A Southside house filled with clues about its own history may have more to tell about its own construction.
Students from Clay Tucker’s dendrochronology class at the University of Southern Mississippi visited the Spiers-Laws-Kaye house on Seventh Street on Friday to collect core samples of the timber used to construct the home. Dendrochronology is a scientific method for dating events, environmental changes and artifacts using annual growth rings found inside trees.
The samples will be analyzed for tree ring data that may provide insight on when the wood was harvested with the goal of determining when the home was built.
Robert Thompson bought the home with plans to restore and resell it. During the renovation, contractors have found several clues that offer suggestions about when the house was built and how it has changed, like whitewashed studs behind the siding of one room that indicate it was a later addition to the home.
An architect who previously owned the home believed it was built sometime in the 1830s. The marker in front of the home dates its construction back to 1880.
Thompson assumes it was an antebellum home, but he said it could have been built even earlier as a two-bedroom pioneer structure. He said some early maps indicate the home was an out-building of the Cartney-Hunt house up the street, but there’s no way of knowing for sure.
At least until Tucker’s class came along.
“It’s a structure we don’t have a lot of history on. All of these little clues are telling us things about the place, but the best clue will probably come from the tree ring information that Dr. Clay is going to be getting,” Thompson said.
Tucker said the history they already know about the home — combined with the results from the dendrochronological analysis — can provide a good indication of when construction started.
“Most of the work is history. … Dendrochronology is sort of the final puzzle piece,” he said “A big part of this is listening to locals, the community and the homeowner. All of this is necessary for us to do the work that we want to do.”
That work includes using tree-ring analysis to determine when the wood was harvested. Because wood is often processed soon after harvest to prevent deterioration, the timber’s age can help determine when the home was built.
While dendrochronology may get Tucker’s class close to what year the house was built, he said other supporting factors, like the types of nails and saws that were used in the home’s construction, may offer further clues about the house’s age.
“Our answer to Robert might be, ‘It’s not easy to confirm, but we think you’re right,’” Tucker said. “But we’re going to keep going in Columbus. That’s what we want to do.”
Tucker plans to continue looking into the ages of houses in Columbus since the city has an abundance of historic homes to choose from.
“One of the great things about Columbus that I found on my visit is that this isn’t the old house in Columbus. This is one of the dozens of old houses in Columbus,” he said. “It’s sort of a little bit of a gold mine, if you will, because there aren’t a lot of cities that still have all of their old houses.”
Thompson said everyone in the neighborhood is anxious to learn more about the history of the house.
“You’ll be able to hopefully through this process bring us the DNA of the buildings and tell us scientifically a little bit more about what happened here back in the day,” he told the students.
McRae is a general assignment and education reporter for The Dispatch.
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