“A Great Addition to Deadwood”

So we’ve uncovered some pretty cool stuff about the house, but I’m going to have to do this in stages. First, the setup:

Thanks to Mike Runge over at Deadwood’s Historic Preservation Department, we got a ton of great historic info on our house. One of the best pieces is an article from the January 1, 1899 issue of The Daily Pioneer-Times, one of the local newspapers. It’s not a real high-res scan, but you can read most of it.

It’s a perfect description of the house’s layout, and it’s given us a couple of pieces of information we didn’t know before:

• The bedroom at the back of the house on the first floor isn’t a bedroom at all – it was built as a library.
• The house used to have some great views of downtown Deadwood. You know, before a forest of trees grew up in the backyard.
• The small room at the top of the stairs was a “den,” which could have meant a lot of things, but probably meant a study or office. It’s not much bigger for anything else.
• And Wardman liked green.

Actually, it seems that he really, really liked green. That’s for part two.