Twenty years can really change a person – or a building. As to the former, I think I would barely recognize the me of 20 years ago (and that’s not a bad thing!). Searching for a house documented two decades ago is often a desolate task culminating too often with the notation “no longer extant.” So as I peered at a tiny black and white contact sheet photograph of a house surveyed in 1999 in the small town of Oneida, Kentucky, I didn’t hold out much hope of finding it still standing.
Circa 1999 image from the files of the Kentucky Heritage Council.
Oneida, located in northern Clay County where the Red Bird River, Goose Creek, and Bullskin Creek merge to create the South Fork of the Kentucky River, dates to around 1892, when the post office was established. It is perhaps best known for the Oneida Baptist Institute, a Christian boarding school founded around 1898-1900.
And it is home to the small frame T-plan house pictured above – the first building I saw when I turned onto Second Street.
I was pleasantly surprised to find the dwelling still standing.
The T-plan is a common historic house plan in Kentucky -if you were to look down on the house type from above, it looks like the letter “T” set on its side, with the cross bar of the T being a gable fronted wing. There is almost always a porch joining the two wings of the house, and entry into the dwelling is from that porch – sometimes with one entry door, sometimes with two.
Façade of the house. The window in the projecting front gable has been shortened.
While this house survives, there are many others that have vanished from the landscape.
A stone chimney is all that remains of a house on a once-prominent corner lot.
Preservation can be a hard sell in rural areas, especially as older generations die and younger people want to live in more populated areas. Houses are torn down or left to crumble – but sometimes they stubbornly cling on to life. And it’s those small victories that buoy me up through the gloom of finding empty lot after empty lot.
