Pair saves a home of history|[4/25/06]
Published 12:00 am Tuesday, April 25, 2006
After retirement, Bob Hollingsworth had dreams of building a lake house. His wife, Sandra, had hopes of finding an antebellum-style house to renovate.
But as luck would have it, the couple now has the best of both worlds – an 1870s-era home they saved and have rebuilt on land at Thompson Lake.
“We’re pretty happy with how it worked out,” Sandra Hollingsworth said.
The Vicksburg natives bought the house at 519 Farmer St., a property up for demolition, and are now ready to move in this weekend.
Nancy Bell, director of the Vicksburg Foundation for Historic Preservation, said the house was in fairly good condition for being more than a century old.
“It was an important building in the cityscape. It was intact,” she said. “So many buildings have changed so much, but its porch, doors, floors, walls, were all intact, which is pretty good for a house built in 1870.”
Hollingsworth said when they toured the building, the structure seemed very solid.
“The first four rooms of the house were very solid, but they had added on to the back of it, and those rooms were nearly caving in,” she said.
But it was the beautiful cypress and heart pine wooden floors that really captured the couple’s attention.
“We wanted to buy it just for the floors. We figured if that was all we could salvage, that would be fine,” she said.
But it came as a surprise that about 80 percent of the house was salvageable, including the roof system with ceiling joists, most interior doors, the entire front door panel and frame and the pierced columns that lined the front porch, a special feature unique to Vicksburg architecture.
Bell said the columns were made here in the River City, but she doesn’t know who made them or where.
“There are 14 different styles. A few towns have one or two, but none anywhere near as many as Vicksburg has. We still had 50 in 1987, and we have pictures of 50 more,” she said.
The Hollingsworths bought the house in October and immediately started the process of tearing the building down board by board to move it.
“We wanted to just have the entire building moved, but it would have been too costly. That’s why we moved it in pieces,” Sandra Hollingsworth said.
All the renovation and rebuilding work was done by Newell Construction, whose owner, Sando Newell, had done preservation work on old homes before.
“We can’t tell how much of the materials we can reuse until we demolish it,” he said. “This house actually had a good bit of reusable materials.”
Newell said the hardest part of refinishing an old house is working with the old lumber.
“There’s so much you have to resurface, remake or replane. It’s hard, but it’s worth it to use the original lumber,” he said.
And now, more than six months after the project started, the new, old house stands strong and tall 12-feet above ground at Thompson Lake.
“Now we’re working on the last few things like insulation and sanding the floors and painting,” Bob Hollingsworth said.
Although the Hollingsworths have done some reconfiguring of the 1,700-square-foot house to make it better suit their needs, they kept the dimensions of the building the same – complete with the 11-foot ceilings.
The only thing left on the couple’s wish list is to find out a little more about the history of the house.
According to Bell, the house is a five-bay gallery cottage which was divided into two apartments.
“We don’t know a lot,” Sandra Hollingsworth said. “But we want to find out more.”
One thing they know for sure is that they’re glad they took on the endeavor, Bob Hollingsworth said.
And one of the first decorations they want to put up in the house is a poster-size print of a photo of the house in its original form on Farmer Street.
“We want to always remember how it was and why we wanted to save it,” he said.