Researching the history of the Darnall House

Sorry for the lack of posting lately but after the last post on the timeline of the additions I decided to research the house some more. (what little work I have accomplished on the house is not really worthy of pictures, mostly rewiring the upstairs) I've found some more interesting information but still no old pictures or solid information on the beginnings of the house. I really wish I could find an old picture of the house but every old picture of the area I find has the house just out of view or just a tiny sliver of the house.

Here are a few old pictures of the area to illustrate what I mean (house is circled in red):



This is a picture of the Planters Inn. It was one of the first structures in the area having been built in the early 1800's. It was moved about 100' NE on log rollers sometime around 1885 to make way for the railroad. It used to be an inn for travelers along the indian trail, what is now Meriwether St. This picture was taken after it was moved, probably taken around 1909. Sadly it was destroyed in 1968. I'm pretty sure that's the roof of my house in the distance.


This next picture is taken from the top of the old water tower and looking down Meriwether St. It was taken sometime around 1920-25. As you can see there is my house right there behind that clump of trees.

This is the First Christian church, built in 1906. the picture was taken sometime in the 40's or 50's. There's my house on the right.

This picture and the next one aren't all that old - 1994 I think - but I wanted to show them for a few reasons. First, in the above picture you'll notice the lovely grey, bland building in front of you. It's a branch office of the Dept. of Children and Families. This building is what was built after the Planters Inn was torn down. There was another beautiful house - a Victorian - in the empty lot in front of it. Grrr.... Anyways, there's my house in the background, it still had it's chimneys then too.

This one is taken looking up New Orleans St. This is probably the best shot of my house. Too bad the pic is from 1994.

The other day I went to the courthouse to research the deeds. I found quite a bit of interesting information. One of the most interesting is that the deed for Thomas M Darnall purchasing the land from Lewis S. Salmons is dated DEC 21, 1858 (the filing date is at the end of the entry, this date is not the same as the date of the deed. The date of the actual transaction is always listed at the beginning). There are no other records of the Darnalls owning any other land besides a vacant lot behind this property. So where did they live for 12 years?? It appears that the Darnalls were fairly well off so I highly doubt they rented or squatted. He was a surgeon who was one of the co-founders of the Medical College in Griffin in 1859. That date fits with the date he bought the land. It seems that they moved to town around this time from Atlanta (the deed lists him as being from Fulton county). Here is the deed:


So was the house built in 1870 or 1858...? I still think it was 1870 for one main reason: the house was built with a lot of reclaimed lumber. Immediately after the war between the states in the south no one had any money to do anything. Even well off people didnt have any money. The Griffin history books list 1869-1870 as the first years of relative prosperity after the war. It lists numerous building and houses finally being built. Many of these house were most likely built with a lot of reclaimed lumber to save money. Still, I wonder where they lived for 12 years prior to this house...

I found a few other interesting deeds as well:



The above 2 pictures are of one of the very first deeds to the property. It's dated 1850. Griffin became a city in 1841 By General Lewis Griffin, he bought 800 acres because he found out that 2 railroads were planning on intersecting on the spot(he owned one of the railroads). He laid out a city and then auctioned off lots. I plan on going back soon to find the very first deed to the property but that may prove hard as the original tracts were much bigger than the 2 (later becoming 4) original acres.

Another very cool deed I found was for a charter to the Griffin & West Point Plank Road Company to creat a plank road from Griffin to West Point (West Point is near Lagrange, Ga in Troup county). From reading the deed it would seem that this was done without the land owners permission. The Plank road was built on the Indian Trail, it later became Meriwether St.



The deed pictured below is from 1890 4 years after the death of Thomas Darnall. Mattie Darnall was one of his daughters, this shows a triangle of land being sold off to the house next door. Notice the road in the plat, it was still called Plank Road at the time and not Meriwether St. You may also notice the writing "Kelly's Barn" at the back of the property. The Kelley's owned the Planters Inn at the time. This was the original location of their barn and of the plantation house, that would explain why I find a lot of old bricks at the back of the property.


Well that's all for now, Hopefully I'll have some new pictures of my progress soon.

House addition timeline

Since I dont have any pictures of progress to post I figured I'd post this picture that I created one day when I was bored. The different colors show the different additions to the house.


Dark Blue - Original portion of the house

Red - Kitchen - late 1800's?

Green - Bathroom addition - 1915?

Yellow - Laundry room - 20's or 30's

Light blue - laundry room extension, breakfast room - 1955


The kitchen addition may actually have been the original kitchen that was separate from the house and was just moved up to join it.

The bathroom addition is a full 2 story addition with a shed roof. The 1915 date is from the date on both the tubs that were in the house. Of course that doesn't mean that's when the addition was built, they could have bought both tubs used.

When the laundry room was built the space between it and the kitchen was probably a porch until 1955.

