SOUTH LINCOLN: THE BEGINNING
My eleven-year-old son, Joe, has Asperger’s syndrome, characterized by obsessive interests in subjects of little interest to others, so no one took him very seriously when he began his “old house” fascination in fall 2008. We tried, unsuccessfully, to divert him as he endlessly speculated on the age of our house, photographed the woodwork, evaluated the pipes and traced the ductwork…Until the day we stripped linoleum from the bedroom of our other son, David, and discovered a small patch of hardwood in the closet that didn’t match. It was positioned in a direction opposite the other hardwood; it was finished off; and it was surrounded by wood pieces that had been nailed to cover something up, and raise the level to match that of the hardwood. Weird stuff.
It was that discovery that changed an eleven-year-old Aspie’s obsession into a family project, the history adventure of a lifetime, as we began to research our home. Our research project has taken us to places not frequently visited by fifth-graders and their moms: the county recorder’s office in search of title deeds, the county clerk’s office in search of antiquated court records, the local cemetery, the research room of the Aurora Historical Society. We have read obituaries and high school yearbooks over 50 years old, and we have become weekly users of the library’s microfilm machine. We have accumulated a list of “friends,” long since buried, that we will never meet--Mildred, Cecil, Marion, Charlotte, Hazel, Louis and Dorothy. We have experienced the thrill of living history as an elderly woman told the story of her life in our living room, knowing that her first-hand knowledge will someday become extinct.
Here, then, is the story of our home, South Lincoln Avenue in Aurora, Illinois. This is a work in progress; our questions have not all been answered, and we don’t know if they ever will. But this what we now know, after three months of research.
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Our home was born, in a sense, on August 2, 1883, when prominent Auroran Henry H. Evans sold a plot of land to Ebenezer Denney, lot 5 in the new Evans addition on South Lincoln Avenue. The original selling price was only $300. Evans, a Civil War veteran, had a thriving real estate business, and he founded a number of subdivisions on both the east and west sides of Aurora. His grantee, Denney, had also fought in the Civil War, attaining the rank of lieutenant and leading the 50th regiment of colored troops. Denney had come with his parents from England in 1855, at the age of 15. Having returned from the war, he was working in his family’s furniture business, a trade which had been passed down from his father. It is likely that he developed the property, because the selling price had inflated to $1700 by the time he sold it to William Prindle in September, 1888; however, it is unclear when the home was actually built. There is no record of Denney ever living in the home.
William Prindle, the second property owner, came from another family prominent in Aurora history. His father, Edward, was the vice-president and superintendent of a small company, Prindle Manufacturing, and actually patented the Prindle carpet sweeper. William, his oldest son and second-oldest of six children, followed his father’s trade by working as a machinist. He married a woman named Adelaide and had one daughter, Mary, born in 1886. Little is known about the Prindle years, as he and most of his brothers later moved out of the area and, therefore, has a genealogy that is difficult to trace. We do know, however, that he had a gas lighting system and installed running water in June 1895. He moved out around 1899 and rented the home to William Brightwell for a year or two before selling it to James Harley in 1901.
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