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September 14, 1999TC's Slabtown shows for a dayRemodeling job reveals 1880s walls made mostly from waste lumberBy MIKE NORTONRecord-Eagle staff writer TRAVERSE CITY - A piece of Traverse City's early history came briefly to light on Monday - and was just as quickly covered up again. Workers carrying out a renovation project removed the siding from Bud and Dorothy Round's home on Second Street, exposing the building's original walls. Like many of the other homes in the neighborhood, the house was built from ill-sorted slabs and planks of scrap lumber that were scavenged by the original builders and nailed in place to provide free housing for 19th-century working families.
There was plenty of wood lying about at the time, since sawmills lined nearly the entire Traverse City waterfront. Mill owners allowed their employees to take whatever they wanted, and for years the area bordered by Front, Union and west of Division was known as Slabtown because so many of the houses had been built from waste lumber. But most of the evidence of those humble beginnings has been covered with siding and shingles, and is only occasionally exposed to view. The Rounds decided to put on a new roof this summer and ended up having their house re-sided in the bargain, so the ancient walls were brought to light for a single day before disappearing under layers of blue Styrofoam and brown vinyl. "It sure was cobbled together," said one workman, looking at the patchwork design of boards and planks under their tarpaper skin. "But it's been there for 140 years or so, so it can't be too bad." The Round family has lived in the house for over a century - Bud was born in the house next door, which the family also owned - but he thinks the building predates his grandparents, who arrived here from Czechoslovakia in the late 1880s. His grandfather, Anton Topinka, ran a saloon across the alley in a brick building on Bay Street now occupied by real Estate One. In those days, the neighborhood was sometimes called Little Bohemia, a name still preserved nearby at Li'l Bo's tavern on Front Street. Large numbers of Czech and Bohemian-speaking workers were employed by the mills, said Bud, who's now 75, and children quickly learned to get by in both languages as well as in English. A few fragments of that past survive in the Round house, too - in the form of Czech-language newspapers that were found pasted to the slab-wood walls to keep wind from blowing between the cracks. Dorothy Round soaked several of the papers loose, and was able to recover scraps of local and overseas papers from various periods in the late 1800s. "It's hard to tell what's under the surface when you look up and down the street," said Dorothy. "That's why you hear lots of people talk about Slabtown, but a lot of them don't know where it really was." |
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