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House known for social events divided and moved in Benton |
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Tuesday, 25 November 2008 |
For many years there was a house on top of a hill between Arkansas 5 and Interstate 30 that became legendary for its dances, band performances, Christmas parties and other large social gatherings.
If you drive past that location today, across the street from the Rug Doctor on Arkansas 5, you will only find remnants of the structure. The 5,600-square-foot, two-story house is still standing; it has just moved two miles down on Fox Run Road, where the new owner hopes it will stay put.
“This is its first and last move; it won’t be going anywhere else,” Marsha Fleming said. “Now it’s on Fox Run and it is going to stay on Fox Run ... . My main reason to get it is because it is such a beautiful home and it has been in this area for so long. I just did not want to see it being demolished. It is too beautiful of a house to do that.”
Fleming, a current Bryant resident, has been moving and remodeling homes for 10 years and owns 30 rental properties in Arkansas. The house had to be cut into three sections for the relocation and said that nobody in the area believed it was possible to move it.
“This is the biggest house ever moved in Saline County,” Flem-ing said. “This is definitely the biggest project I have ever taken on. I am glad I did the others first, because if I had taken this one on earlier in life, it would be too overwhelming for me. But I also heard some people say that it can’t happen and they can’t move something that big and that they’ll believe it when they see it — well, we moved it.”
Fleming, who is also the charity coordinator for St. Vincent visiting nurses in Little Rock, said of all the homes she has moved, it was a phone call she received more than a year ago that would change her life.
“Jimmy Elrod [of the Mount Carmel Community team] called me and said he had a house and wanted to know if I wanted to move it,” she said. “They hated to demolish the house because it was in such good condition. I couldn’t stand the thought of it being demolished, so I said I’ll take it.”
The house was going to be razed to ready the land for commercial development, Fleming said. She then found out a little history of the house and how much it meant to many people in the county. One particular person she talked to gave her a detailed history of the home.
Lee Wilder of Benton lived in the home “off and on” for 50years and was saddened when he first heard it would be demolished. He said his spirits were lifted when he learned that Fleming planned to move the home a few miles down the road.
Wilder said he lived in the home until 2005, when he sold it to Mt. Carmel Community Team for commercial development.
“I believe they had intentions of putting a retirement home there originally,” Wilder said. “Of course [Mt. Carmel] ended up building a retirement home on Boone Road, but to make the property available for commercial development, they don’t need the home anymore. So I was really relieved when I heard Mrs. Fleming was moving the house.
“The house was built in 1922 by Dr. A.E. Townsend, strictly for parties,” he explained. “In the 1920s and 1930s they had some big parties there. It was then sold to Elmer Pudge, then to G.T. Appleyard and then in January 1947 my dad, R.L. Wilder, bought the house and 34 acres of land for $15,000.”
He said his family kept some of the party tradition alive through large Christmas parties for all the nearby neighbors.
“Sometimes we’d have 50 or 60 people there and there was room for all,” he said. “They would come and play cards, sing or just visit. We did this from 1948 until about 1973.” Wilder said the house had two huge fireplaces and both could burn a log 2 feet thick and 3 1/2 feet long “if you could get it in the house.” He said the home was also built with a coal-burning furnace, but in 1955 his family installed a gas floor furnace.
Wilder also talked about how the house had been the setting for large parties. He said bands would play music on the back porch, a baby grand piano was placed in the large living room and five sets of double French doors were opened.
“The home would really open up and people would dance all through the house,” he said. “I also know that Zane Grey, a famous western book writer, visited a few of the parties during that time.”
Fleming said she loves the history of the home and plans to make only a few changes, such as adding central heat and air, to update it to today’s standards.
“The way these old houses are built is why I like saving them,” she said. “It is very dated and needs to be updated, but I don’t want to do anything that will destroy the historic value. I’ll add some of the new, but keep as much of the old as I can.”
She also said she has heard stories about the house, from it being haunted to it being used as a gambling house for politicians in the 1920s and 1930s. Wilder, however, dispelled those rumors.
“I don’t believe it was ever used as a gambling house — that was just a rumor,” he said. “Some said the house is haunted and I’ll admit there were some eerie sounds inside the house, when the wind would blow just right. You see, all the French doors had a strip of metal insulation on the bottom and would vibrate severely when a big wind would blow, which would make a spooky sound.”
Wilder said some of the legend of it being haunted grew thanks to the famous American author, Nathaniel Hawthorne.
“The house has seven gables on it and Hawthorne wrote the book ‘The House of the Seven Gables’,” he explained. “The house also had bats that lived in the attic and sometimes they would get into the bedroom or living room. I think all of that helped spread the rumors, but it wasn’t haunted.”
