Looking Around: On Moving; or, The Story of a Little Old House

Author’s Note: This article consisted of two weeks of intense research, involving scouring over fire insurance maps, tables of wages, census records, Sears catalogs, and atlases. Before I begin, I owe some mad thanks to those who helped provide their resources and advice: preservationist Jackson Gilman-Forlini, furniture history guru Susannah Wagner, the nice folks from the Maryland Historical Society, and the research library staff at the Johns Hopkins University.

Anyone who has made copious trips to U-Haul, rendered their fingertips numb after stringing along line after line of packing tape, or spent hours intimately acquainting ones lower back with an ice pack, knows – and loathes – moving.

Originally posted by pure-blooded-retcon

Moving is stressful. It is a form of migration, itself an immense change. Despite the momentous effect moving has on us, there is little to be found regarding the history of, well, moving. Plenty has been said about techniques of migration, by boat, by horse and buggy, by rail, and by car. 

In novels and movies, from Harry Potter to Doctor Zhivago, there are scenes of train stations, carts with ornamented trunks, and porters donning funny cylindrical hats to haul them. In photographs of Ellis Island complete with their visual narratives of the American Dream, we see thousands of hopeful newcomers cheering gleefully, suitcases in hand. 

As time goes by, the railway porters are replaced with truck drivers; the journey implied by the ocean liner morphs into bucolic images of a smiling suburban family on the island-lawn of their poorly-shuttered idyll. 

Family Moving to their New Home. Washington State, 1935. via Library of Congress. 

Why am I writing about moving? Over the last two weeks or so, I, myself, moved. I moved from a dingy (yet immensely charming) self-constructed room in what used to be a Cork and Seal Factory, to a little 812 square-foot Baltimore rowhouse. 

Each of the times I’ve moved from apartment to apartment (and finally, on this move, to an actual, full-sized house), there have been great difficulties loading and unloading all of my crap – difficulties innate to the houses themselves. These were usually small hardships, involving the clever rotation of a sofa or armchair in order to wrestle it out the door. 

This time, however, I came to a horrifying revelation: None of my existing furniture would be able to A.) fit within the cramped dimensions of the narrow staircase or B.) make it around the corner in the shallow hallway to my room. 

I solved my problem the same way as any reasonable millennial:

Photo by Rainchill. (CC BY-3.0)

Yet, as I loaded up my cart with brown box after brown box, I couldn’t help but wonder: What did people do before Ikea? Why were the stairs so narrow, and more so, what went up them before my trendy flat-packed furniture?

The Little Rowhouse

According to two days of scouring archival newspapers and other primary sources, I could gleam a few interesting things about the little brown rowhouse into which I’m currently schlepping my stuff. 

The Little Brown Rowhouse (center). Via Google Maps.

The rowhouse was built sometime between 1900 and 1902. A Baltimore Sun record from 1898 shows the auction of parcels of land where the house would soon be built: 

EDIT: My colleague, Jackson, has found out that the house was built by a pair of builders named John S. Kidd & William A. Davidson. 

However, the first mention of any of the houses on the row (that is to say, even-numbered houses, as the houses on the opposite side of the street are of a different design), comes later, in 1902, in a divorce notice:

In 1905, the house next door to mine was for lease:

Unfortunately, no searches for C.W. Webb pulled up anything of note. 

I learned some other interesting things during my newspaper dig, (most notably that the folks who once lived a block south from me got busted during Prohibition) - but ultimately, came to a dead end on my original topic: what kind of person moved into my rowhouse first, and how they did it. 

The Process

In order to glean how working people moved back in the early 1900s, I decided to focus on a few key areas of research:

• What kind of wages the family would make, what they would spend it on and what kind of local industry they might have participated in.
  

• What kind of stuff was being moved; (AKA what kind of furniture these folks bought and how much it cost)
  

• What the costs were of moving services during this time, and whether they were affordable for the family in question. 
  

Potential Jobs, Wages, and Expenditures

The best way to look for what kind of industry existed in a certain area at a certain time is through a series of maps by the Sanborn Fire Insurance Co. These maps were used for evaluating fire risk (and therefore how high the premiums should be for fire insurance.)

In the index of a Sanborn Map, there are two parts. First is the list of streets, with a number, corresponding to a plate number. The second is a list of industries along with larger businesses, schools, orphanages, and churches, along with their plate numbers. To find out what kind of industry was near the street you’re looking for, simply look for industries relatively close to the plate number of your street. 

