Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

On my way to work recently, I saw a sign on a porch. It said, ”On this spot in 1897, nothing happened.”

A joke, of course. Just someone’s way of making fun of historic markers. I’ve seen them before—I spotted one in Woolrich once, and there’s even one in the background of the bar scenes on the TV show “How I Met Your Mother.” It’s amusing enough—The sign, but also the show. You can probably get those signs from Amazon or something; people hang them on their porches just to get a laugh.

I was curious, though, and I wanted to see how accurate the sign was. I am well aware that historical accuracy is far from the actual point here, but I wanted to do the research and see how well it lined up. Hey, I’m easily bored.
The house was 5 East Bald Eagle Street. So I went down to the courthouse and got the assessment record, and then started digging into it.

The assessment record, which I acquired at the courthouse annex, lists the place as built in 1930. Or thereabouts—Assessment records are often not the most accurate method of aging a house. I’ve seen them off by as much as fifty years. The 1925 Sanborn Map shows the house, so I know it was built at least a little before 1930.

There’s a structure on that property on the maps from 1914 and 1906, too, but that was a double house with a considerably different layout. So I’m going to work on the basis here that the old house was torn down sometime after 1914, and the new one built by 1925. It may have been heavily remodeled, but I think it’s more likely a tear-down-and-rebuild job. (I could get a more precise date by doing a title search, but that’s a lot of work for one column.) So, the house was built about 1920-ish.

According to the 1924 city directory, the first person to live in it was Thurman Earon. Earon was a signal maintainer with the railroad companies, which presumably meant he repaired and maintained the crossing signals, thus preventing people from getting killed crossing the tracks.

Thurman Earon was born in Colebrook Township on October 28, 1883. He was the son of Joseph and Margaret Earon. He married his wife, Mary Fulton, on May 23, 1911. They had three children—Helen, William, and Anna. It’s pretty likely that they rented for a few years before buying this house, which would have been new at the time. He fought in World War II.

Mary died in 1968, and Thurman died ten years later in 1978. They are both buried in Rest Haven, in Dunnstable Township.

Moving backward, chronologically, I checked the old maps from 1857, 1862, and 1869. And they all show that in those years, there wasn’t a house on the lot. Along that stretch of Bald Eagle Street, at the corner near Liberty, there was a grocery store next door, but no house had been built on that spot yet.

So the property has an interesting history to it, with a railroad employee and World War II vet living there and building a house there. I’m impressed enough. But remember, we were talking specifically about 1897 here. So, extra points for historical accuracy—It looks like the sign was right—In 1897, on that spot, nothing happened.