Section 36:  Building a House

In the spring of 1858 I had made up my mind to build a house on my lots on the south side of the street, and I settled in my mind what I wanted the inside of the house to be. As that was where I expected to live, I made that my first study and the outside had to conform to it whether it made an imposing appearance or not. I was not an architect or draftsman but I drew plans on paper to an exact scale, locating rooms, halls and porches, windows, doors and chimneys, and when I got them all adjusted and fitted to suit me I found it made my house fifty-four feet long by thirty-six wide with an eight foot porch in front thirty feet and the same width at the back the whole length of the house, cutting off a buttery on the east end and a small room on the west end and the house was one story of twelve feet to the square.

The first thing I had to do was to move the office down to the corner for it then stood right in front of where the house was to be. This involved the erection of a foundation for the office on the alley which I had done. We then took down the chimney and got rollers under the office and shoved it down on to the new foundation where it now stands. I was somewhat annoyed to find that in making room for the house I had to take two of my best apple trees and about three peach trees, but they had not recovered after the frost of 1855 and 1856.

But I had George Lapole, Francis Slagle and John Warack (a gentleman of African persuasion) to dig the celler [sic] under all the house but the porches -- 52 by 36, and pile the clay around the foundation to raise the ground. Got old Wm. Shaner to split out the stone down in our woods by the spring and as soon as a part of the cellar was dug out got old John Cookson to laying the cellar walls. Charley Beman had a stout team of horses with Smith Strickler for driver, and I hired this team for the summer at $2.50 a day, he finding everything, and I very soon had quarrying, hauling and laying stone. Mr. Neal had filled up a little lime house and we got water out of the well to make the mortar which George Brewer mixed and carried to the mason. By the time the cellar was dug out, Shaner was done quarrying stone and he turned in and helped Cookson at the wall. The stone had been carefully split out and all projections and protruhberances [sic] knocked off, and when the stone was dumped on the ground they were in shape for dressing and building which saved hauling, and I got a most excellent substantial wall in which mice find no place to make nests. There is a good deal of wall under the house, and though we commenced work in May it was late in August or first of September before the mason work was fully completed.

Some years before this, John Klingensmith and I had bought two hundred and twenty-eight acres of very fine timber land in Jefferson County, north of Corsica. Subsequently he wanted to build a saw mill on it and manufacture the timber. To this I would not agree and told him the money was in holding it for a while and then selling the land. However he insisted or if I would not go in with him he would buy me out. I finally told him I would either buy or sell at exactly double what we paid for it. He at once agreed to buy but had not the money to pay me, so I made him a deed and took a judgment for the purchase money. He went on and put up the mill and had it ready to commence cutting the spring I began building my house. I got my carpenter to make me out a bill of all the sawed stuff I wanted for the house, the building to be double plank so as to have the walls thick enough for weights in the window frames.

I got in all 51,000 feet of sawed stuff, had it cut and the stuff for doors and windows put into the dam and soaked for a month or so and then taken out and stuck up and dried. The balance of the stuff Beman's team hauled in the course of the summer and fall. It was cut out of the stuff right around the mill -- mostly cock pine and a good deal of it clear stuff. There are some plank in the house 27 inches broad and much of it is clear stuff. I got the oak sills out of our woods and the long plates on the hill out towards the old Kelly place, and we were all ready and raised the house in September, 1858.

During that fall we put the roof on it and by winter closed it up and let it settle till the next spring. All the carpenter work was done by hand by Abr'm. Richards and his two boys, John and Tom. The stuff was all worked out through the winter. The weather boards were nearly all clear stuff and there is not a knot as large as a ten cent piece on the front of the house. The windows, doors and sash were worked out and put to dry. During the winter I got lath and made a contract with Mr. Burns to plaster it as soon as the spring opened. By the first of May, 1859, the carpenter work was ready for the plasterers. The chimneys were all up the fall before. Burns and his partner went to work nailing on the lath. The mortar was made in a big mortar bed right under where the cherry tree at the east end of the house stands, and it took a good deal of it. There were twenty-five loads of sand besides the lime worked up and plastered on the walls. Then the woodwork was finished, the doors hung and the windows put in and Miller Beaty got at the painting, and by the time it had three coats on inside and out it was fall.

