copyright © 2002 by Laura Campbell

It sometimes seems as if the only Victorian houses you hear about are the really large, old, elaborate homes. Certainly, houses fall prey to the rule of the survival of the fittest. The home connected to an important historical person, and the home chock full of elaborate details attract attention. But I have come to believe that by leaving out the perspective of the ordinary house, we lose something of the social and architectural
history of the communities in which we live.

This problem is complicated somewhat by the number of ordinary old houses surviving in relatively un-remuddled condition. In working class neighborhoods, most people had the resources available to install "modern" wonders that make the prospective old home restorer cringe -- the replacement portholes [windows], the insul-brick, the aluminum siding. We had to look at about six ordinary houses before we found one with most of its original hardware intact. However in many areas there are still plenty of these homes surviving. I found one of these about two years ago, in Sharpsburg, a town just outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Unable to afford the upkeep on a rather large and elaborate Queen Anne, we needed something a little smaller and more manageable.

This particular home was built in about 1872. How do I know this? Being rather busy with a small child, a full-time job, and a new house, I took the easy way out and hired a professional researcher. I also did this with my Queen Anne, and it paid great dividends. The prospective buyers were fascinated by the house history. Our real estate agent, who specializes in historical properties, felt that the house history played a big role in the speed of that sale and the price I was able to get. But I must admit -- I had the history done on the new house just because I was too impatient to wait until my baby was old enough to let me go to the library and do it myself. What I hope to share in this article is the role a seemingly ordinary, nondescript house can play in the local history of the place in which it exists.

In 1872, the lot upon which the house now stands was sold to a German immigrant named William Pfusch. William Pfusch was a self employed building contractor by trade. A quick scan through the deed books for Allegheny County, Pennsylvania show that between about 1860 and the late 1890s, William Pfusch was purchasing tracts of property in Sharpsburg, building houses on them, and reselling or renting them. This was a boom period in the town's history; there were several large employers in business during the latter half of the 19th century nearby. These included the Heinz Company, Vesuvious Iron & Nail works, and several large brickyards along the Allegheny River. The canal, and later the railroad, between Pittsburgh and the East ran alongside the river, cutting right through Sharpsburg, further encouraging growth in the area. Biographical information on nineteenth century building contractors in the Pittsburgh area show that most of them built within about a half mile of their homes, and usually lived in a house of similar size and cost to the houses they were hired to construct.

Soon after purchasing this particular lot, Pfusch built this home, which he lived with his second wife, Elizabeth, and many of his 11 children. Four children were the children of his first wife, Anna Catherine. Anna Catherine died between 1863 and 1866. In 1866 William Pfusch married his second wife, Elizabeth. Together they had another seven children.

In about 1883, he subdivided the lot and built another, slightly larger home on the other half, and moved the family into it. This house, built in the second empire style with a mansard roof, also still exists. It is likely they needed a larger house to accommodate their growing family. Their last two children were born during this time, in 1881 and 1884. Between 1884 and 1898, my house was a rental property. Because the 1890 census was destroyed, we do not know who lived in the house during this period.

However, by 1898 William Pfusch was renting the house to his daughter and son-in-law, John C. and Elizabeth Sheppard, who had four children. John and Elizabeth purchased the house from William in 1902, and lived there until 1919.

In the early 1920s the house was purchased by an Italian family - Massimino and Victorio Rizzo. I purchased the house from one of the granddaughters of this couple, who told me many interesting things about the house. She told me that her grandfather used to make wine in the basement, which solved a mystery about the odd concrete bins still down there. She said he kept a kitchen garden in the back, and a larger garden on another piece of land farther up the hill. The Rizzos enjoyed playing music together, so no doubt they would feel at home in our parlor, with a baby grand piano, two fiddles, two mandolins, an Irish flute, a fife, and three or four penny whistles.