It’s likely that the folks who lived in my house worked in one of two places: as a railworker (at the Maryland & Pennsylvania Railroad, The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad; The United Railroad & Electric Company) or in the stone quarry (Sisson Marble Works, not shown in screenshot). Working class women often worked as well, most likely in the nearby textile mills lining the Jones Falls River.

There are a few smaller industries these folks could have worked in as well, such as the Columbia Motor & Manufacturing Co., The American Can Factory, J. Stack & Sons Lumber, or the Schier & Bros. Dairy. However, it’s most likely that the person who first lived in my house was a stone or rail worker, as the house used to be mere blocks from both the quarry and a massive rail yard:

Image from a 1905 Map. House is in top-right corner, in red. 

Okay, so we know where the head of the household likely worked. How much did they make doing it? 

Were the head of household a worker in the nearby marble quarry, he (women did not work in the quarry in 1900) would have made around $813 a year.

Source: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008319974

Were they a railworker of some sort (the average workweek of railway workers in nearby Pennsylvania was around 62 hours/week in 1901) they would have made somewhere between $420/year as a day laborer and $1350/year as a senior engineer. Source. 

What would these folks spend these wages on? Here are some more statistics (average expenditures) from Pennsylvania (a neighboring state with similar industries.)

Source.

Now that we know what these folks might have made (on average), let’s see what kind of goods they possibly purchased.

Furniture

It’s difficult to know what kind of furniture most working class folks had in their houses. According to my sister (Hi Suz!), who studies furniture history at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, it’s possible that a family working in 1900 bought some pieces of mass-produced furniture, like that sold by Sears Roebuck & Co.

Page from a Sears catalog c. 1900.

The truth is more difficult, because much of the mass-produced, inexpensive furniture of the time was made out of cheap materials such as basswood and has not survived. It’s also possible that the family had some pieces passed down from generation to generation, which wouldn’t be accounted for in primary sources from the time. What is true, is that there is a certain amount of furniture most folks need for their homes.

Fortunately for us, there are photographs in the Library of Congress of tenement and other working class interiors, enabling us to get a better picture of what folks had in their homes:

Keep reading

50 States of McMansion Hell: Bernalillo County, New Mexico

Hello Friends! I’m at that stage of moving where all of my boxes are in my new house, yet remain to be unpacked. Needless to say, I’ve been recycling the same three outfits for a while now. 

My favorite part about houses in the desert is that they’re painted dull colors in some vague attempt to “integrate with the landscape” but fail miserably because they are conspicuously huge as heck. 

Today’s house, built in 2002, boasts 4 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms, totaling around 6,300 square feet. It can be your desert oasis for just under $1.3 million dollars!

Lawyer Foyer

Perhaps my favorite thing about so many houses in New Mexico is that they drift into very iffy Native American cultural appropriation territory, but fail miserably and end up imitating an Olive Garden instead.

Great Room

“Yes, guests, this is totally a restaurant! The consuming space is totally separate and not visible from the preparation space!” It’s a pretty awkward place to have a bar, tbh. 

Kitchen

Mockery aside, why aren’t ceiling mounted cabinets more popular, especially in small kitchens? It seems like a clever way to add extra shelf space!

Dining Room

Calling it now, take the dining table out and this is totes vaporwave. 

Master Bedroom

Can’t tell if this room is gold or not, please advise. 

Master Bath

I’ve never been rich and divorced before, so I have no idea if rich person divorce involves chandeliers or not, but it seems logical to me that chandeliers would be involved in some way. 

Bedroom 2

I laugh, but I’ve owned that same ottoman. 

Football Kitchen Office

This room puts the multi in multipurpose. Also MP3 Jukeboxes are analogous to those old-school phone handsets you plug into the headphone jack of your cellphone.

Bathroom 2

Antique Slime is your free Band Name of the Week!

Okay folks, we’re about to wrap up, but I couldn’t not include the room that made me pick this house in the first place. Prepare yourselves for…

(In a sinister voice): Child’s Lair

THE BEAUTY AND THE BEAST FIREPLACE IS NEXT LEVEL

Alright, time for our favorite and final part:

Rear Exterior

Why is half of the rear of the house “Mediterranean” and half of it Adobe Photoshop? Why is there astroturf on one part but grass on the other? Why are there so many dining sets?  

Well, that does it for this week’s McMansion! Stay tuned this weekend for a special Looking Around where I examine the history of…moving! Have a great rest of the week!

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Copyright Disclaimer: All photographs are used in this post under fair use for the purposes of education, satire, and parody, consistent with 17 USC §107. Manipulated photos are considered derivative work and are Copyright © 2017 McMansion Hell. Please email kate@mcmansionhell.com before using these images on another site. (am v chill about this)