have you ever wondered if a home that you're looking at is older than it appears to be
well today we're exploring the trapper's cottage hi everyone ken here welcome to
this house walking into the property we can already tell that this is something
a little different than what's going on on the rest of the street the buildings don't line up
with this house as it sits a little cockeyed and it also sits a lot deeper so this is just
kind of the first mystery that we're going to find with this house before we even get inside
now approaching the house there's a set of stairs that takes us up to the second floor and that
is actually the main floor of the house so we are going to take these stairs and head on up
walking inside this house one of the very first things we notice is the mill work so we can see it
is all done in the federal style with triangular pediments above the doors windows and openings
now all of this was recreated after a fire that had happened a few decades ago it was all
recreated in a style that would have fit with the original historic features of this house
now there is a fireplace here and of course this isn't necessarily historically accurate
but it does lead us to a mystery that's down in the basement which we'll get to soon in the
meantime let's just go ahead and take a quick glance around here and then we'll continue on
now continuing further into this house we come down a half flight of stairs
and this is going to take us to a more modern section of the home and i think that this was
really respectfully done because it's not trying to falsify the historic architecture
there's a clear separation between the old and the new so we'll just take a quick glance around this
and then we're going to continue down to the basement where things get really really
interesting making our way down to the lower level of the house the mysteries of the construction
continue so les you found something really interesting when you were renovating this house
and this wasn't necessarily like this can you tell our audience kind of what the story of this
fireplace is when i moved in the fireplace was drywall here drywall here this was just
a void area when i started the remodel down here you know jabbed jab knife in there found
void like all right here we go started pulling that drywall off and found plaster completely
covering it started chipping away the plaster you can see the little pieces of plaster left
i got most of it off but i kind of like a little bit of it left what i found was the brick was
basically crumbling and they had put a piece of plywood up a bunch of junk brick and mortar in
between that and another piece of plywood just to keep it from falling down so of course going into
rehabbing this fireplace that was one of the things we had to fix another cool thing these
nails actually came out from the plywood and the bricks that were holding up the arch at the point
so when we rebuilt it we put in the angle iron there's two l-shaped angle irons in there
andrew is his name he's with old-time brick and stone he's the one that rebuilt the fireplace
basically day one was just the tear down and he said he had never seen so much soot and junk
in a fireplace and all the fireplaces he's ever redone i'm guessing at some point i
mean these nails are pretty old so i think it had been blocked off for a long time and
maybe they just used it as a soot dump from the fireplace upstairs into it so it took us all day
and i'm that i'm still finding that that old 200 year old soot in this house you know we
got it cleaned out got it torn down to get back to the structure obviously the entire
arch was taken out and you can even see the outline of the the bricks that don't have
the plaster on it um that's what we eventually had to replace just to make sure that we had
a sound brick structure once we got done with that he gave me a crash course in tuck pointing
and i wound up doing all the tuck pointing myself the mantle came from
uh luke reynolds who owns molly's which is right behind the house here he has a very nice wood shop
on the north side and he helped me cut it down and sand it down and then i finished it from there
continuing further through this level we now pass by the bathroom that once contained the
fireplace that was freed and of course there are two larger windows over here that look out onto
the side of the house and these also have those triangular pediments that have been replaced
now as we come to the very front of the house there's something really curious
and jay can you tell us about the stone wall you're standing in front of
i'm jay gibbs um i don't really have a title i'm just sort of one of the neighborhood historians um
been in soulard for at this point about 39 years previous tenants who have been kicked out started
vandalizing the building and they exposed the structure before they exposed the structure the
building just looked like a tarp paper shack it didn't look like it was worth even saving it was
frankly really ugly and it was an anachronism in this brick neighborhood and they tore off
some of the layers of toilet paper and the wood siding and they exposed the original thatchwork
underneath raquette enteroplateau or thatchwork anyway um if you look at some of the photos you
can clearly see that my friend judy called me on the phone one saturday she said jay did you
see that house on ellen and i said what house and she told me and i said no and i went and look she
and she said this is so exciting we had no idea this was here and i had just found an article
in the old house journal magazine that showed a building in the french quarter with the same style
of construction the posts with brick in between and she and i were really excited that's when
i started taking a lot of pictures and then the building shortly after it was
vandalized was torched and it was heavily damaged by fire but uh it was still saved
because by then everybody knew what it was and we were like wow this isn't you know
this isn't just a throwaway this is really really old construction style dates it to one
of the earlier probably the earliest oldest house in soulard and that's saying something because we
have some old houses here the article in the in the in the old house journal dated this style
of construction between 1790 and 1840 down in new orleans and remember this this would have
been this house predates the street grid that now exists around it and it was part of a long linear
piece of farmland and that the official date on the plaque says 1810 that is a wild guess
we don't know we'll never know for sure but it's some somewhere around there between 1790 and 1840.
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