Another revelation about our new old house. From the discovery of the amazing fifteen occupants in 1930, I knew the house had had its west wing rented out at the time. Further deed digging gave me a new conundrum: according to the town’s deed index, the owners of the house in 1930 seem to have bought it twice! The next day I was able to get back and read the deeds. As you’d guess the lot and house were actually subdivided and had changed hands independently several times in the later 19th century and beginning of the 20th. This detail, from a plat filed in 1871, shows a line running through the lot, carving off a chunk of the SW corner:
The lot line as drawn in here actually goes around the perimeter of the house (from the back left corner to the front door), but the deeds show that this lot accompanied the west wing of the house itself, and in the deeds a bounding line is described as going through the house. Actually, some of the language describing lot boundaries on various deeds doesn’t quite match up with preceeding or succeeding deeds. I hope there’s not a thin slice of the front lawn that got left out when the puzzle pieces were reunited, and now rightly belongs to somebody’s heirs in Arizona…
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