William Morgan Aycock

I am constantly researching the history of the house. A few years back I pulled all the mantles off the walls looking for things that might have fallen behind the mantle. I found many things, one of them I already posted about was a wedding invitation from 1904. I also found two other letters from 1904. These were in much worse condition than the wedding invitation so I put them up and have just recently found them again.

The letters have lots of holes in them, especially the second one which I am still trying to fully decipher.

The first one is a letter from the Lagrange Sanatorium to Maggie May Aycock about someone named Morgan:

Note: To view the images in their full resolution in Firefox, click on the image, then right click the  image and click on view image. You will then have the option of clicking the image again to make it full size (the pointer will look like a magnifying glass). I hate the way blogger has changed how images are shown.

At first I thought maybe the letter was about her father, Rev. Thomas Guinn Morgan, but he had died the year before in 1904. I have his obituary written out in the House History tab.

Then I looked at the prescription that was enclosed with the letter:

Morgan Aycock. I looked the name up on Ancestry but could not find any information about him.

The letter is written by a Dr Henry R. Slack, a man of some note in his time.

Here is a picture of the Lagrange Sanatorium from 1907:

Then I started trying to decipher the second letter. It was obvious that it was a sympathy letter.  I finally realized that one of the words that was very hard to read was Morgan. Here is what I have so far:

This letter is dated just 6 days after the one from Dr Slack. So now I know why the prescription was never filled. It is addressed to Opal who is one of Maggie's daughters.

I went back and started going over the Aycock records I have to try to find out who Morgan was. Then I realized that in the 1900 census Maggie and John Aycock's first born was listed as Willie M. Aycock.

I looked him up on Ancestry but could only find him in the 1900 census. He was born in 1885 in Griffin, Ga. I know he was born in Griffin because i know the Aycocks lived there then. The only other record of him would have been the 1890 census. Most of the 1890 census was destroyed in a fire including all of the Georgia records.

I'm assuming that Willie M. Aycock was William Morgan Aycock. I don't think it's that much of a leap to come to that conclusion. Maggie's maiden name was Morgan. Back in the day it was common for people to name a child's middle name after the mothers maiden name. Also, after 1900 he just disappears. I can find records on most of the other Aycock's after 1900 but none of him.

After doing a little more research I believe that Morgan died of heart failure caused by Rheumatic Fever. The first letter mentions that his Rheumatism is getting much better but that his current trouble is with dilation of the heart caused by the Rheumatism. The word Rheumatism is a catch-all for many ailments, the most common one being Arthritis. Rheumatic fever is another one. It can cause inflammation of the heart and heart failure according to the Wikipedia article I found on it.

The prescription is for an elixer, "Elix Ferri Quin et Strych". Basically it is Quinine, which is for Malaria, and Strychnine, which is a poison but was used as a stimulant. I think the Strychnine was prescribed to him for his heart.

I believe he died here in the house because in the first letter the Dr. is telling Mrs. Aycock to continue giving him his pills and elixer, plus the prescription that was in the letter so he definitely wasn't an in-patient in the hospital.

The period of time the Aycocks lived in this house (1899-1904) wasn't a particularly good time for them. In 1902 John Aycock's Planing Mill burned down. I believe he had some financial and legal troubles from this because of some letters to his attorney that I have from around this time. In 1903 Maggie's father dies, also in the house I believe. Then their first born son dies in 1904 at the age of 19.

Edit: I have just updated the House History tab with more information on the Aycocks.

Old letter find

I found an old letter from J. A, Aycock whom I believe to be the original owner of the house. I found it, of all places, online on e-bay. The letter is to a John W. Park. He was an attorney and was also president of the Georgia Bar Association.

The letter was about Mr. Aycock not being able to repay a debt right away. Not sure what he would have needed an attorney for but I sure would like to know. It's dated June 14, 1902.

The really interesting thing about the letter is that it is written on Mr. Aycock's letterhead. As it turns out he was a contractor and woodworker. If he was the original owner of the house and was the builder then that would explain all the nice wood moldings in the house. I've been told by locals that there used to be a lot more elaborate moldings in the house "the likes of which they've never seen before". Unfortunately they were all stolen when the house was being rented out by the previous owner.

Framing the deck

Yesterday we worked on framing the deck. Somehow I mis-calculated and ended up 4 boards short so we couldn't finish. I forgot the camera at home again but I took a few pics with my cell phone.




While I was attaching the joist hangers to the ledger board I made a really cool find. It's an old bottle. I took it home and cleaned it up, the bottle was filled with coal. Also, it appears to be very old, pre-dating the age of the house (1888) by at least 20 years.

There is no seam at all on the main body of the bottle. The neck and the lip each have their own separate seams. There also appears to be a pontil mark on the bottom. The bottle is also iridescent.

This first picture above is before cleaning.

The next two above show the iridescence.

This one shows what appears to be a pontil mark.

This one shows the two separate seams, one on the neck (directly in front), and one on the lip (to the right on the top).

This one shows the coal that was in it.

So does anyone know anything about this bottle, what is was used for, it's general age, why there was coal in it...?

More electrical work

We didn't get to spend a lot of time out at the house today but I did get some things accomplished. I worked on installing the second circuit to the kitchen. The second circuit will run the fridge, dish washer, garbage disposal, and attic light. There will also be a third circuit run, it will control the chandelier, the recessed lighting, and the under counter lights.

I ran the circuits down from the attic space above the kitchen. Why I didn't think to do this for the first circuit I don't know. It would have saved me a lot of crawling around in the dirt under the house...

I'm running the wiring through the holes that the knob & tube wiring ran through.




The last picture above is the wiring for the attic light.