The house is identifiably Italianate: It has carved roof brackets and two over two double hung windows. The windows on the front side of the house are rounded on the top. We found the original wooden shutters from the front of the house under the insulation in the attic, along with a tin dishpan that dates from the 19th century. Four of the original windows have been lost -- unfortunately including the lower two front windows. These were replaced with a 1950s tract house style picture window. However you can still see the outline of where they used to be, as they had to patch the clapboards there. And yes - it still has its original clapboards.

The front door leads into the stair hall -- a typical narrow stair hall found in many old houses in Pittsburgh. This is my favorite thing about this house! The staircase goes up to a landing, turns 180 degrees, and continues up another four steps. The landing is square, but the handrail and the area between the two sections of stairs are curved. The woodwork was originally grained to look like quarter sawn oak. The graining in the front hallway survived intact, needing only minor repairs. After making the repairs, we sealed the graining with polyurethane as it has a very high lead content.

Originally there were two rooms downstairs: the parlor and the dining room/kitchen. The fireplaces in the parlor and the dining room were plastered over, but during the wallpaper stripping process we could see the outline of where they were. The dining room fireplace was about 60 inches high, suggesting it was a cooking fireplace. Later it was reduced to a normal fireplace, then closed for a cook stove (the round hole for the stove pipe being still visible), and finally removed completely. Period maps indicate that the kitchen was added off the dining room prior to 1891,
although it was substantially remodeled in the 1950s. Originally there was a small porch along the side of the house, directly behind the stair hallway. This was enclosed sometime between 1891 and 1906, creating a bathroom and coat closet on the ground floor and a third bedroom on the second floor. At the same time a back stairway was put in, leading upstairs from the dining room. The cellar stairs were relocated from under the main staircase to under the back staircase. These modifications were no doubt made by the Sheppard family. With the enclosure of the porch, the second floor now has three bedrooms. The back bedroom was shortened slightly to accommodate the back stairs.

The original baseboard, door, and window trim remain in most rooms of the house. Since this house never had elaborate woodwork, plaster ornaments, and stained glass, restoration of these elements takes on the primary role in retaining the historical character of the interior. Evidence I see suggests it was all originally grained. Due to allergy considerations, we did not restore the graining beyond the front stair hall.

The woodwork in the rest of the house is painted in colors that harmonize with the wallpaper and carpets, the most common treatment in the 1870s. We added salvaged trim around the windows and doors in the kitchen to help them blend in with the rest of the house. Around the large dining room closet, we had to remove some damaged trim, where we found several sizes of nifty old square nails, including some very small square finishing nails.
Many of the original doors were missing. The originals are four panel doors, with iron rim locks and grained doorknobs. We moved most of the original doors downstairs, and replaced the upstairs doors with salvage doors that are very similar but not identical. This provided us with the exact type of door needed to restore the original floor to ceiling cupboard in the dining room.

The floors throughout the house are softwood, as at this time most houses had wall to wall ingrain carpet. The floors on the first floor are very badly damaged. Currently we have a good reproduction patterned wall to wall carpet on the first floor. Upstairs, the floors were painted around the edges with a large area rug in the middle of the room. We continued this usage -- with new paint, of course.

In the future we hope to restore the parlor fireplace. One original fireplace remains in the master bedroom, which at least shows what the mantel would have looked like. It is a simple wooden mantel that was no doubt also originally grained. The two original upstairs bedrooms once had fireplaces, making four total. The third floor has been finished for a long time as one big room, which we use as a family room. The Rizzos used it as a spare bedroom. It has a walk up staircase, directly above the main staircase, leading up from the second floor bathroom. As the house would not have had bathrooms originally, this room was originally a small bedroom. These mini-bedrooms were often used as nurseries.

I hope this brief tour is enough to show that an ordinary house can be interesting. I am fairly sure that the memory of William Pfusch is preserved nowhere else but in my house history, as he is not included in any of the local biographical books at the library. Yet many families around town no doubt live in other houses he built. Do they ever wonder about the man who built their homes? One can only hope that they do, and hope that other people decide to restore ordinary houses while there are still some available.