t wasn’t her first find, but Connie Kelsey thought it might be the most important yet, her treasure chest.
She had pulled up a few wooden boards in a bedroom of her 1886 Victorian house in Snohomish to work on the wiring. She flashed a light under the floor and spotted the box tantalizingly wedged about 8 feet away.
She bought a telescoping pole with a magnet on the end and poked at the box furiously but it was apparently wood.
“Through a lot of cussing I finally got it out,” she said. “I was hoping it was money. Something very important – not even money.”
It wasn’t money but it was a treasure, a Good Year Fountain Syringe Kit with a few syringe parts inside, probably a remnant from Dr. Thomas Keefe, who owned the house in the 1890s.
It is one of several dozen items she and her husband, Jeff Kelsey, have found during the restoration of their historic home. From time capsules to everyday items that slipped between the cracks, many buildings and homes like the Kelseys’ contain a trove of items hidden under floors and between walls.
For the Kelseys, discovering an item is a glimpse into the past, a connection to those who lived before them. Each item, whether a worn baby shoe or a coffee tin, is an artifact and the house an excavation site. The discoveries won’t be sold for profit.
“When you take apart a house it’s important you’re cautious about not only what you’re going to do to rebuild it, but the artifacts you find,” she said. “Some people just gloss right over them. They don’t seem to have a clue and don’t seem to get how important the excavation of a renovation project is.”
Restoring houses has become a lifestyle for the Kelseys, who have painstakingly restored two pre-1930s houses. They consider themselves caretakers rather than simply homeowners.
Since they bought this home a year ago, they’ve begun the tedious process of removing the mishmash of modern additions and fixtures that past families added to make the house livable and replacing them with period materials.
The restoration work has been punctuated by the exciting discovery of items inside the walls and under floors: coffee and baking soda tins, Asian buttons popular a century ago, playing cards, rusty forks, an iron ink well, an 1890 voter registration card, a Victorian earring attached to the original card.
A warranty guarantee the Kelseys found for Tricora Relief corset stays, offering $20 if they broke, was probably cut off the box and left in the attic years ago. A hoop slip found collapsed between floor joists now hangs in one bedroom.
The couple muses about how the items got where they did and the people who owned them. Connie Kelsey gently fingers a worn pair of baby shoes and sets them on a table in the front parlor.
“You think about the foot that was in there and wonder if they made it to adulthood because lots of kids didn’t in those days,” she said. “People in the East lived a lot longer … here it was the Wild West.”
Connie Kelsey’s son discovered a Victorian coin purse with an 1883 five-cent piece still inside. She believes the purse probably slipped from the attic down inside the wall, where her son found it resting on top of a first-floor window frame while rewiring.
Some items may work their way into the walls of a building accidentally but sometimes people may want to leave a piece of themselves behind.
Construction workers renovating a commercial building on Rockefeller found a haunting photograph, curled with age, of a woman wearing a hat, said Eric Taylor, director of the Snohomish County Museum and Historical Association.
“You wonder who was the person who put it there. Did they have a relationship with this woman? It’s an interesting thing to think about when it comes to human nature,” Taylor said. “Sometimes people will want to leave their mark so people that come after them will know they existed.”
The most historically valuable finds by the Kelseys may be several items with ties to pioneers in the area, including George Allen, the first owner of the Kelseys’ home. He owned Allen Bros. Plumbing and Tinning, a hardware store. For months the Kelseys would discover playing cards with the word “Acorn” on them and couldn’t figure out what they were.
So the Kelseys were excited to find a hand-held fan with a young girl’s face, an advertisement for Acorn stoves. On the back is stamped “Allen Bros. Acorn Stoves,” proof he sold the stoves and an explanation for the “Acorn” cards strewn around the house.
“Sometimes you’ll discover something and months later it will dawn on you what it is,” she says.
Another advertisement card they found makes a plug for shoes sold by Isaac Cathcart, another local pioneer and entrepreneur. The back is covered with penciled columns of numbers, probably someone figuring accounts, Connie Kelsey guessed. She said she’s never seen anything like it and she should know. She serves as president of the Snohomish County Historical Society.
A house the Kelseys used to own a few streets over had its share of hidden treasures too. Handwritten recipes, an 1887 book, a business card and silverware are some of the items current owner Lisa Pickford has discovered during a renovation project.
The Kelseys know there are other treasures to find in their home. Some women who grew up in the house say they left a time capsule in the walls of the downstairs bathroom when they were girls more than 40 years ago. But the Kelseys won’t tear apart any walls searching for it.
“A lot of walls we haven’t gotten into yet,” Jeff Kelsey said. “We’re going to leave that for future generations.”
Debra Smith is an Everett freelance writer. You can e-mail her at features@heraldnet.com.
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