Longway Home Bed & Breakfast
▪ History of The Longway House ▪
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When we bought this old house
in 2005,
we promised ourselves we'd try to find out about its past. But getting settled in and a parade of projects kept us focused
on the present. One day, we stopped at the public library for a reserved book and
ducked into the local history and genealogy center there. We heard it
had good resources for finding a home's history and since little info
came with our place, we decided we'd see what the archives had for us.
A quick search stretched into an evening of
sleuthing. Old city directories revealed the former owners and we
tracked them right back to the earliest listing. The first man here --
Ernest L. Longway -- was identified as a building contractor and both
his home and business addresses were our house address. That clicked
with what we'd been told by neighbors who said the first owner built our
house for himself and the one next door for family or for sale.
On return visits over the next few days, we scrolled through census data as far back as 1900, searched old newspapers for announcements and obituaries, and scanned old city fire maps. The hunt led us to lots of information about our home's past that surprised us. But the biggest discovery was that Ernest Longway was a contractor in our area for 50 years who designed and built many houses, including four in an historic district nearby. One of those homes is the centerpiece of the block and was our favorite from the first time we saw it years ago. Now we find we have this link to its lineage.
But the richest part of this find was Mr. Longway's
name listed in bold print at the top of the page where it proudly
identified him as the building contractor (another document listed him
as the designer, too). And at the bottom of the page, there was his name
again in a large ad for his business with our house address big as life
in black and white.
Several years ago, we contacted his family, now in Tennessee, and asked them for family history and photos as we piece together the past. But no matter what else we find out about our home's history, we decided with all the twists and turns in our path to our first house, it's fitting it should be called "The Longway Home."