The Mallory House

Located at 224 Eastern Ave.

Woodsfield, Ohio

I didn't know my maternal grandmother, Gertrude Mallory (1891-1975), very well. She sometimes came to stay for a few days at my family’s home in a suburb of Manhattan and we occasionally visited her in Connecticut, where she had moved from Rochester, New York, after her husband died. But I was almost completely unfamiliar with her past and at best vaguely aware—from my mother’s references to childhood summer trips from Rochester to visit relatives in “Oh-Ho-Ho” during the 1920s and 1930s—that my grandmother originally came from Ohio.

So when one of my brothers sent me the image of a stately Victorian home, made from a digital scan of a turn-of-the-Century photograph he had discovered on my father’s home computer, I initially drew a blank. My father had labeled the computer file, “Old Woodsfield House,” however, and my brother guessed that it might once have been owned by the Mallory family.

The ‘Old Woodsfield House’ at the Turn of the 20th Century

My mother died in 2004, but we sent the scan to her sister—the only survivor among my grandmother’s three children—who confirmed that it was indeed my grandmother’s childhood home. “It was built when Mother was very little,” she wrote, “and was considered quite something. It had the first indoor bathroom. [My mother] asked me several years before she died whether I remembered that the first floor had electricity but the second floor had a gaslight. I had forgotten.”

The image was striking and I was curious to know whether the structure still existed. However, I wasn’t keen on hopping in the car and driving more than 300 miles—I live in Washington, D.C.—to search for a house whose precise address I didn’t know and which, in any event, might have been torn down decades earlier.

I made a print of the scan and brought it to work to show to a colleague who had been researching his family’s history, thinking he might have some suggestions. He told me many local historical societies around the country had set up websites, and suggested I try a Google search. It only took a few minutes to track down the site of the Monroe County Historical Society—and not much more than that to find an electronic mail address on one of its pages for Richard Harrington (who, by coincidence, lives not far from me in a Washington suburb). Dick kindly offered to forward a copy of the picture and my query to some of “the most qualified people I know in Monroe Country . . . to answer your questions.”

Meantime, without saying anything to me, my colleague had begun a painstaking street-by-street search of Woodsfield using the “street view” feature of Google Maps, which offers panoramic photographs of thousands of locations made by the company’s fleet of roving camera vehicles. The next morning, after arriving at work, he asked me to follow him into his office and look over his shoulder at his computer monitor. He tapped a URL on the keyboard and suddenly I was looking at my grandmother’s house, as it appears today, on a corner lot on Eastern Avenue.

Within a few more days, the electronic mail responses from Dick’s group of current and former Monroe County residents began rolling in with detailed information about the Woodsfield branch of the Mallory family.

Delvin Devore verified the street address of the house (Google warns that its address listings are approximate) and gave me the names of the current owners, to whom I sent a print of the old photograph. Frank Schumacher informed me that the house is still known locally as “The Mallory House,” provided more information about the Mallory family’s Ohio connections than I suspect my mother or her siblings ever knew, and sent me a copy of a 1902 photograph of the interrelated Schumacher and Mallory families with a legend identifying each of the individuals, one of whom was my grandmother.

John Ogden provided photographs of the Woodsfield Methodist Church that my grandmother attended as a child and, after making an impressive comparison of Census records from 1880-1910, calculated that the photograph might have been made between 1908 and 1910 rather than the early 1890s, as I had assumed. (The scanned image doesn’t have sufficient resolution to permit a definitive match of the little girls and young women in the picture with the available family photographs of my grandmother.)

My siblings and I are still searching for the original photograph, by the way. My father, now well into his 90s, recalls making the scan at the request of my mother, but doesn't know where she later put the hundred-year-old print.

Chris Kern
Washington, D.C.
February, 2009

Provided by Chris Kern

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