Stories Found

1117 W. 11th Ave.

Craftsman, 1910

The house at 1117 W. 11th Ave., known as the Dirickson House, is associated with the 1884-1913 Progressive Era of Eugene and development of the Westside Neighborhood. The house's location in the James Huddleston Land Claim No. 54 and its prominence among early development in the area contribute to the pattern of history associated with the development of the JWN. 

Eugene was expanding its urban growth boundary during 1910 when this home was built. While the current owners have not been able to identify the original owner of this home and are still doing research to try to obtain that information, they believe it’s possible that 1117 W. 11th was one of the first homes to be built in this area.  Given its size (house: 2600 sq. ft; basement: 1350 sq. ft.; covered porch: 568 sq. ft.; and a 360 sq. ft. carriage house) prominence on 11th Avenue, and well-crafted exterior and interior, it might easily have been built for an important Eugene family.

The house has been in the past and will continue to be used for mixed business and residential purposes. The previous tenants used the building for a day care center that was also a primary residence. It also has been used for many other businesses in the past, including a boarding house (c. 1940), hostel (c. 1989), and hardwood flooring company (c. 1995-2004), and a daycare center (2015-2017). For more than 20 years starting in the 1950s, matchmaker Grace Henderson had her office at 1117 W. 11th Ave. And in the late 1980s the house became the home of the Southern Willamette Green Assembly (Green Party) for several years and was the site of the organization's 1989 May Day celebration. Now the house is the main office for Roberts Hardwood Floors as well as the owners' primary residence. 

Since 2013, current owners Tanara Greywolf and Brishen Thomas have done and continue to do substantial repairs and improvements to the house. The roof has been repaired and reroofed and new gutters were installed in 2013; the garage was repaired in 2014; a beautiful decorative cedar fence replaced an old dilapidated fence in 2015; the asbestos siding that had been placed over the original siding was removed to reveal the original siding in mostly pristine condition in 2018.  

The Craftsman Bungalow with some four-square features is a highly used style in Eugene for this era of increased home building. With good integrity of exterior materials, the house is a nicely preserved specimen of this time in history. Many houses from this era in Eugene have been demolished. This one, although previously used for a rental, still stands in excellent condition thanks to the current owners.

1611 Lincoln St.

Gothic Revival, 1871

A designated Eugene City Landmark and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, this circa 1870 Gothic Revival house was relocated in 1912 from its original downtown quarter-block site at the southeast corner of Pearl Street and 10th Avenue to its current address at the southeast corner Lincoln Street and 16th Avenue in the JWN.

The house known as the A.V. Peters House was built for Andrew Vincent Peters and his wife Mary Elizabeth (Lizzy) Shaw Peters and is a particularly good example of Carpenter Gothic or Gothic Revival style in the state. The design for the house comes from the 1856 pattern book “Village and Farm Cottages” by Cleaveland and Backus. Typical of the style, the house is irregular in plan with a steeply pitched, intersecting gable roof and vertical board and cove-edged batten siding. It is a 1-1/2 story, balloon-framed wooden structure. The primary window type is tall, elongated two-over-two double-hung wood sash, which were the characteristic style and proportions produced in the very late 1860s and early 1870s. Many of the windows are protected by decorative wooden hoods. The quarter hipped roof of the front porch is supported by pairs of trellis-like porch supports with decorative brackets. Other decorative details that make this house distinctive include a small flower balcony and a gabled hood with decorative brackets protecting a door on the north elevation, a bay window off the parlor on the west elevation, and numerous fine interior details. The west facing roof dormer window, the two massive chimneys, the finials at the roof gable ends, the porch deck with its wrap-around steps and the tall picket fence were all re-created from physical and photographical evidence. The paint colors of the house are original.

On the back of this historic property along 16th Avenue is a carriage house dating from the late 1890s. It was also moved there in 1912. It is a 1-1/2 story 20’ X 22’ building with balloon framing (originally with open studs on the interior) and exterior shiplap siding. The building has a hipped roof topped by a cupola-like ventilation structure. The west side of the main floor has one large sliding carriage door suspended from a rail. There was sufficient space inside the building for one buggy and probably two stalls for horses judging by the two openings in the upstairs hayloft floor. Originally the building’s exterior had just one casement window on the north side, and there were also one casement window, a shiplap entrance door and a shiplap hayloft door on the south side, and one small casement window at the top of the stairs on the east side. Sometime in the 1920s the carriage house was converted to a workshop by Lee Liston, who was the owner of the property at that time. He used the building for manufacturing canvas awnings and leather goods. Mr. Liston added five extra windows downstairs (all casements which still remain) and north facing garage doors that opened out toward 16th Avenue. In 1990, the large north-facing garage doorway was framed in and replaced by siding and two double-hung sash windows for added north lighting.

765-781 Monroe St.

Vernacular, 1920

The last remaining two-story false-fronted wooden building in Eugene, the Baldwin Market served for many years as a community grocery store and meat market. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, it was  restored by the Neighborhood Economic Development Corporation (NEDCO, now DevNW).

In 2017, A. Lynn Ash published Eugeneana: Memoir of an Oregon Hometown, in which she describes living in the Baldwin Market building with her family. She traces the history of the building in the book's first chapter.

The building was owned first by the Baldwins. Earl Baldwin was a Texas native, but he lived in the Eugene area off and on for the first decasde of the 20th century. In 1917 his wife Eva purchased the lot where the historic building--the Ash Family home for nineteen years--now stands. . . . In December of 1920 Baldwin began adversiting his meat market under "Wanted" in the classified sections of the Eugene Daily Guard and the Morning Register. . . .

Earl and Eva lived in the apartment above the store, a simple, fifteen step daily commute to the market below. Earl operated his meat market until 1934 when he retired, but he and Eva continued to reside in the upstairs apartmnet for the next three years . . . .

Next came my father, Jesse (Bud) Ash, and grandfather, Jesse Francis Ash. . . . My father and grandfather leased the Baldwin Maret, and right away opened a grocery store where Baldwin, Pohill, and McIntyre had operated their markets before them. . . . In 1941 Grandpa Ash purchased the entire building from Baldwin, and advertised Ash ownership with a bold sign painted across the top two-thirds of the false front.

Later in the chapter, Ash describes her and her family's role in documenting the Baldwin Market's history.

Using testimony and old photographs from the 1940s provided by my sisters and my brother, NEDCO went to work to restore the building to its original condition. A photo from a later time period showed a plywood and glass facade that had been installed across the entire front of the first story. . . . The crew removed the plywood facade, porch and stairs, and sealed up our old front door. They scraped, repainted and refurbished all the exterior surfaces, and by mid-1996 the original Baldwin Market was recreated, or at least a reasonable facsimile.

However, about 10 years ago with Ash visited Eugene, she observed:

But architecture is merely the skin of history. Only minimally, if at all, can it convey the real historic meat and potatoes of a building. Who would walk by the Baldwin Market today and detect even a glimmer of what it once was? Without the bold FOOD SERVICE sign, and antique phone number high on the front facade, without the striped canvas awning and the old Coca Cola sign painted on the south wall, the building loses its historic punch.