Inside Sarah's House – From Wallpaper to Parlor Stove, 1891

Sarah wrote this journal entry in the 1940s, recalling life inside her family's home at 4th and High in Carrollton in the 1890s.

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And now it is time to go into the house, as I remember it, not the day we moved but after we were settled in it inside a few weeks. I am not clear whether Uncle John Howe¹ died within the first few weeks after we moved in, or the next spring — I will have to look at his gravestone for the date when I go to Carrollton, but I think it was in October of ’91, soon after we moved. . . . 

Between the big front east room (which Papa and Mama decided to make their bedroom, tho later it became our parlor) and the three rooms on the other side, which ran straight

Typical heating stove of the time²

back in a row, was a wide hall; before we went in, at least some years before, there had been a back porch at the end of it, but before we moved it had been enclosed and was now a long narrow room, which we took for a dining room. Behind it was a small pantry with one window and an outside door, and this led to the kitchen, on the west side, which also had one outside door and a window. 

There was no back porch, which was a great inconvenience, as the pump was at a little distance from the door, also the cellar entrance — and there was no inside cellar door even in the floor, as in many houses was the case. In fact, it was just about as inconveniently arranged, run-down, badly repaired, and dark (because of the trees in front) an old place that you could imagine, and a perfectly adorable place to look at and to live in! Walter Scott wrote “Oh Caledonia, stern and wild, fit nurse for a poetic child” — this red house was neither stern or wild, but what a nurse it was for me (a poetic child). 

I know, though, it must have rather dismayed Mama, who had for a year and a half lived in the super equipped (for that day) Howe mansion, with no work to do but look after her own room and one little girl; but I think Papa fell in love with it at once. It belonged to Aunt Lou (whose father had left it to her).³ Papa wanted to buy it, but she wouldn’t sell it. However, she rented it to him for $12.00 a month⁴ (considered a good price, too!) for a place occupying 1/4 square. Later he paid $15.00 for several years, and I believe was paying 18 or 20 before he died, after she put on some repairs. But the early arrangement was that he would put on the repairs, and thus have the low rent.

One of Papa’s revolutionary acts, but I believe not till after a winter spent in two dark front rooms, was to have the two cedars cut down and the yard sodded — for of course the pine needles had effectually squashed any grass blades, even if they had been able to grown in the dark. I think he had the limbs trimmed off a good way up the trunks that first fall, then in a year or so had the trees cut clear down.  ...

Now as to where they placed the furniture in the house — I don’t remember what the [wall]paper was like, other than that it had some small flowers in blue on white in the square east room, and I think a kind of creamy flower paper in the parlor. We must have re-papered soon, for I remember a new paper in the back bedroom on the west side, small red flowers on cream yellow, which reminded me so much of the coral honeysuckle outside the window. There was a striped paper in the hall and dining room, I think. 

In the early 1940s, Sarah drew this floor plan based on memories of her childhood home. The house faced High Street (now Highland), and the front door is in the middle at the top of the drawing. The house apparently had 2 large rooms and an entry hall that led to a dining room, pantry, kitchen, and a bedroom. The room placement doesn't always match her descriptions because her parents changed the purposes of the rooms from time to time. The area to the right of the dining room is part of the yard. Notice the bed of "sweet peas" and the "back walk" leading to the "cistern" and around the back to the "cellar door."

In the parlor we had the lace curtains used on Price Hill⁵, and I don’t remember our having any in the east room while it was a bedroom; of course there were great outside shutters closed every night, and dark green shades — the windows were very old and had the original “snaps” to put them up and down (indescribable if you’ve never seen any) (they were not on ropes). On the east room was a Chinese matting in the summer — in fact, the carpets came up and matting went down as the seasons changed; in the winter the carpet from the parlor and dining room in Price Hill was used; it took both of them, as the room was so much larger, so in the east bedroom there was in winter just a light ingrain carpet.

In the hall and dining room was matting with the strips of the hall carpet from Price Hill laid through across them, and the kitchen was simply supposed to be a bare scrubbed floor, like most kitchens of that day, with small pieces of carpet in front of the stove and table. The fireplaces in the house were very tall but were not white — all were painted a dingy black. I think sometimes how beautifully the house could have been fixed in the modern restoration idea. The hearths were made of brick painted red and of course we had grate fires in every room except the dining room, where the gay little Franklin stove from Price Hill was placed but proved so inadequate that about 1896 we bought a larger one from Mr. Salyers⁶ hardware store, as much like it as possible. But until we bought the anthracite stove, we froze every winter. I well remember heating pillows at the fire to put against my back to temper the icy sheets. I called them my “pup arms.”

I think the anthracite stove came in about 1894. In the front, or east, bedroom we used the guest room furniture, with dark marble slabs (Tennessee marble) including the washstand which stood in the corner by the door, and we did have a big piece of “oilcloth” under this stand. In the parlor, of course, stood the velvet furniture, but still no piano!, tho that was the hope that beckoned always. Papa’s desk had been added to the furniture — I don’t know just when, but it was a bulky, beautiful thing tho not a bookcase affair, just a roll top with lots of drawers, but it was a shiny, beautifully grained red cedar and I certainly wish we had it today. (She sold it about 1909 to a man in Worthville who had a poultry business, I don’t remember his name, for $15.00.) There were two big cupboards in this room, which were all right for storage but awkward looking in a parlor; when we made it into a bedroom they were just the thing (it was one of these that Shakespeare, my cat, went into and got shut in for a day or so in 1904).

