05/02/05

Cable Era 1900's -1940's

We have discovered that our house is basically a clustering of additions on to a small and simple farm house.  The original house is the current kitchen and first floor servants area.  We don’t know who built it or when it was built.

As for the additions, from what we can tell they were all added by a man named William Cable.  I searched the census records for Pleasant Grove township (where our house is located).  See the census records.

Rumor has it that William was in competition with another farmer at the end of the road named Leander Perry.  If one of the men added something to their home the carpenters just packed up their tools and moved down the road to recreate what they had added, only bigger and better.  The reason for the tall peak in the roof is because William heard that Leander would have the taller house.  He calculated just how tall his roof would have to be to beat that and then had it built to that specification.  But in order to get the peak to that height the base of the roof would have been to large for the house.  So on the north side the roof slopes in a many different angles to fit the house.  This gives it almost an effect of caving in.  The Perry home still stands down the road, but it is only a shell held up by the windbreak Leander planted years ago.   

Our neighbor lady is 92 years old and has lived in the area all of her life.  She remembers that Mrs. Cable was very proper and was always dressed fancy and had nice things.  She said that Mr. Cable was always much more simple.  She and Gladys had gone to the country school on the corner of our road together.  She remembers dancing an Irish jig with her during a school presentation.

William lived in the home until his death on October 5th, 1926 after a lengthy illness.  He is buried just a few miles away from the house in a small country cemetery.  His illness left Mary and Gladys with nothing but property to pay for the debts he had accumulated.  Mary began borrowing money against our property and others around the area he had left her.  As she got deeper and deeper into debt the lawsuits started.  The lumber company in town sued, a roofing company in Des Moines sued, and numerous banks and insurance companies sued.  Even the two daughters from the previous marriage, Nora and Ruth, sued.  They were given another plot of land as settlement.  After this point Mary was going to loose the land to an insurance company she had borrowed money from.  To prevent this she hired a lawyer to act as Gladys’s guardian and he won a court settlement that transferred the land to Gladys.  Mary then went to court and had herself deemed Gladys’s guardian and started borrowing money in her daughters name.  Of course then the money borrowed in Gladys’s name came due and the law suites started again.  Also around this time Mary begins renting the land to her son from a previous marriage, G.Ewing Lambert, for $1,000 a month.  It is about this point that Mary and Gladys start disappearing for periods of time and it is noted in the abstract that the sheriff tries to visit them numerous times to serve them with their court papers.  It is also noted that Mary isn’t paying her taxes.  The final nail in her financial coffin occurs when the Equitable Life Assurance Society sues them for a $36,224.24 loan they had taken out 10 years earlier in Gladys’s name.  Mary takes bankruptcy to avoid loosing the house.  But  that doesn’t work.  Then as a last ditch effort she attempts to buy more time through an act created during the depression, but even that doesn’t work.  It is written in the abstract that she is “financially incompetent,” and that nothing she can do will ever save her from the large amount of debt she has accumulated.  The insurance company ends up with the house and remaining land.

Gladys married a man named Faber Miller and lived out the rest of her life in town.  She had two sons, one of which is buried next to William in the country cemetery.  The other is still living, but not in the area.  Gladys had a stroke and lost the ability to speak.  She died in the early 90’s.  Here funeral took place in town, but afterwards the funeral procession drove out by the house and then back into town.  She is buried in the cemetery in town with her husbands family.

 The Equitable Life Assurance Society Era 1940's

One afternoon my husband and I got a pleasant surprise from ...  She and her husband ... had rented the house from .... while the insurance company had owned it.  She brought with her her grandson whose father had been born in this house.

