Old house updates

The old Gibbon-Copeland house on South Grand Street, which I've written about before --- most recently here ---  turned up this week on Old House Dreams, a blog where I hang out sometimes. So it seemed like a good idea to swipe Realtor photos from online listings and post them here, too.

I wonder sometimes if Chariton's finest old buildings, when they come on the market, are marketed with the degree of enthusiasm that they deserve. So it's nice to see that an effort to sell it, casting a broad net and using decent photographs, is under way. The exterior photos here are mine. Interior shots, which are small, are taken from house listings at Zillow and at RE/MAX Innovations, Indianola.

This house served multiple generations of the same family from the outset, but for as long as I can remember it has been an apartment building --- an exceptionally well-maintained one. So there are kitchens on all three levels. Meg, who now lives on my homeplace south of Russell, lived in the third-floor apartment of this building for quite some time.

This is the main entrance, facing South Grand Street, which opens into a large entry hall with open oak stair that ascends into a flying bay window before turning to reach the second floor. The glazed openings at the head of the stair are similar to those in the "other" Copeland house (actually, Larimer-Copeland) on East Auburn, so I wonder if the family of one house adapted the idea from the family living in the other.

You're looking east here (above) through the entry hall into the two rooms along the ground floor of the north side of the house.

The staircase bay is capped by panels of leaded and colored glass, which remain intact. And here (below) are the glazed openings at the head of the stair.

The doors below once lead from the entrance hall into the front parlor, which I believe has been adapted over the years to serve as a bedroom.

This is the most easterly of the two large rooms beyond the stair hall. I suppose this could have been the dining room, or a study. Hard to tell, but my guess would be dining room.

This is the front parlor fireplace (there are four fireplaces in the home, but none function; the stack serving this fireplace has been removed above the roofline; the large central chimney, stubbed and flues blocked).

And here's a close-up of the elaborate inlay in the floor surrounding the fireplace.

And a more general view of the parlor. Note that most of the ceilings in the house appear to have been lowered.

I think this inlay is within pocket doors that separate the parlor from the large room to its east. I'm not sure if this would have been the dining room originally, or a back parlor.

 Here is that center room on the south side of the house, perhaps originally the back parlor. The big bay with two-story porch alongside it, offering on its first floor access to a side hall, is the noticeable exterior feature of this room.

  

And here's the corner fireplace in this room with opening to the side hall beside it.

There are a variety of other photos of the second and third floor interiors on both of the Realtor sites, for those who enjoy playing name-that-room.

Here's a view of one of the rooms in Meg's former home in the third-floor apartment.

  

 And here's a colorful sample of stained glass, but I have no idea exactly where it's at.

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Writing here the other day about the Stewart-Harper house on North Grand Street, I speculated that it dated from the 1870s, but lacked a specific date.

Looking yesterday, I found the following brief item in The Chariton Patriot of July 18, 1877, stating that "Mr. G.J. Stewart has changed his plans and is building a brick residence." This probably dates the house to 1877, but gives no indication of what George's original plans might have been.