Take the Dirt Road Home

We stumbled across this old photo in the City Hall office the other day. It shows some schoolchildren crossing the main street through town, as the partial caption shows. The interesting part is that the street is still unpaved dirt, and that our house is in the background.

The light-colored building on the far left is the Gosby House Inn, a B&B that's our next-door neighbor. It's been a boarding house or inn since the very beginning, and currently has 22 rooms, I think.

But right next to it is our house, which is darker and partially hidden behind a telegraph pole and a tree (neither is there anymore).

Since our place was built in 1893, that means that Lighthouse Avenue, the main street though town (and the only route to the Point Pinos Lighthouse, hence the name), was still unpaved at least that far back. We know that a horse-drawn trolley service used to run up and down this street, and that may or may not have come later than this. I almost think I see a trolley track under someone's foot, and it wouldn't be unusual for trolley cars to have run on dirt streets in the 1890s or early 1900s.

The other interesting detail is the wrought-iron railing on top of the roof for the "widow's walk." At first, I thought both buildings had one, but it actually looks like only ours had it. It's certainly not there now, but we've been itching to replace it... someday.

By the way, the dark house color in this photo (and a few others) was a big help to us when we started painting the house a few years ago. Remember, it was solid white before we started, and a few of the townspeople grumbled and complained that we shouldn't be adding any new colors because "it's always been solid white." Uh, no. Not even close. Victorian-era houses were very rarely white, partly because that just wasn't the style, but also because white (i.e., lead-based) paint was very difficult and expensive to make. Most houses, like ours, were dark-colored. Apparently the Gosby family was more affluent than the Harts.