More house history

The kiddo and I spent a few hours at the library on Saturday looking through the old city directories and deed indices on a creaky, lop-sided microfilm machine. We got a little bit of new information, perhaps-- I'll need to go to the courthouse and look at the actual deeds to confirm.

I believe we left off where I had read the book about our neighborhood; the author listed TH Brannan as the first resident listed in the directory at our address in 1922. Here's where we deviate. The deed index only lists grantor, grantee, date, and which book the deed is in-- it doesn't identify the actual property, not to mention it's handwritten and not really in alphabetical order. I looked up Mr. Brannon, but couldn't find anything where the dates coincided. I did, however, find a Gertrude Brannon with appropriate dates. Hold that thought...

In going through the city directory, we found a lot of cool stuff, including advertisements for the Goldman Hotel, European rooms, with rates from $1!

Postcards from the Fort Smith Historical Society's website. The link there is to an article about the hotel. In 1985, my father was on the crew that was looking to restore the hotel, so I did get to run around the inside a fair bit; it had been mostly gutted by the time they were involved, I think, but was still a cool, monster of a structure. You just knew it had been grand.

We also confirmed something we'd seen in the neighborhood history. In the 1921 directory, there's a resident, W.D. Baker, at a mystery address between ours and our neighbors. There's not an empty lot between us, and that address only appears that one year-- never before or since. I had assumed that this was a garage apartment or something, but I decided to dig a little since I had the index right in front of me.

Follow me here: Mr. Baker is listed as a grantee in February of 1921. He bought the property from H.P. Lyman, et al. Lyman owned a very active real estate agency, and the Lyman, et al, name as a grantor shows up a lot around this time period. My assumption here is that Lyman was a realtor and developer. So now I went to see where Mr. Baker is listed as the grantor, to see when he sold the property that he bought from Lyman. There's a listing showing William Dudley Baker selling a property to Gertrude Brannan in December 1921. See what I just did there? The person who lived at the ghost address (one number over from ours) sold a property to a woman with the same last name as the first resident in our house at the same time that our first resident appears.

My current assumption is that the address was a typo in the city directory, or the neighborhood was rezoned; there was a huge amount of development going on at this time in an area that had been in the country until now. It wouldn't surprise me if the neighborhood itself was still being sussed out.

So. Looks like the house was built in late 1920. By a developer. I'll make a trip to the courthouse to look at the actual records at some point in the future; unfortunately, the research librarian tells me that the courthouse only has 2 microfilm machines and the place is currently crawling with oil and gas speculators. Sometimes you have to wait hours.

So the oilmen screw me every morning and evening when I drive to work and back; now they're gonna screw me in a whole different way.