of Chillicothe, Ross County & South-Central Ohio
of Chillicothe, Ross County & South-Central Ohio
History & Architecture of the "Harley House" October 2005My research has confirmed much of what I suspected about the house, and added a great deal more to the understanding of this humble yet unique building, best referred to as the 1850 and 1907-1910 "Johnson-Marquis House."
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1850 Auditor's Tax Duplicate in Ross County Courthouse, with my finger pointing to the entry of "new fr. house 200" for the tract that encloses the "Harley House." |
The land where the "Harley House" stands - and much of the eastern part of Buzzard's Roost Preserve and the hilltop around Polk Hollow Road - was originally a 2,000-acre square patented in 1800 for Francis Coleman, son and heir of Revolutionary War veteran Richard Coleman (no relation to me that I know of). After Francis died, the land was resurveyed and sold in 1815 to the heirs' attorneys, Thomas S. Hinde and William McDowell, who apparently also dabbled in land speculation.
The tract was divided up and an 83-acre parcel eventually found its way to an Alexander C. Johnson, who owned it for about 40 years, from 1840 to his death sometime about 1880. He built the "Harley House" in 1849 or 1850 on the parcel. Tax records clearly indicate a new wood-frame house appearing on the parcel by about April of 1850 taxed at $200. (That would be $4,436 in 2005 dollars.)
The CottageEvidence in the building shows that this house was small, only two rooms. It is now the core of what is the "Harley House." It was a Double-Pen Cottage, two rooms side-by-side without a center hall, and only one story tall.
In the center, in the dividing wall, was central fireplace. The front and back walls both had two windows on the outside of the walls and two doors on the inside, one to each room. (Those openings, or their ghosts, are still visible in the Harley House.)
The cottage had some style to it. The siding was given a beaded lower edge (similar to that on the Lucy Hayes House), and the siding was shiplapped, making a smooth wall surface having an additional decorative line above every joint.
The doorways and window frames had a narrow strip of molding around the outer edge. The six-panel doors also had molding, tacked around the panels in a stylistic cross between the Federal Style and the Greek Revival.
But an 1860 county map doesn't show this sole building on the parcel where the Harley House is now - instead, it's on the south edge of the parcel. Is the map inaccurate? I think, instead, the house was moved when it was remodeled after the turn of the century. But I'm getting ahead of myself...
After Alexander Johnson died, his family appears to have maintained ownership of the property until 1907. At that time the 83-acre parcel was sold to an Elsie Marquis. She appears to have enlarged the house or begun to, because the taxable value drops in tax year 1908, as if it's put out of commission, and then rises to a new height in 1911, as if the job was finally done. (Perhaps the house was put on rollers to be moved to its current site, and the process took longer than expected.)
Elsie disappears from the tax books and deeds after 1908, so possibly an heir, Sarah F. Fields, may have had her work finished. But the work is unique in south-central Ohio, and coupled with Elsie Marquis' French surname, implies a Mississippi or Gulf Coast origin for Elsie. The resulting 1907-1910 house is a "Cajun Cottage," a house type found mainly in French-American parts of the American South, namely Louisiana.
"Cajun" is a corruption of "Acadian." The Cajuns were originally refugees from the Acadia settlements on the Atlantic coast of French Canada (current Nova Scotia). Eventually evicted in 1755 by the victorious British, they found their way mostly to Louisiana, and brought and developed a new culture there. Many stopped briefly in the Caribbean en route, and probably picked up the idea of a porch there, since they did not have porches on their houses in Canada.
The "Harley House" - er, Johnson-Marquis House - in its final form has all the characteristics of a house from an early nineteenth-century bayou. It has a built-in front porch, a built-in back porch (later enclosed), a two-room core, a second-floor loft with a side-gabled roofline that extends out over both porches, and a stairway to the loft in a "porch room" which can be considered an original enclosure of the end of the front porch. All this makes it considerably unique in Ross County.
As for who Elsie Marquis was and where she came from, I have not researched that - yet.
By 1936, the property had come into the hands of apparently two sisters, two husbands, and their spouses:
Eventually Earl had three groundskeepers who lived in the house. He installed electricity possibly as late as the 1950s, when the rear porch appears to have been enclosed. The house did not have indoor plumbing until 1981, and it never had central heat - except for a wood stove in the middle of the house! The last groundskeeper, Harley Adams, died there in 1995, and the house was left uninhabited.
Earl died in 1980, and his widow Jean Barnhart held the property until July 13, 2000. She donated it to the young Ross County Park District, with a deed restriction that if it was not cared for as a preserve, it would revert to the Nature Conservancy.
The Johnson-Marquis house stood empty and unmaintained until 2001, when the Chillicothe Conservancy requested to work towards preserving it. Although the job was left unfinished, the outside was partly painted, brush was cleared from it, much of the junk inside was cleaned out, and the action bought time for the house.
But by early 2005, the house was slated for demolition. The Ross County Park District voted in February to demolish the Johnson-Marquis House during construction of a water line to a new shelterhouse. And that's where I come in...
Continued in "What's New With the 'Harley House'?"...
Below is an animated three-dimensional rendering of the "Harley House" showing how I believe it evolved, from a one-story two-room cotttage to a two-story house with front and back porches. (The image should run through its 6-frame cycle automatically...and then stop. Reloading this page may restart it.)
