The Bowling Green Historic Preservation Commission’s Historic Building of the Month for March and April is the brick home at 315 W. Wooster St. The owner, Lee Anne Snook, wrote this piece about her home in 1989, when it was published in Toledo Magazine. This story will appear in two installments and was edited for length and updated.
Until we bought this old house in Bowling Green, I could only picture turn-of-the-century American life as having taken place in sepia tones, or in black and white. But faded photographs of stiff, stern people from the past seem much more vivid to me now.
Thanks to this house, now over 130 years old, I have been beguiled by the whispers of history. My fascination with my house’s life and times began when I learned that back around 1915, a group of ladies from the neighborhood used to hold temperance meetings in my attic.
The thought of them up there intrigued me, and I began to court their company.
Sometimes I turned off the radio, shuttered the sounds of the constant cars on Wooster Street below, and imagined I could hear the rustle of taffeta petticoats as the women walked by my study on their way to the attic.
If I honed my imagination sharply enough, I could hear them pace the floor above me as they talked intensely to each other about the dangers of drink.
Living in an antique house does that to you. Soon after you move in, you find yourself pausing on the stairs, convinced you hear the whisper of a tinny old tune. Or you freeze, your fork halfway to your mouth, during dinner: wasn’t that the faint trill, just now, of some long-ago laughter?
This house in which my husband, Jeffrey, and I and the spirit of the temperance ladies live was built in 1892, when Bowling Green hummed with prosperity from the newly discovered oil fields outside of town.
The original owner, George Helfrich, was by turns a harness maker, grocer, real estate broker, life insurance agent, and publisher of the old Wood County Tribune newspaper.
Although occupationally fickle, Mr. Helfrich was a solid and successful man. To prove it, he built a brick Queen Anne-style house on West Wooster Street, a major thoroughfare where other prominent citizens were building homes, too.
It is, in my affectionate opinion, a graceful home with a large, two-story bay window, broad eaves supported by scrolled brackets, and a hipped roofline which flares at the eaves and has a riot of dormer windows.
A dignified house, really, except for the impertinent tin lion’s head on a panel between the first and second floor. This sassy embellishment—the lion is sticking its tongue out!—was one of several tin-head designs found on homes around Bowling Green and apparently nowhere else. Mr. Helfrich would be delighted to know that his tin lion is still gawked at and photographed.
Maybe it was left to the lion to speak for Mr. Helfrich, who achieved success only after great hardship. As a young man he’d invested all he had—$35—in a harness business dragged down by debt.
After he’d saved and sold that enterprise, his next business was destroyed by fire. But the man described by contemporaries as having “indomitable perseverance” triumphed over that adversity, too.
He might have considered the lion a fitting show of defiance.
Then again, maybe Mr. Helfrich commissioned the lion decoration for the same reason his neighbors were icing their Italianate, Queen Anne, and Georgian Revival homes with splendid spindled railings, wrap-around porches, towers, and turrets. They were flaunting their newly acquired wealth.
Although the oil and natural gas which initially fueled their affluence soon gave out, the good life along Wooster Street continued unabated for many years after.
Times have changed along West Wooster Street, of course. Although some of the stately old homes still have carriage houses behind, only in imagination can you hear the clip-clop of horses. The clanging street cars which ran by here on their way to Tontogany are long gone, too.
The tree-lined street, which is in the heart of the Boom Town District, which was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1987, still retains some of its leisurely charm. While Internet scrolling and streaming series have replaced front porch-sitting as the neighborhood’s prime form of recreation, there are still strollers on the street at all hours. the pedestrian mix is about equal parts townspeople and university students. Often they are dragged by their dogs.
One old home in the neighborhood remained in the same family for over 130 years, but now, like the rest, it has passed on to new owners.
Three other families have lived in this house between Mr. Helfrich’s time and mine. With delight, I’ve discovered their flotsam. I’ve found rolls of wallpaper circa 1940; blueprints of the house from the same era; little metal soldiers that have gone AWOL in the shag rug in the attic; a box of letters saved by a teenage girl and hidden high on a closet shelf; and a record, penciled over paint in another closet, which chronicles the height and weight of two growing brothers. From the family with the sprouting sons who lived here immediately before us, and from townspeople who used to come play hear as children, I learned some intimate details of the house’s history.
But my most enthusiastic chronicler was a man whose large, lively family lived here in the 1960s and ‘70s. On a tour I offered him of the house in which he grew up, he rewarded me with stories of races run up and down the back staircase with his dog and dark expeditions he led on his belly through the narrow storage spaces in the attic. This was one of the premier hide-and-seek houses in the neighborhood, he told me. And he still remembered the combination of the ancient steel safe in the library.
From an old newspaper clipping, I learned the county coroner and his family lived here in the 1940s and ‘50s. The doctor’s office was downtown, only two blocks east of the house, and he charged his patients 50 cents per visit, including medicine. He must have been called out of bed often in his lean years following the Depression. (To be continued next month…)
Would you like to nominate a historic building or site for recognition? You can do this through the City website at – https://www.bgohio.org/FormCenter/Planning-13/Historic-BuildingSite-Nomination-Form-83
You can learn more about the Historic Preservation Commission by attending their meetings (the fourth Tuesday of each month at 4 p.m.) or by visiting their webpage at – https://www.bgohio.org/436/Historic-Preservation-Commission.
