architect and Kane County’s preservation planner.
Jack White brings before-and-after photos of the Sycamore farmhouse he bought after previous owners moved it 40 feet. He hopes to learn about the house’s roots, despite the fact that its roof and foundation were replaced in the move.
Kathy Ghilarducci of Wheaton has no tangible clues about the origins of her four-square, but hopes neighborhood hearsay will help her launch her search.
Although their reasons for searching vary, these old-house soulmates nod in unison when VanKerkhoff tells them they are more than owners of their old homes; they are stewards of pieces of art.
“It’s your responsibility to sleuth your house’s history in order to make informed decisions about maintaining and remodeling,” says VanKerkhoff, who proceeds to show them slides of Chicago-area old homes victimized by uniformed remuddlers.
The first task in your quest, VanKerkhoff tells his audience, is to “examine the scene.”
“Walk around your neighborhood and check out street patterns, lot sizes, house styles and outbuildings. If you’re lucky, you’ll find a date engraved in a sidewalk or street. Look at the landscaping; how old is that oak tree? These clues won’t date your house exactly, but they’ll help you figure out when the neighborhood was established,” he says.
Use references such as “Identifying American Architecture: A Pictorial Guide to Styles and Terms, 1600-1945,” by John J.G. Blumenson, to determine when your house style was popular. If your home is a four-square, for example, chances are it was built between 1895 and 1930. This will give you a general time frame unless your house is “Midwestern vernacular”–architectural lingo meaning “the carpenter winged it.”
Caveat: Guidebooks show the ultimate in each style. Your Gothic Revival may not have every detail shown in the book, yet it may qualify as a true Gothic Revival. Also, styles evolved over the years. A 1910 Queen Anne is not as ornate as an 1890 Queen Anne.
Next, look at your property and house with a new perspective. Inspect the foundation, siding, windows, architectural details, floors and fixtures. If your walls cannot talk, maybe your doors can. A two-panel door in a Greek Revival house was probably built in 1845 to 1860, while a five-panel in a Victorian was built in 1880 to 1910.
“If your house still sits on its original foundation, you can probably date the house within a decade by knowing which materials were used in which area for which styles,” says VanKerkhoff. “The 1840 foundation has boulders from the field. In the Fox Valley, they used limestone blocks from 1840 to 1910. In Dundee in the mid-1800s, they used cobblestones. In Wilmette, they used brick prior to 1920.
“After 1910, foundation materials changed in this area. They started using precast concrete blocks, which all have the identical, rough-cut pattern. Also that year, they started using wooden planks for poured-concrete foundation forms. You can still see the horizontal lines from the planks.”
If you have exposed lath (check basement stairwells and closets), “How Old is This Old House? A Skeleton Key to Dating and Identifying Three Centuries of American Houses” can help you “read” it. Accordion-like cuts, for example, suggest your house is pre-Civil War. Wire-mesh lath didn’t appear until the 20th Century.
Other materials that provide quick clues are bricks (soft, hand-cut in the 1840s, machine-cut with vertical lines in 1915) and windows (six-over-six, divided light in the 1840s, two-over-two in the 1860s).
Once you’ve narrowed down your home’s birth to a decade or two, trek to your city or county building permit offices. If you’re lucky, there’s a record of your home’s building permit or even a blueprint on file. Unfortunately, many pre-1920 permits are lost. Another snag: If you live in an area that has since been annexed by a city, such as one-time suburb Hyde Park, don’t look to city records for permits.
If that route is a dead-end, your next stop is your county’s recorder of deeds office. There, you can try to trace the chain of ownership of your property. Bring your property’s legal description, which is on your title. Start with the current grantee or buyer (that’s you) and trace backwards via grantors or sellers.
Or, check old tax records at your county clerk’s office. Don’t forget to bring your property parcel number, which you can find on your property tax bill. How long each Chicago-area county keeps these records varies; in DuPage County, they date back to 1850. In Kane County, they go back to 1844, but some subsequent years are missing. The trick here is to find the date when the taxes on your property jumped, signaling construction of a house. If you’ve got deep pockets, title companies will do this search for you.
While you’re at the county clerk’s office, check out old plat books and bird’s-eye photos. Don’t be surprised if your county clerk has destroyed the old photos of your area, though; many of the old prints contained toxic chemicals.