In the back bedroom was the bed and dresser and washstand with white marble top (we still have the dresser). My little red bed stood beside Mama’s in the east room, but Papa was already arranging to have long sides put to it instead of the slat sides that went up and down. Mama’s great pride was a new picture Papa had gotten her — five little pink pigs looking out of a barn window. This was the day of “lambrequins,” “lampmats” and “throws.” We had a “throw” at the end of the parlor mantel, made by Grandma Howe⁷, of white “scrim” embroidered in black silk. We also had nonchalantly thrown over several of the picture frames pieces of Spanish moss brought to Papa by Aunt Emily⁸, I believe, or perhaps it was from Grandma Howe’s niece Mrs. Sue Higbee, who lived in New Orleans. 

I know we didn’t have a Christmas tree that year. I got my Christmas presents not in the parlor but in the big front room, and I had a new doll — the first new one actually given to me. (Alice Leonora⁹ had been Aunt Lee’s¹⁰  before she was mine). Grandma Howe gave me this very blue-eyed, fair-haired doll, who had her mouth slightly open and her teeth showed. . . . I called her Janie. Mama made her some nice clothes, in her careful, meticulous, little stitches — always the perfectionist, she even finished the inside seams of the doll clothes, as she did mine. Alice, too, had a new outfit, and I really enjoyed my

Sarah's cousin Jenn Howe (1883-1957)

dolls that year, for Jenne Howe¹¹ liked to play dolls and used to come down sometimes and help dress and undress them. Aunt Emily sent me a small “valise” (suitcase was what it was, but we didn’t know it) made in Paris and sent her by that friend who always gave her these imported things such as the lovely “Emily Jane,” as we called her later (I just called her Emily). In this case were a pair of tiny stitched kid gloves, a little silk parasol with ivory handle, a lovely little feather fan, a scent bottle, powder puff, a little “chambrè,” pitcher and bowl, and a soap cup with a quarter-inch cake of soap in it! And a pair of red high heeled slippers and a pair of bronze high shoes with tassels! It is just unbelievable that such dainty things existed, made in Paris, too. I kept them very carefully, too, in spite of my ... taking them out and admiring them at intervals. ...

What happened to those French trinkets was that when Leonora¹² was a little girl of about three she used to cry to see them, and Philip Holmes and the little Dunaway boy and “Pling me” Orr used to come down and play with them, too, and throw them all around until most of them were lost. I think it was that Christmas, too, that I had the doll jewelry — it was perhaps in the same set, necklace, earrings, & watch, with tiny dull red sets (and the little nursing bottle with a long rubber tube that said on the box, I never forgot that, “Biberon poupée”). But the time was going fast when these toys meant so much to me, and books meant already so much. 

And public appearances were beginning to multiply, too, for I didn’t leave my histrionic prowess behind on Price Hill. The “Children’s Day exercises” very elaborately practiced for affairs, were occasions when I was asked to “speak a piece” or “recite” and even sometimes other churches, or union affairs, like Sunday school “country conventions” were on my schedule. Mama labored with me ...  to learn the words. “Stretch It a Little” was my star selection for a good while. It really was a good poem, tho I don’t know who wrote it. It ended like this:
Stretch it a little, oh girls and boys
With hearts overflowing with comfort and joys
See how far you can make it reach
Your cheerful word and your loving speech.

There were several more lines, but I forget them. The story was about a little girl and boy standing in the wind; she had a blanket and put it around him and said cheerfully that it would be all right, she would just “stretch it a little” to take him in. (I was generally supposed to recite this before they took up the collection.) 

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¹ John Irvin Howe, brother of Sarah's father, died Oct. 25, 1891 in Carrollton.
² Image from antiquestoves.com
³ Louisiana Winslow Howe, wife of Sarah's paternal uncle William Ficklin Howe and daughter of William Beverly Winslow (1814-1883) and Martha Jane Woolfork (1826-1905)
⁴ $12 in the early 1890s equals the buying power of $332 today. $15 in those days equates to $415 now; $18 or $20 then is worth $498 or $553 today.
⁵ The neighborhood in Cincinnati where Sarah's family lived and later visited her maternal grandparents.
⁶ Charles D. Salyers, Sarah's future father-in-law
⁷ Sarah Brown Howe, Sarah's paternal grandmother, an Irish immigrant
⁸ Emily Berndorf, wife of Sarah's uncle John Irvin Howe
⁹Another of Sarah's dolls, which Sarah named for her mother Alice and her aunt
¹⁰ Ida Leonora/Lenora Cost
¹¹ Sarah's cousin who was born in 1883, the same year as Sarah
¹² Sarah's sister Leonora Alice Howe (1896-1967)

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