The Pooley-Rottler Era 1940's - 2003

The house was put up for auction by the insurance company and Charles “Bert” Pooley, the owner of the local lumber company, bought it in his daugther’s name, Persis Pooley.  Neither he nor she ever lived in the house.  Instead they rented the house and land out.  Fred Wirth was the first farmer to rent it long term.  He and his wife, Florence, had two daughters and a son who are still living and visit the area occasionally.  We have been lucky enough to have a few e-mail conversations with them and they have even provided us with some old pictures that we are using to restore the exterior.  They said that when they first came to the farm it was a bit run down.  Thankfully they worked with Ms. Pooley to do some up keep.  It was during this families stay in the house that the barn was given a new roof, paint job, and foundation.  Also, the Wirths slaved at taking out layers of old wall paper.  Her daughter tells me that in some parts of the house there were 14 layers.  When they first moved in there was no bathroom in the house.  They hauled their water from the windmill by the barn and heated in on the stove.  They did their laundry with an old wringer washer on the north porch off of the kitchen.  While they were there the bathroom on the first floor was added.  Their son tells me that before that it must have been a bedroom because he can remember sleeping there when he had the chicken pox.

 Merril Peters was another farmer who rented the acreage and surrounding land for quite some time.  He and his wife, Kathy, are still living and also visit the area frequently.  Kathy said that the last time the barn was painted was right before they moved in.  While their children were home they used the upstairs, but once they moved out they lived only in the downstairs.  Merril was able to tell me that when they lived in the house the outhouse had been located at the north-west corner of the house.  That is where I now plan to return it to.  While they lived there they had a new septic tank put in, and he was also able to show me where abouts that was located. 

When Persis died she left the property to her nephew Gary Rottler who farmed himself.  The Peters left when he took over farming the surrounding land.  Two years previous to us buying the home he had sold it on contract to another man who planned to turn it into a bed and breakfast.  He ended up being transferred out of the area for work and began renting the property out.  The renters turned the house into a meth lab that was busted the fall before we purchased the place.  I then sat empty since that point.  The man who had wanted to turn it into a bed and breakfast stopped making the payments so the acreage went back to Gary.  We bought the property from him, and he still owns and farms the surrounding ground.

The Newton Era 2003 - present

Tim and I had both grown up on farms and longed to return to the open quite of the country.  In the fall of 2000 we decided to make the jump from renting to home ownership.  We had looked at a couple of old farmsteads, but we just didn't have enough to purchase any of them.  So we bought a small bungalow in Waverly, and began making some repairs in hopes of building equity for our dream house. 

In the summer of 2002 I mentioned to my father about our search for an old fixer-up farm house.  He mentioned what was to be our home, but said that he thought the owner had torn it down.  I drove by as soon as I left his house to find the house still standing.  Excited I drove Tim by it.  His reply was no way in hell.  We were the middle of planning our wedding and I was so busy that I didn't push the subject. 

 In the spring of 2003 we brought up the subject of the old fixer-up farm house with our realtor.  He had the perfect place for us.  They owner had called him last summer and he had gone out to look at the house.  He had told the owner that he would have a hard time selling the house and was not interested in the listing.  Last he know the house was a rental.  He had a couple of other properties in the area he wanted to show us and we could swing by that one and see if the renters would let us have a quick look around that very night. 

The other houses were uninteresting and very remuddled and I was getting pretty depressed by the time we headed out of town towards the unsellable house.  When we turned onto the gravel I knew he was taking us to the house we had looked at the year before.  Unfortunately Tim figured it out too.  We got to the house to find it abandoned and well after dark.  None of us had a flash light so that put an end to the tour.  When we got back into the car I begged Tim to talk to the realtor about finding out more information on the house.  Tim replied that he would not since in was, "the ugliest house in the world."

The next day we drove by again.  This time with a friend of mine who is way more fun and exciting than my straight-laced husband.  We pulled into the driveway and before mister fun-sucker could stop us we had bolted from the car and up the steps into the house.  What could he do but follow behind.  As we walked through the house the excitement grew as we discovered the original un-painted woodwork, large sunny rooms, and well laid out floor plan.  By the time we fled from the house (after hearing the crunch of tires on the gravel road outside, just someone driving by) Tim to was in love.  It was all we could talk about.  Of course the realtor was called that night.