DUANE
Get the App
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, the year is 1895, and in Washington County a man named Frank Wood is doing what he does best. The man was a home builder and lumber company owner, and he knew a thing or two about putting together something worth looking at.
That year he built a house, and not just any house. This was a late nineteenth-century L-plan Victorian dwelling, and Frank Wood was not going to leave a single surface unadorned. Fan-shaped porch brackets.
Wood shingled gable ends. Decorative bargeboards. And on that front gable, corner brackets so heavily embellished they practically hollered at you from the street.
Turned-wood columns holding the whole proud thing up. You get the sense Frank Wood looked at plain lumber and saw an argument waiting to be won. Now here's where the story takes its first turn.
Frank built that house in 1895, and later that same year he sold it. The buyers were H. G. and Annie Wittbecker, owners of a bakery, which means this particular block of Washington County once had the smell of fresh bread drifting toward one of the finest Victorian porches around.
The Wittbecker name would eventually give way to another. In 1920, a merchant by the name of Robert Weiss acquired the house, and his family held onto it. Held on and held on.
All the way until 1982. The fan-shaped brackets are still there. The bargeboards, the turned columns, the embellished gable.
Frank Wood built it in 1895, and it is still making its argument.
What the marker says
Home builder and lumber company owner Frank Wood built this house in 1895 and later that year sold it to bakery owners H. G. and Annie Wittbecker. A late 19th-century L-plan Victorian dwelling, the house features fan-shaped porch brackets, wood shingled gable ends, decorative bargeboards, heavily embellished corner brackets on the front gable, and turned-wood columns. Merchant Robert Weiss acquired the house in 1920 and it remained in his family until 1982.