In 1955 the house was converted to apartments. The laundry room addition was so that the apartment on that side could have a back door. The porch in between it and the original kitchen was closed off to create a kitchen for the other apartment. The original kitchen then became a bedroom. I've since converted it back to a kitchen and the old porch will be a breakfast room/informal dining room.

This is definitely the strangest house I've ever seen. At first glance everything seems clear-cut and simple. But once you dig beneath the surface it becomes a crazy maze that I have yet to figure out. I think a large cause of this is the major renovation that the house underwent in the 30's. This "renovation" took away many original features of the house. Most of the door hardware was replaced with plain, art deco hardware (grrrrr!). The study was totally reworked and I have yet to figure out how it was originally. The beautiful heart pine was covered over with red oak in the study, foyer, parlor, and the formal dining room. It appears that the stairs were moved/rebuilt around this time also. I have no idea if they are the original stairs and just moved or if new ones were built. I do know for sure they were moved back by about 8'. I'll probably never figure out every detail of how the house was originally.

Well hopefully I'll have some pictures of progress up soon.

shifting gears

I know I said I was going to finish the Breakfast room in my last post but we've decided to change our strategy a bit. Our construction loan is getting pretty expensive, not to mention the fact that all we're paying every month is interest only. We need to get the house done so we can refinance and get a regular mortgage at a much lower rate.

Because of this we've decided to move our attentions upstairs and finish the hell called plaster/drywall/mud work. As you may remember we finished the master bedroom last month but we still have 3 other bedrooms, a long central hall, and 2 bathrooms that have hardly been touched. We need to finish these ASAP so the floor guys can get up here and do their thing.

I've been working in the Nursery for the past 4 days scraping and sanding off tons of old flaking paint from the walls and ceiling. For the past 2 days I've been bent over backwards sanding the stipling off the ceiling. Needless to say I find it hard to walk upright now.

For those of you who may not remember this was the condition of the upstairs bedrooms when we bought the place:


The upstairs was vacant long before the downstairs was. In addition to all the peeling paint, there were whole sections of the ceiling that were falling in. I patched those a few months back.

Here's the room after scraping paint and sanding stipling:




Looks like it snowed in here. I looked like that floor when I was done by the way. One thing you may notice is that the original skim coat of plaster above the picture rail and on the ceiling is green and below the rail it's a pale blue(the cream underneath the gold is paint that's on the blue plaster). I actually like that green color, not sure about the blue though...

After that I started in on skimming the ceiling with mud mixed with sand.


I didnt get much done because my back went out. Hopefully my back will be a little better by this afternoon. That way I can finish the mudding tonight, and sand and primer tomorrow.

I also wanted to post a picture of the doors upstairs:


I dont think I've ever seen 2 panel doors like this before. All of the doors upstairs are like this, they are all rim locks also. Downstairs we have the more common 4 panel doors like these:


Has anyone seen 2 panel doors like these before?

Kitchen island update

I haven't done much to the island with all the work going on in the breakfast room but I did get the marble cut. I bought a hand wet tile saw from Home Depot for $35. The thing worked great. We went ahead and lugged it inside to test fit it on the island.



It fits ok but I just wish it had a little more overhang all around. We salvaged this piece of marble from an old textile factory that was being gutted. It was broken on one end so we had to cut it this size.

The overhang on the front of it will serve as a small bar, we'll have 2 small stools there. We got the brackets off E-bay, they're shelf brackets from the 1800's.

As soon as the breakfast room is completed I'm going to finish the island. I still have to build the inside shelf, stain the unfinished edges and the inside shelf & floor, touch up the scratches, remove the cement from the surface of the marble, patch the holes in it with epoxy, and polish the marble. Oh, and find 2 short old stools.

Breakfast room floor

I finally tackled the breakfast room floor. It's been bugging me ever since I ripped out the old kitchen. The floor was in awful shape as you can see here:


The black stuff is the remnants of old linoleum tile glue. If that were the only problem with the floor I would have bit the bullet and scrapped the stuff off. Unfortunately the floor is also badly slanted and heavily rotted. 60 years as a kitchen were hard on this room.

In one corner of the room there was a patch that was very rotted. This corner held an old washing machine for at least the last 30 years. the drain for it must have overflowed often.


Because our driveway goes around to the back of the house this is our main entrance and the first room everyone sees when they come over. There's nothing worse than making all kinds of progress on the house and when you bring people over to show them the very first thing they see is this room... So the floor had to go.



Wonderful, as is usually my luck, many of the joists are rotted.


All 4 of these joists are bad and have to be replaced.



When I went to take them out most simply crumbled in my hands like Styrofoam.


A prime example of why I hate notch-cut joists. This is an otherwise perfect joist without any rot.



