If These Walls Could Talk

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Survivors of war, weather, trends and time, old homes speak volumes about a community's history. Vox takes you inside several of Columbia's historic homes.

The David Guitar House, 2815 Oakland Gravel Road

From the road, the white frame two-story house at the top of the hill looked grand, but as Kendra Holliday got closer, she saw the house was in bad shape. The paint was peeling off, and the front door stood gaping open. Holliday parked behind the house and walked through the overgrown grass. She circled the empty building and rang the old dinner bell on the side of the house. The clanging reverberated into silence through the trees. At the front of the house, she stopped and stood in the open doorway. Then she stepped tentatively through the threshold into the grand entryway.

The Guitar House, with bedrooms honoring Civil War officers Capt. David Guitar and Gen. Odon Guitar, will open as a bed and breakfast in late August. "I love the historic integrity of this house," says Kendra Holliday, the bed and breakfast manager. "So many people loved this house. I'm just one in a long line." (Photos by Craig Lentz)

For a year the house stood empty. Brian Pape, Columbia architect and chair of the Columbia Historic Preservation Commission, had researched the house, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1993, and knew it was in danger of vandalism or destruction. "We felt pretty desperate," Pape says. "Something had to be done quickly, or it wasn't going to be there anymore."

She didn't mean to be a matchmaker, Holliday says, but she was the one who told the current owners, Noel and Mary Ann Crowson, about the house off U.S. 63. She met the Crowsons when she was taking a tour of an old Montgomery City house that they had restored. She told them about the Guitar House and its plight.

In February 2002, the Crowsons bought the house. They weathered financial problems and invested months of work. With Pape as architect, they have restored the house and turned it into a bed and breakfast, which Holliday will manage when it opens in late August.

The man who built the house was an early Boone County farmer and successful businessman. Capt. David Guitar graduated in 1847 in one of MU's first classes, served in the Mexican War and sought gold in the 1849 California gold rush. Coming home to settle down around 1862, he married and built a humble two-room dwelling with a central fireplace. As the family grew and prospered, the Guitars slowly updated the house, adding wings, upper floors and porches until the house turned into a mansion. It was made in the Italianate style, an ornamental look with a European influence that was popular in the Midwest during the 19th century. The Guitar House was notable especially in its columns and ornamental eaves. Pape explains that Guitar reinforced the wood frame by filling in the stud spaces with brick. This process, called "nogging," provided protection from years of weathering and strife and from "marauders and stray bullets," Pape says. The strife, marauders and bullets came swiftly in the form of the Civil War. When it was time for Missourians to decide where they stood — with the Confederacy or Union — legend says David Guitar chose the South. His older brother Odon chose the North. Legend has it the only reason the Guitar House still stands is because Gen. Odon Guitar ordered Union troops to leave his brother's house alone.

Guitar's legendary Confederate loyalty drew another devoted inhabitant, the fourth owner after the Guitar family. The man who dubbed the house "Confederate Hill" was Ward Allison Dorrance, a lover of the South and professor of French at MU. He fell in love with the house and moved into it in 1939. Dorrance's biographer, Joel Vance, who was once a student in Dorrance's French class, says the house was a dream home for Dorrance: "It fit exactly the image he wanted to project, which was that of a Southern gentleman."

Dorrance wrote the novel The Sundowners while he lived in the Guitar House and loosely based the fictional home on his own. In his desire to become a great literary writer, Dorrance made his house a gathering place for a literary circle called the "Agrarians." The group of Southern writers believed in a return to the pastoral, but mostly "they'd sit out on the porch and drink bourbon and talk about the old plantation days, which none of them really ever knew," Vance says.

Today cicadas drone in the honey locust trees around the Guitar House, which the Crowsons have painted a creamy white with green shutters and brick-red trim. A bedroom decorated in Union blue is dedicated to Gen. Odon Guitar; across the hall is the gray bedroom for Capt. David Guitar, complete with an airy canopied bed fit for a Southern gentleman. The third bedroom, called the Missouri Room, houses an out-of-print collection of Dorrance's novels. Through the old wavy window glass inside Guitar's grand hallway, the hill down to Oakland Gravel Road spreads out like a valley, fireflies winking as evening approaches.