Fleming said she doesn’t care if the home is truly haunted or not; she is just happy to have a piece of Saline County history.
“I haven’t seen any ghosts yet,” she said. “They haven’t come to visit me, so I think I’m OK on the ghost thing. I think this house is big enough for all of us, so if there are ghosts, they’ll just have to make room for me because I am not leaving.”
Wilder said he found out that the people who built the house worked for a $1 a day after his dad found a paycheck stub. He said that a Mr. Whitmore was the contractor on the house and the builders that he knows of are Whitie Callahan and the Whitley brothers — Oris, Houston and John. He said small log cabin for servants was built behind the house.
“There was a button underneath the dining room table that somehow would contact the servants,” Wilder said. “It would let them know when to bring in the food.”
Wilder said that when Interstate 30 was built, the Arkansas Highway Department bought dirt from his dad. He said they dug a huge hole and hit an underwater stream.
“It made about a 2-acre pond,” he said. “We would swim and fish out there. We would also take a boat out there and water ski in a circle.”
Wilder said he lived in the home as a child and then moved out of state several times. He came back to stay years later to take care of his dying mother, until he moved out for good in 2005.
After finding out the history of the home, Fleming had to find a way to move the home and a place to put it. She said she contacted David Covey with D & E House and Structure Moving Inc. in Hot Springs about the move.
“He told me if I took it even a fraction over 2 miles that he wouldn’t move it and I was a fraction over two miles, but he still moved it,” she said. “I had to beg him to move it. I said it is just about an eighth of a mile extra, and he said ‘OK.’”
Fleming said she originally had looked at property within two miles on Fox Run Road, but that plan fell through. She thought the house would end up not being moved and eventually become demolished.
“I tried to purchase land a little further up on Fox Run, but it wouldn’t perk,” she said. “I looked down the street and I saw these two lots. That land perked and I bought the land from a man in California. So it was meant to be that I got [the house] and meant to be that it is sitting on Fox Run.”
She explained that she did not have to pay for the house — she had to pay only for moving it. She paid $40,000 to the house movers and also spent substantial money to have the electrical lines along Arkansas 5 moved.
“For everything, it probably ran about $45,000,” Fleming said. “It took [D & E] about a week and half to get everything up on wheels and we had to get all of our permits. The people at Charter and First Electric Cooperative were nothing short of supportive and wonderful. They were just so professional. They had to move all the lines so I could move the house through because it was 28 feet tall. I had to pay extra for that, but it was money well spent.”
Fleming said nothing was damaged during the move and they took as much of the original parts of the house as possible. Unfortunately, though, she said no treasure was found during the move, expect for a few marbles that her husband now proudly claims.
“We were hoping to find about $40,000 in gold somewhere, but it didn’t happen,” she said. “There were no hidden rooms, no stashed cash, but we did find three marbles in the heat vent and my husband is very proud of his marbles. He’s going to hold onto those. But there are parts used to build the house that you can’t even find anymore and we didn’t leave anything behind. Everything got moved.”
Fleming said this was the 12th house she has moved and she plans to live in it. She said It took over six hours to move the house just over two miles down the road, but she hopes to move in it with in a month.
“We are going to hit it pretty hard and we are hoping we can have it ready to move into, hopefully, by Christmas,” she said. “I think in six months it should be a show piece. Right now it is kind of rough, but it takes time. I am to the point right now and so excited about it that if I don’t have anything but running water and get the heat and electricity hooked up — if I can get a few rooms ready — we’ll start the transition of moving stuff in so we are here to work on it all the time and be right here with it.”
Fleming said since moving the home, people have welcomed her to the neighborhood.
“It is amazing how many people know the house or have seen the house,” she said. “I had a lady stop by and say she was really happy to see the house intact. She said she had all of her Christmas [celebrations] here as a child growing up.”
Fleming said she also plans to give a co-worker a piece of the home.
“A nurse that I work with at St. Vincent Hospital told me she always called it the castle,” she said. “As a little girl she would say ‘I want to go live in the castle when I grow up.’ It is what she always dreamed of, so when I got this house I took the tiles off the fireplace to give her. She asked if she could have something from the house so she’ll have something to remember from the castle.
“Once I get this house done, I have a real strong conviction to take in some teenage foster children,” she said.
“The house is so big and there is such need for someone to take in the teenagers. I really feel like that is something I need to do. I feel like I was really blessed with this house and I need to turn around and bless somebody else. Right now it is just myself and my husband. It is just the two of us, but once we get everything done we are going to check into the foster children program and see if we can take in two or three teenagers and hopefully make a difference in their lives.”
and provide them with a home they don’t have right now.”
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