This entire house seems to be built from salvaged wood, This mortise still has the original dowel in it. There is other evidence of salvaged wood throughout the house, even in the original portion. The back sill in the original portion of the house has mortise cuts in it as well. From the look of it, it was once vertical and held the floor and ceiling sills on a 2 story house(the mortise cuts are very large on it). Most of the beams with mortise cuts in them appear to be hand hewn as well. I'm wondering if this house was built on the location of an older one, it's entirely possible as Griffin was formed in 1840 and there was an even earlier town here before that called Pleasant Grove.

Back to the floor... I removed all the bad joists...


...and installed new pressure-treated 2x10's with metal joist hangers.


We were having company over that night so I went ahead and hurriedly laid the subfloor without shimming it.


You cant tell from this picture but the floor slopes away and to the right by almost 1 1/2".

The next day I made the shims.


I laid them out on top of the subfloor for the picture to give a good idea of how much the floor slopes.

I pulled up the subfloor and screwed in the shims.


I then laid the subfloor back down.


Before I lay the flooring down I'm going to scrape/sand and prime the walls and ceiling. I'm not looking forward to that as most of the walls and all of the ceiling is beadboard. Hopefully the walls and floor will be done by this weekend... yeah right!

Installation of the fence gates

We've been working on the fence for the last 2 days. Last night for the first time the dogs were able to run in the back yard!

Yesterday we finished the front right fence.






We covered the gate opening with plywood until we can get the gate built. The neighbor has allowed us to tie our fence into his house as the property line is about 1' from his house.

The top of the wall will be landscaped and I'm going to build a set of brick steps with some of our reclaimed brick. We're going to build 2 small gates instead of one big one in this opening. On the other side of this the bush that is in the way will be transplanted and we'll be building an arbor in between the bushes on either side.

We're also going to fence in the HVAC compressors.

The fence here will only be 3 1/2' high. You can see the hole in the foreground where the post will go. I'll build some type of small gate into it for access.

Today we worked on the main gates on the left side of the house.




We still need to finish the finials, install the handles, the bar that goes into the ground, and figure out some way to lock it from either side.

We were able to get a pretty seamless fit but I'm going to have to do a little reinforcing of the posts, the gates are pretty heavy. I'm going to use lag bolts to bolt the one post to the side of the house.

We're going to finish up a few things on the gates tomorrow morning then we're going to start in on the breakfast room floor... finally!!

Antique Door Hardware

Here's some of the antique door hardware we've picked up recently from E-bay, Craigslist, and antique stores.


There's more but some of it is already installed and I couldn't fit the rest in the picture.

White Bricks?

I found this in the backyard when we were building the fence.


At first I thought it was the same as the bricks used in the study mantle but this isn't as wide as those. I first noticed the bricks in the study mantle were white a few weeks ago. Some of the paint has flaked off exposing the bare brick. I've never seen white bricks before. Does anyone know more about this? I did a little research online, one site says white bricks were popular from about 1800 to about 1870 but the site is in England so I'm not sure how relevant that is to Georgia.

Speaking of bricks, these are in our backyard. (sorry for the bad angle, this is the only shot I have of it)


They weren't visible for the first few months we lived here because the grass covered them but with all the driving over them it's exposed them. At first I thought it was a foundation for something like an outhouse or smokehouse. It doesn't really look like a foundation though, it's just 2 uneven rows of bricks, not a square. I think it's also only 1 or 2 layers deep.

What it's starting to look like to us is graves. I've heard of graves marked with bricks before.
The one on the left is about 8' long, the one on the right is almost 7'. There's also another one thats much smaller in another part of the yard, it's about 5'. Has anyone seen anything like this before?

If it does turn out to be graves I'm not really sure what to do about it. It's right in the middle of our driveway. I don't exactly feel like driving over someones grave everyday. Moving them to another part of the yard is an option. I've been thinking of looking up companies that have ground penetrating radar but I'd hate to spend the money on something like that until I'm fairly sure they are graves.

More fence pics

Well we didnt get the fence finished today but we came close. We finished putting up the dog ears on the one section and we started the small section on the right side of the house.




Here is the small section on the right side of the house.

<-----Street Backyard------->

The fence is on top of a 4' old brick retaining wall. we've set the fence back a few feet from the wall to allow room for plants. There is going to be a 4' gate in this section of fence, you can see the opening for it right after the first fence section. To allow access to the gate we'll be removing one of the bushes, building a trellis between the bushes, and building a set of brick stairs at the wall.

Backyard fence update

We worked on the fence again yesterday in between the rain drops.





This section going down the left side of the house(from the front) is about 175' long. We're rushing to finish this section and the section that comes off the right side of the house. Once those are done we'll be able to let the dogs out instead of having to walk them all the time. We're hoping to get them done today.

The rest of the perimeter has chain-link and chicken-wire fences from the neighbors. I'll eventually be putting our fence up along those fences but that will have to wait. I really need to get back upstairs and finish the bedrooms so the floor guys can refinish the second floor.

Here's a nice panorama shot of about 3/4 of our backyard.