History
Alvin Smith settled on a 643 acres (260 ha) farm on the Tualatin Plains south of what became West Tuality Plains in 1841. He and his wife were the first permanent Euro-American settler at that community that would later become Forest Grove. An earlier cabin on the property was destroyed in a flood, and their second cabin later became a post office. In 1854, he and his wife Abigail began the construction of a new home. Alvin was a trained carpenter and did the work himself. Construction finished in 1856, and is the second oldest wood framed building in Forest Grove after Old College Hall at Pacific University. Abigail died in 1858, with Alvin continuing to live in the home with his second wife Jane until 1870. The couple moved to downtown Forest Grove, but continued to own the property.
Alvin died in 1888, and Jane leased the house until around 1920 when she died. The next owner sold the estate to the Zurcher family circa 1940. Alvin T. Smith House was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on November 8, 1974. The house was abandoned around 1990.
In 2002, the Friends of Historic Forest Grove began plans to purchase the home and restore it. The group worked with the Oregon Historic Preservation Office to purchase the property. In 2005, a methamphetamine lab was removed from the basement and the house decontaminated. In March 2005, the group purchased the home for $75,000 after raising $175,000, with some of the funds raised through a calendar featuring nude members at the house. Long term plans call for turning the property into a center for learning about the cultural heritage of the area.
Read more about this topic: Alvin T. Smith House
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery,—for if men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can supply their place.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)