I found an old Bulldog friction tape box in the attic, it was used to tape up the knob & tube wiring.



We hope to get back out there some time this weekend to finish up the wiring.

Toothbrushes

When I was at the Woodbury house yesterday I took some time to clean up the toothbrushes I had found in the kitchen wall last week. I had noticed that there was some writing on one of them when I was looking at a picture of it.

When I cleaned it up I found that it said "Buster Brown's Perfect Brush". It has the Buster Brown logo at the end of it. On the neck it says France and has some numbers. Just below that is some type of logo, possibly the company logo. I can just barely make out "co." at the end of it. Google didn't return any hits for a Buster Brown Toothbrush.


The other brush says "Mammas Darlings" which is an old childrens book from 1869. It also says France on it. The writing is very faint though so I couldn't get a good picture of it.

If anyone has any info on either of these toothbrushes please post it here. I'd love to know more about them.

Dining room wall

Yesterday I worked on the dining room side of the wall. The first thing I did was install pieces of 2x4 in between studs for the wainscoting.


With that done I began working on the wainscoting. I picked out the 37 best pieces and removed all the nails from them. then I had to cut an inch off of each board. I had to do this because the floors, as it turns out, are not original, they were laid over the original floors so because of this I lost an inch of height over the wainscoting on the other walls.

With the wainscoting installed I installed the chair rail above it and the trim piece that goes just below the chair rail.



I know it looks like the wainscoting slants up towards the camera, it does this for a few reasons, one is that the floor slopes down towards the back wall, the other is that the support 2x4's I installed are level while the wainscoting follows the floor so it makes it look worse than it is. Once the drywall is up it shouldn't be noticeable at all.

This last picture is a few of the things I have found in the walls so far:

The bottom 2 items are toothbrushes that look very old, they appear to be made of bone or ivory. I just noticed some writing on one of them in the picture but I don't have them here, they are back at the Woodbury house. I will try to see what they say the next time I'm there.

The top item is a turned wooden spindle. These are the kind you normally see in a hallway or entryway as elaborate fretwork. We dont have any fretwork in the house, I have no clue how it got into an outside wall in the dining room.

Wedding invitation 104 years late

We went out to Woodbury today to try to get some work accomplished. We wanted to concentrate on the upstairs bedrooms. We picked out neutral paint colors because we dont want anything too drastic.

Today we worked on the front bedroom, you may remember this room as the hideous pink room, come tho think of it I dont think I ever posted a picture of this room because the color was so terrible:


Here are a few after pics:





Much better.

Tomorrow we will tackle the Master bedroom and the upstairs hallway if we have time.

After we finished the bedroom I was exploring around the house. The top of the mantle in the living room is missing and the PO stuck a 1x12 on some shelf brackets to rig up a top mantle piece. I removed it because it was so ugly and started thinking of what might be behind the mantle. It was loose and hanging from the wall so I got a flashlight and started looking behind it. At first I found nothing, I was about to give up when a small envelope wedged way down caught my eye.

It turned out to be a wedding invitation to the second owners of the house dated 1904! and it was still sealed! Here are some pictures of it:




The first pic is of the outer envelope, notice the Ben Franklin 1 cent stamp, the second pic is of the inner envelope, and the third pic is the invitation. It had a very fine piece of tissue paper inside it.

I also found this:


I wonder what store this was from and how old it is...

Yet again more yard work

I'm beginning to think I'll never get this yard done. Here are a few more before and afters:

First the barn area. I'm still nowhere near done:

The entire area to the left of the barn has yet to be done. You can also see the huge yard debris pile that I've built up. The thinned out stuff to the right is in the meadow:

Next is the meadow:

There is still a lot to do in this area also but it's already looking a lot better:

Another angle:


I found this unusual bottle in the yard while working yesterday:


I know the bottle is newer than the mid 1800's because the seam goes all the way up the bottle and through the neck and lip.

If you look very closely at the lip of the bottle you can see that it has a notch in it, possibly for holding the cap on... maybe? The letters on the bottle are very strange, on the front it has what looks like a number "3" but with an extra part on top of it, followed by what appear to be two lower case "i"s. I cant make out the writing on the bottom of the bottle at all.

We probably wont be back out there today. I'm actually thinking of doing some work on the Oxford-Boynton House.

More yard work and interesting barn finds

We had a few extra hours yesterday so we went back out to Woodbury. I started clearing out the area in front of the barn. Below is a before shot of the barn area:

And here it is as of now:

I still have a long way to go back here but it's start. I started exploring inside the barn and found a few interesting things.

I'm not sure what this first thing is, I'm guessing it's part of an old tractor or some other type of farming implement. The patent date on it is June 22, 1909. Today there is a Stahl company that makes truck bodies and Stahl Headers company but they've only been around since 1946 and 1963 respectively. Anyone know for sure what it is?


And what the heck is this thing?:


I found this plinth block in the barn:

The only other ones it matches is in the main downstairs bathroom. All the rest of them throughout the house look like the one below:


It has nails in it so it was removed from somewhere. The only area that I see it could have come from is in the dining room, a doorway was closed off and turned into a built-in. There was also a few pieces of original trim in the barn but I didn't get any pictures of it.

Next I explored the inside of the house. There is an access panel in the upstairs bathroom that leads to the attic area above the Dining room and Kitchen. I took the panel apart so I could check it out.

We're thinking of eventually expanding the upstairs bathroom into part of this area because right now it's maybe 5'x8' at best. I found this ruler in the attic area, the calender on it is from Nov 1951 to Feb 1953.

I took a few pictures of the house and barn in sepia, I think they turned out pretty good.