I had taken a good deal of pains to have everything in and about the house finished in a substantial and workmanlike manner.

After all was finished we let it stand until it was thoroughly dry, and about the last week in December, 1859, we moved across the street and the day we moved we had Francis Slagle, Margaret Potter and a Mrs. Arnold who lived back on Liberty Street help u[s] carry over the furniture. I was in the new house arranging the furniture, and my daughter, Mary, carried over to me an apple pie and a pitcher of milk, and I ate my first dinner in the dining room of the new house alone. The others ate over in the old house.

So much stuff had accumulated about the old house that I thought I would never get it packed in the one, though the latter was as big again as the old one. After nailing down carpets, putting up beds and arranging things for week or two we were living in our new house and found it exceedingly pleasant and comfortable, and I have never found a house since that I liked as well and I hope to occupy it as long as I live. It has now sacred associations. My children have grown up in it and all but one gone to other homes and built up families of their own, and from it our youngest little daughter has gone up to a higher and happier home to live and rejoice with angels.

The spring of 1859 -- the second new court house in Clarion was begun. The cellar was cleared out and enlarged. Daniel English, who had the contract to rebuild, had two or three wagons hauling away clay, sand and brick bats. He said he would haul as much stuff as I wanted to fill up around the house, and think he dumped not less than three hundred loads around the house and between the house and office. It was the handiest place he could get to unload, and with what came out of our own cellar it filled up the lot so that the water runs away from it in every direction. I was afraid I had gotten it filled up too much, but I got Alfred Slick to grade and give it the proper slope. He was pretty slow, but he had a good eye. I told him to take his time and make a good job of it, and I was entirely satisfied when he got it done and I found I had none too much filling and that I would have a nicely graded, dry yard.

Then that spring I bought twenty-eight dollars worth of evergreens, shrubbery and trees and planted (nearly all of it died but the Larch and Norway Pine at the window east of the front porch). Then I got a peck of blue grass seed from Martin Kearney and sowed over the whole yard, and lastly I got some real well rotted horse manure and gave it a light coat and Slick raked it well into the soil. Instead of the blue grass coming up, a fine crop of clover and timothy made its appearance and grew vigorously, notwithstanding the big frost on the 5th and 11th of June of that year which killed nearly all the fruit and wheat in the county, but in a year or two the blue grass began to show and soon rooted out the timothy, but the red and white clover held its own and some of it, particularly the white, is growing in it yet. The poor clay out of the cellar when mouldered down by the frost and the lime and sand from the courthouse, sent up a vigorous growth and the trees and grass grew stronger on the new made ground than on the native hard pan. But we soon had a nice sod and trees growing and a very agreeable home.

As soon as the house was finished, a pailing fence was put up along the front, west side and rear, and a high board fence next to Mr. Love. The front of the house is thirty feet back from the street.

That same spring I got Charley Harkless to go out into our woods and dig up half a dozen maple grubs and he and I planted them in front of the pavement where three of them are growing yet. We also planted two little hemlocks in front of the front porch where one of them is growing yet. The other maintained a precarious existence for a number of years and then died. I guess the children shook it too much.

I had spouting put on the house and I got Toney Paster to cut out two long stones -- I think about 14 feet, and cut a nice channel in the face and sunk them in the ground under, the spouting to carry the water from the roof away from the cellar and front porch. They are there yet.

I kept an accounting of the cost of the new house and when everything was done I found it had cost me about four thousand five hundred dollars. I rented the old house for a number of years after that and then sold it to Mrs. McCrea for a thousand dollars. While living there I liked it very well as a home, but as soon as I got to living in the new house I never cared anything about it. The yard was so much larger and so much more pleasant for a playground for the children that I soon lost all interest in the old home. [Note: a photo of the Campbell house is in the on-line Photo Album for this Web site.]