11/06/25

11/6/2025

Kathy and I live in an old house in Jefferson (apparent construction year 1901). It’s the house my parents bought in 1944, and it was my childhood home. My folks sold it about 28 years later and moved some 20 miles south to their new home on Lake Panorama.

The house is one of three within a two-block stretch along South Maple Street that were built by a trio of siblings, members of a family that owned an early telephone company here. The homes are all three stories, squarish in shape, and constructed in the prairie craftsman style. 

Because the home was built before the automobile age, the property was designed to accommodate horse-drawn transportation. It therefore includes a stand-alone carriage house toward the rear on the alley, adjacent to a driveway that runs along the north side of the house from the street to the alley.

The carriage house has been an intimate object of my life as long as I can remember. I rarely called it a “carriage house”—it was always “the garage.” It’s large enough to accommodate two vehicles, but the pair of double doors are too narrow to comfortably allow modern cars to enter. So it now serves as a commodious storage building for our garden tools and miscellaneous paraphernalia. I store the firewood supply for our living room fireplace in a long stack in front of the building.

But back in the day, in the early 1900s, the carriage house must have been worthy of admiration. A horse-drawn carriage or coach would have entered the driveway at the west edge of the property, pulled under the overhead portico over the drive on the north side of the house, and entered the carriage house through the double doors on its west side. Two Identical sets of double doors on the east side of the building allowed the horses to be unhitched and led out onto the alley, headed for the livery or some other location.

There used to be a sturdy iron ring on the inside north side of the portico to hitch the horses. The first step up to the north door leading into the house from that spot is very high, so that carriage occupants could step directly onto the step from the vehicle.

A floor cistern in the southeast corner inside the carriage house stored water for the horses. It’s still there, covered by a very heavy cast iron lid. I have no idea what’s in it today: not sure I want to know. There’s an identical cistern on the concrete slab outside the back porch steps of the house. It also has a heavy iron lid, but when my folks bought the house, Grandpa Morain stopped by with his tools and welded the lid shut, figuring it posed a danger for inquisitive young boys. (He was probably right.)

The carriage house is not what it used to be. Pieces of the plaster ceiling of the ground level have fallen off, and the concrete floor is cracked and heaved in places from frost. Most of the exterior stucco is intact, but it too has seen better days. The two wooden dormer windows that protrude from the front roof on the second floor no longer boast their former handsome appearance. We cut off electricity to the building years ago.

Nevertheless, the carriage house retains much of its original historicity. The concrete floor was no doubt laid several years after the building was constructed, as evidenced by its lettered inscription near the front double doors: “September 17, 1912.” A good friend, who formerly taught high school history, spotted the inscription and remarked, “That was the 50th anniversary of the bloodiest day in American history.” (On September 17,1862, the dead, wounded, and missing North and South soldier casualties in the Civil War’s Battle of Antietam in Maryland numbered 22,727.)

My dad accumulated a large stack of used lumber over time—for what, I don’t know—inside the north wall of the building. It’s still there, most of it dating from the 1940s and 1950s. From time to time I’ll rummage through it for a piece of a particular size, but most of the time it simply reposes there, awaiting my next rummage.

Now the second floor—there’s where the magic lies. As kids, my brothers and I and assorted neighborhood boys annexed it as our clubhouse. The club operated with “No Girls Allowed.” I don’t know why—just seemed the thing to do back then. There weren’t many girls in the neighborhood anyway, and I doubt they would have wanted to participate. I don’t think we had much of a club agenda—we just walked up the stairs along the north inside wall (no railing), sat down, and pretty much looked at each other, maybe talking baseball or something. 

Brother Bill recalls that we had an orange crate desk for the club president, and that the secretary used a red fountain pen. He adds that we copiously washed the floor once, and Dad was concerned that it might cause the first floor plaster ceiling to fall. Bill says we boys once reroofed the building, and brother Steve got stung by a bee while we did it.

Our neighborhood kid activities included lots of ins and outs to and from the carriage house. On the north wall—it must have appeared about 1953 or so—was painted “Lester did all this by blank and blank” (verbatim quote). Then someone partially painted over it, but most of the words were still legible. They still are.

When Kathy and I bought the property in 1980, I climbed the stairs to the old clubhouse, seeking the handwritten minutes of our meetings. No luck—the varmints probably ate them.

But the second floor continued to serve its clubhouse duty. Our daughter Molly and her girlfriends reprised the club thing. For them, though, it was “No Boys Allowed.” What goes around comes around.

One of my own childhood club activities remains pretty clear in my mind today. That was when our club shape-shifted into the Hospital Helpers Club. We held a neighborhood circus and charged our parents and anyone else to attend, with the goal to give our proceeds to the hospital. As I recall, we painted our long-suffering dog Tony to resemble a lion or something.

When the event was concluded, we had made the princely sum of $3.58 or thereabouts. Since we had no transportation to the hospital ourselves, we gave it to Dad to hand off to the hospital bigwigs.

So when the next quarterly hospital financial report appeared in the Jefferson Herald, under “revenues” it stated “Fred Morain, $3.58.” Dad took the requisite amount of comment from his friends for his generosity.

As author Kurt Vonnegut used to write, “So it goes.” ♦