Greenwood, 3005 Mexico Gravel Road

For a year and a half, Sady Mayer and Eddie Boster have lived north on Paris Road in the house known as Greenwood — one of the oldest standing houses in Columbia and Boone County. When they moved in a week before Christmas in 2002, the roof was sagging, any heat generated was rushing out of the huge chimneys, and spaces of clear daylight shone around the edges of the old double front doors. "Every house has a story to tell," Mayer says. "This house, I imagine, could tell War and Peace."

A kettle and teapot hang inside the old-fashioned hearth of the Greenwood home. This hearth has newer bricks and probably replaced the original, built in 1829.

The oldest part of the brick house was built in 1829 in the Federal style, a somewhat austere, survival-minded architectural style that came to Missouri with settlers who originated in Southern states. Some say the building started off as a tavern operated by Edward Camplin along the Boonslick Trail. Walter Raleigh Lenoir, the son of a Revolutionary War general from North Carolina, brought his family to settle in Missouri in 1834. In 1839, Lenoir built a house in front of the first structure the family lived in. The original building then housed the kitchen; the separation of the two structures protected residents from the common threat of fire from smoldering coals. Lenoir, a farmer, prospered as an early Missouri pioneer and became one of the original benefactors of MU.

Tucked away on Mexico Gravel Road, this historic home — on the national register since 1979 — is now a close neighbor to the Gerbes grocery store on Paris Road. Yet the curved gravel driveway draws visitors into the greenery the house is named for, and the quiet that surrounds Greenwood is reminiscent of the peacefulness of the 19th century.

The modern entrance to the house is through the kitchen, the oldest section of the house, which features a 6-by-10-foot stone fireplace, big enough to walk around in. To better insulate their home, Mayer and Boster have stopped up most of the home's fireplaces. Inside two of the old hearths, they have installed wood stoves, newer chimneys fitting inside original ones.

Everything in Greenwood is built of oak. A couple of oak boards stored in the old carriage house help explain why the house is still here. They're not just two-by-fours, Boster says; they are virtually trees. Boster says the house is so well-built that the beams in the attic look like they could be new; only the hand-hewn ax marks betray their age. The beams at the top of the roof have no nails in them. They were fitted together, tongue-and-groove, and then a hole was drilled in them and a pin driven through. Greenwood's built-in cupboards, typical of Federalist houses in Missouri, also demonstrate masterful tongue-and-groove woodwork.

Mayer and Boster have worked with their carpenter, Adlai Czarnomski, to restore the house to a more authentic state by undoing some of the additions that have been made over the years. They ripped out a '70s-era light box and mirrors from their bathroom, stripped the plaster off the bricks to expose the old wall and stumbled across a slanting, ridged ceiling behind the plaster one. They carefully followed the original design in replacing the rotting wood in the ceiling. Finally, they replaced the large bathtub with an antique claw-foot tub because they had read in the house's history that there used to be such a tub.

Boster, who has some experience bricklaying, says the house's bricks are amazingly tough for how old they are, having been made on the property in 1839. He and Mayer have been working on the house since they moved in, removing the plaster, repairing cracks in old bricks and replastering and painting the walls. In the dining room, a crack appeared in one of the walls they had already completed. A door in the dining room reveals that the room is sagging. As the door frame has sunk downward and to the left over the years with the weight of the bricks, the top of the door itself has been cut at a slant to fit inside the shifting door frame.

Mayer and Boster have determined that the house's foundation is basically a pile of stones. Lenoir had his slaves dig a hole in the ground and haul and stack stones inside to form the foundation. The people who later installed a heating system took stones out to put the pipes in. Over time, the house has shifted with the temperature and humidity. To mitigate the stress this put on the house, Mayer and Boster went to a metal shop and built metal boxes to house the pipes. They dug a trench and poured concrete around the old stones under the bathroom. Eventually they will encapsulate the entire foundation this way.

The summer after they moved in, Mayer and Boster worked tirelessly repairing the house. "The entire summer we had no life," Boster says. "It felt like we were living in a big mess." The following winter they decided to take it easy and focus on living in their old home rather than getting caught up in all of the projects they needed to attend to. "It's a challenge," Boster says. "You have to be willing to go through the anxiety and stress of fixing things and watching them crack all over again." Yet the work has had its rewards. "Sometimes you wonder — is it ever going to end?" he says. "But then I drive up and say, 'God, I live here, look at this.' Then it's worth it."

Maplewood, 3801 Ponderosa St.

