Mary and I found a stack of old photos as we were reorganizing the basement this past weekend and in it was this old photo of the four houses on North Franklin Street. Ours is the second one from the left. My best guess judging from the age of the trees is that this photo probably taken around 1910. The bottom photo was taken from about the same spot today. Our house is hidden by the big Norway spruce that Mary’s grandmother planted when they bought the house in the late 1940’s.
Much of the original features on all of the houses are still intact with only a few small changes here and there. One thing that I did notice is that the two middle houses (ours and Jason and Bethanie’s) don’t have fireplaces, which they currently do. So those were added at some later date.
In case you might have missed the blog about these houses on our old site, they were built for the managers of the Sharples Works, which was a factory that manufactured the first mechanized cream separators. When you look out of our front door you can see the old factory, which has now been converted into luxury apartments. The factory was built in the 1890’s and our home was built in 1900.