Among the treasures that showed up in our recent move, was this picture of my great-great grandmother’s old house. I decided to put this picture together with other old house pictures, most of which I have already shown to you.
Great-Great Grandmother Mary Morgan’s Old House
Mary Morgan’s Killbuck house with Doc Stout office on right. Circa 1880
Mary Bassett Morgan (1810-1890), (wife of the infamous Jesse Morgan) lived in this Killbuck, Ohio house. When Hattie married Dr. William Stout in 1872, the newlyweds moved into an apartment in Mary’s house and Dr. Stout set up his office in the lower front part of the house, facing Main Street.
I have not researched land records–if they exist for those early days of the community–so I don’t know if Mary first lived in that old house with her first husband, Asahel Platt. Since Mr. Platt apparently owned a general store, this would have been a perfect location. And those big windows on the left side, look like a store front to me. Mary did not live in one place consistently. After Mr. Platt died, she lived in another county, where she met and married Jessie Morgan. Later census records indicate she joined her daughter in a household that probably provided a room for the school teacher, Hattie Morgan.
In 1870, Mary’s census address includes a variety of people, making it look as though she runs a rooming house. That could be the big house above. Next to her on the census list, we see a physician, so possibly that doctor left and Doc Stout took over his office.
The little town of Killbuck (then called Oxford) has two main streets–Main and Front. This building stands on a corner of the intersection of Main and Front Streets, facing Front Street where most of the businesses developed. Hattie and “Doc’s” three children, William (1873), Maude (1875) and Vera (1881), my grandmother, were all born in that house at the corner of Main and Front.
When I was in high school, a restaurant called Hale’s occupied that corner–and possibly the same building, much remodeled. But the restaurant building burned down in the 19 s and the rebuilt building on the corner bears no resemblance to Grandma Morgan’s old house.
Great Grandfather Doc and Great Grandmother Hattie Stout’s New House on Main Street
By the time my grandmother, Vera Stout (Anderson) was about four or five years old( circa 1885) , Doc Stout build a grand new house for his family, around the corner on Main Street.
I can see echoes of Hattie’s mother’s house in the new house and office Doc Stout built on Main Street. She obviously wanted to have the same kind of porch she had in her mother’s house.
Dr. William Stout and family in front of family home, circa 1885
Grandma and Grandpa Anderson’s Farm House
When my grandmother married, she and her husband Guy Anderson lived for a time on this house on a farm near Killbuck. The first picture below–a gathering of their extended family in 1909–gives a hint of the grandeur of this house, which had been built by Guy’s uncle. The next picture shows how the house looked a few years ago.
Vera and Guy Anderson and families 1909
Old Anderson Farm, Photo courtesy of Herb Anderson
Grandma and Grandpa Anderson’s House in Town
However, farm life did not agree with Vera and Guy, and they moved in to town. I wish I had a better picture of the little house they lived in on a side street in Killbuck. In this one, Grandma is sitting on the porch with the three children–Bill (1905), Harriette(1906), and Herbert (1908).
Vera Anderson and children at small house in Killbuck, about 1910
Not long after the picture of this old house, the house burned to the ground. Mother tells how her father, who had a hardware store at the time, came running calling for her because he was so afraid that she had been caught inside in the fire. It was a traumatic experience that none of them would ever forget. Mother said that for years, Grandma Vera would look for things and then realize they were destroyed in the fire.
Great Grandmother Hattie Stout’s Small House
Doc Stout died in 1910, and Hattie Stout decided to move to a smaller house. She lived in this little place when my mother went off to college. This picture shows Mother’s brothers, Herbert and Bill Anderson, and her friend Sarah, who later married Bill Anderson. A cousin from Guernsey County gazes off to the right. Hattie Stout sits In the center and her daughter Vera Stout Anderson, in an apron, pets her dog Peggy. The picture dates to about 1925. (The family had moved to Columbus, Ohio when Harriette started college at Ohio State University, but returned to Killbuck when Guy and their sons could not find work.)
My grandmother Vera pets Peggy. In the center of the picture is my great-grandmother Hattie Stout, Vera’s mother. About 1925 when my mother was in college.
The End of Doc Stout’s Grand Old House on Main Street
Guy and Vera by this time had moved into the family homestead–the house that Doc Stout had built when Vera was very young. Vera continued to live there until she was in her 80s. Through the years part of it served as the doctor’s office, it became a boarding house, then a restaurant, and later Vera offered rooms or apartments for rent. When she sold it, she moved to a small house on Water Street near Front Street in Killbuck, and the grand old house on Main Street was dismantled to pave a parking lot for the grocery store.
Stout-Anderson house newspaper article
So of the five old houses shown here, only one survives that I know of. It is possible that the small house of Hattie Stout might still exist in a different form in Killbuck. But meanwhile, I am glad to have a collection of pictures of houses of my grandparents, great-grandparents and great-great-grandmother.