If you want to learn more about your home’s original habitants, check your county clerk’s birth, death and marriage records. They may include fascinating facts about your predecessors and whom they married in your back yard. These records can be haphazard, though. In Cook County, for example, they date back to 1872 (records before that were destroyed in the fire) but pre-1916, it’s hit-or-miss.
While you’re at it, read their wills at your county’s probate office. These sometimes list the home’s contents–illuminating peeks into the homesteaders’ households. A mention of andirons may lead to the discovery of a hidden fireplace.
Your public library and historical society/museum are excellent places for your detective work, too. Here, you’ll find old atlases, genealogical records, diaries and census records.
Check your library’s city directories, which predate telephones and are sometimes cross-referenced by addresses, for fun facts such as the occupation of your home’s original owner. Note: City directories include cities only. If you live in an unincorporated area, you may be out of luck here.
Flip through the library’s microfiche for 19th Century newspaper articles; they’re filled with local color such as who attended Mrs. So-and-so’s tea and whose dog died. Some libraries even keep local house and neighborhood histories.
“If you can find your house on one of the old Sanborn maps–published from the 1880s to 1930s to indicate fire insurance territories–you’ve hit pay dirt. These show such details as types of building materials and location of original outbuildings and water tanks,” says VanKerkhoff. The Sanborn sketch of your home may indicate a long-forgotten front porch. Or, it may lead you to an abandoned cistern that could yield archaeological treasures.
If your library doesn’t have a Sanborn map of your neighborhood, ask your librarian to obtain a copy from the Illinois State Library through the inter-library loan network. Or, visit the map section of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s library. You can order your own copy for $100 from the Sanborn Map Co. (914-738-1649).
Finally, your best resource may the least scientific–the elderly lady down the street. She may give you the neighborhood history firsthand, or–if you’re really lucky–unearth some old photographs with invaluable clues.
As you travel back in time, beware of roadblocks. Streets change names and are renumbered. Artists enhance their drawings. Previous owners replace original moldings. City boundaries change. Houses move.
When you reach the end of your journey, share your discoveries with your neighbors. These are the seeds that grow into historical districts such as Elgin’s Gifford Park. As neighbors pool their research, they learn more about the neighborhood fabric. The house-history fever spreads.
One final note from VanKerkhoff: Don’t worry about determining the exact date your house was built. Even some plaqued houses admit to being built “circa” certain years.
What’s more important is that you learn and appreciate your home’s history and style. Then, when you remodel or restore, you can choose products or additions appropriate to your home and avoid stylistic schizophrenia. Otherwise, your next home improvement project may the best “blooper” in VanKerkhoff’s next slide show.
Which brings us back to White, owner of the farmhouse-on-the-move. When the previous owners gave it a new roof and foundation, they erased many structural clues. But White did find square-topped nails throughout the house, which VanKerkhoff says date back to 1825 to 1890.
Backwards traces of tax and grantee/grantor records at his county tax assessor’s office and the local title company both dead-ended at 1935. But before White left the assessor’s office, he flipped through the old plat books. There, he found his house–then a lone house on what was called the Waterman farm–in a 1892 book. More digging unearthed an 1871 plat book, sans farm house. That narrowed the range determined by the nails.
Next on White’s agenda is a visit to a tiny nearby hamlet named Waterman, where “there may or may not be a connection. But, if there is, maybe I can find someone who remembers something about the Waterman family,” he says.
Ghilarducci not only found out her home was built in 1910 through a DuPage County tax-record search; she clarified some gossip, too.
“For years, it’s been called `the Ward house,’ and I was told I was the third owner. It turns out, the Wards bought it in the 1970s. There were many, many owners before that,” she says.
Tax records helped Ghilarducci confirm a rumor that her house and three neighbors’ homes are Sears kit houses. Sure enough, page 291 of “Houses by Mail: A Guide to Houses from Sears, Roebuck and Company,” a book she found at her library, shows her model, dubbed the Fullerton. She also found an old catalog listing Sears kit accessories, doors and millwork.
“Now I know what kind of fretwork to use when I replace the original living room/dining room divider, which I can locate by marks in the wood floor,” she says.
But Ghilarducci’s greatest find was a missing link she spotted at the November Kane County Flea Market. Thanks to her research, Ghilarducci recognized it as an original, Sears, interior kitchen door–a perfect fit for the Fullerton.
