Doug Decker, like a lot of homeowners, was interested in historical accuracy when his family restored the porch of his 1912 Alameda home seven years ago. Decker, a project planner with the Oregon Department of Forestry who has a passion for history, went in search of an old photograph but came away with something worth even more.
The journey led Decker through plumbing and building records, land maps, neighborhood plats, city directories and newspaper obituaries until he found a 90-year-old who had moved into the house on Northeast 30th Avenue in 1918. After interviewing the man at his retirement home, Decker began the remodel armed with an insider's story of the house. He knew architectural details and -- just as important to him -- how an earlier family used the rooms, even where the previous owners always put their Christmas tree.
"We were able to bring those things into our lives and it just added a whole context to the house," he says. "For a person interested in history, it was invaluable."
Neighbors who watched Decker's porch construction were so curious about the history of his house that they soon became more interested in their own. Today, Decker spends nights and weekends moonlighting as a researcher of old houses who compiles histories for others at $400 to $500 a project.
He's not the only one in Portland responding to a growing interest in house histories. In tough economic times, we seem to seek nostalgia. In an age when the world seems to spin faster than ever, house history classes at the Architectural Heritage Center and the Multnomah County Central Library are filled to capacity.
"We define our lives so closely by the spaces we're in that I think there's a natural curiosity about what has come before," Decker says. "The value to me personally was being able to connect the past to today by bringing into focus those lives for my family."
At the Central Library, where most searches begin, reference librarians say the recent interest is fueled, in part, by boomers, many of whom grew up in brick houses of the 1950s that now qualify as historic, according to the U.S. National Park Service, which sets the bar. While some homeowners want to know the history of their houses for resale or tax purposes, others are curious about who came before them.
"When people reach a certain point in life, they look around them and ask, 'What is this context I'm in?'" says Emily-Jane Dawson, a reference librarian at the Central Library. "It's a human impulse."
The desire to know more about an old house seems especially suited to a city like Portland, where 63 percent of the housing stock will be 50 years or older next year and another 35 percent 75 years or older. "It's a city," Dawson says, "with a high amount of people connected to the community, a lot of activists, and that encourages people to be proud of where they live and want to preserve it."
But finding the history of an old house is not necessarily easy.
The thing most seekers are looking for, whether for curiosity's sake or guidance on a period renovation, is the one thing many don't find -- a photograph, Dawson says.
Unlike Seattle, where a 1930s citywide project aimed to take a photographic portrait of nearly every house, the closest effort in Portland was the Historic Resource Inventory from the 1980s, a push to document a broader representation of houses and neighborhoods.
Other old-house history hunters want to know the name of the architect who designed their home. They, too, often come away empty-handed, primarily because many of the city's historic homes were built from standardized designs. Many others built before World War II were sold by companies that advertised in catalogs, including Sears, and shipped the lumber and building supplies by railroad cars.
Original blueprints are also tough to find, though digitized Sanborn maps at the library, created to assess fire-insurance liability, can reveal the outline of a house and help pin down when porches, rooms and garages were added on or removed.
People who want to know the style of their old house sometimes find themselves without firm answers, says Val Ballestrem, education manager at the Architectural Heritage Center. The question is complicated in Portland because the city went through a building boom after the Lewis and Clark Exposition of 1905 and the late 1910s, a time when home styles were evolving from showier Victorian to simpler Craftsman tastes. Resource books at Central Library and the Architectural Heritage Center on Grand Avenue can provide generalities but not specifics about designs, floor plans, building materials, even typical furnishings and fixtures, Ballestrem says.
Anyone embarking on an old-house history search should expect the effort to take time, Decker says. He estimates each project requires at least 40 hours of research. But the result, for history lovers, can be rewarding.
"If you are at all curious about human stories, you can watch families grow and change and move out," he says. "That's the humbling thing to me, looking at old-house histories, you see how quickly our lives change."
-- Larry Bingham: 503-221-8262; firstname.lastname@example.org