One of the children who grew up in Greenwood was Slater Ensor Lenoir, who turned out to be a successful farmer and the man who built the Maplewood home. When it was constructed in a grove of sugar maple trees around 1877, the red brick farmhouse and its 400 acres were in the country, several miles away from the city of Columbia. Today the house's pastoral setting is enclosed south of town in Nifong Park, and cars on U.S. 63 rush by as they shuttle people from place to place in the growing area around Columbia. The city owns Maplewood, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979 and now serves as a museum and headquarters for the Boone County Historical Society.

Maplewood's graphaphone, located in the music parlor, plays wax cylinders. The cylinder boxes next to it were produced by the Edison Laboratory and bear Thomas Edison's picture.

Originally a T-shaped farmhouse in the Italianate style, Maplewood was altered as the decades passed. Only four people ever lived in Maplewood: Lenoir; his wife, Margaret; their daughter, Lavinia; and her husband, Frank Nifong. After Lavinia and Frank moved in with the Lenoirs in 1905, the young couple made some modern upgrades to the house. In 1976, photographs taken at the turn of the century were used to restore the house by removing these alterations.

The Lenoirs and Nifongs were, by all accounts, very happy at Maplewood. Much of the furniture and art they owned remains in the house. Some of the home's special accoutrements still remain, such as the speaking tube in the sitting room that connects to the upstairs bedroom and served as an early intercom system.

Maplewood's nomination form to the National Register notes: "Restored and operated as a museum, Maplewood is a prominent feature in Boone County and a reflection of the coordinated preservation efforts of local citizens." Bill Crawford, a former president of the Boone County Historical Society and a charter member of the Columbia Historic Preservation Commission, says saving historic homes in a growing area is tough. "Old houses just get in the way and go down," he says. Crawford estimates that as the university spread outwards, 15 blocks of historic homes have been lost. "It's nobody's fault," he says. "That's just the way it was."

Peanut brittle homes, Westmount Avenue

The peanut brittle houses were built at the turn of the century and nicknamed for their exterior, which was built with stones set in concrete that look like the candy. The local joke was that there would only ever be three houses like them in the whole city of Columbia, and the joke rang true. Today green vines climb happily up the brown stone-faced block houses on Westmount Avenue off Stewart in the old southwest neighborhood. Each of the three houses was built by a different MU professor, and as a group, the houses came to be known as "professors' folly" due to cost overruns and their unorthodox building style.

Edward Pickett's house, one of the first peanut brittle homes on Westmount, was built in 1907. It was named for the appearance of its exterior, which was made by pouring concrete over stones. Today much of the home is covered in vines.

The three MU professors, one of whom was Winterton Curtis, a zoology professor famous for his involvement in the Scopes monkey trial, built their houses of heavy concrete blocks made on site. The three developed the idea of facing the blocks with stones — chert, which is related to flint and of the same chemical composition as sand. The professors took the chert from different streambeds; their stones vary in hues of brown depending on which streambed the stones came from.

The peanut brittle houses, as they came to be called soon after they were built, were added to the Columbia Historic Preservation Commission's list of most notable properties in 2001. They were among the first houses developed in the city's first subdivision. A former Boone County judge named John Stewart was entirely responsible for the subdivision. He also was responsible for the roads that led to the subdivision and its paved streets, curbs and sewers.

In his autobiography, A Damned-Yankee Professor in Little Dixie, Winterton Curtis wrote that in 1905 Westmount was all open farmland. That summer 14 faculty members got together and bought most of the lots on Thilly and Westmount Avenues from Stewart. Curtis wrote that the professors were big on gardening though sometimes they learned the skill the hard way, "like the professor of education who pulled up his lima beans and replanted them when he found them 'popping up out of the ground wrong side up.'" The woods near Westmount were also a great draw for neighborhood kids, Curtis wrote.

Current owner Edward Pickett's peanut brittle home was one of the first three houses on Westmount. He has lived for almost 50 years in the house, which was built in 1907. Pickett says he and his friends used to swim in the rock quarry hidden in the nearby woods. "We didn't bother with swimming suits," he says. "We were out in the country."

A photograph taken just after the house was built shows a lone tree to the left of the new building. But as Pickett gives a tour of his backyard and garden, the former MU biochemistry professor identifies the various trees he has planted over the years — the basswood, sweet gums, redbuds, the dogwoods. The black walnut, he explains, has to be more than 100 years old. He points out the "irregular sort of balance" of the tree's limbs and deep green foliage of the wild black cherry — "an artistic tree," he calls it. But his house is one of three that predates these trees now crowding the old southwest neighborhood.