Hedrick House

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, every good house has a story, and this one has traveled to get here. We're talking about the Hedrick House, and if you think a house can't have an adventure, well, listen up.

The story starts about thirty miles southwest of where we're standing, on Tenth Street in Huntsville. The year is 1900, and a builder named Elias Jones is putting up something special for a man named J.E. Coldwell.

Jones wasn't cutting corners, either. He gave that house a second floor turret dressed in fish-scale shingling, and a big wide porch dripping with gingerbread ornamentation. Victorian all the way.

The kind of place that makes you stop and stare. Now, the house changed hands over the years, and in 1919 a man named Walter Gibson Hedrick came into the picture. Hedrick ran a grocery store and meat market, which means he was a practical man, a man who kept a community fed.

But he had an eye for a fine home, and he bought it. His family held onto that house for a good long while, right up until 1978. And here's where the adventure part kicks in, because in 1978, they moved the whole structure to this very site.

Not a photograph of it. Not a memory of it. The house itself, picked up and brought here to Trinity County.

It settled in, and eventually, in 1996, it got a new wing added on the west side, giving it a little more room to spread out. Walter Gibson Hedrick passed in 1944, so he never saw the moving day, never saw that new wing rise up on the west. But his family carried it forward.

And the house is still here, fish-scale shingles and gingerbread and all, proof that some things are just too fine to leave behind.

What the marker says

Originally located on Tenth Street in Huntsville (30 mi. SW), this house was built for J.E. Coldwell in 1900 by Elias Jones. Walter Gibson Hedrick (d. 1944), the owner of a grocery store and meat market, bought the home in 1919 and members of his family owned the structure until 1978, when it was moved to this site. The Victorian residence features a second floor turret with fish-scale shingling and a large porch with gingerbread ornamentation. The house was enlarged in 1996 with the addition of a new wing on the west side. (1999)