Saving the Postmaster's House

One of the grand beauties of architectural preservation is that a dedicated single individual can save a historic building and assure its continued cultural benefit to the community.

Take Mike Lyons, for instance.  Twenty years ago he stepped up to buy a large but deteriorating Queen Anne Victorian-era house and move it four miles from its original lot in Irvington to the Woodlawn neighborhood.

True, he was able to buy the house for $1 because a developer planned to demolish it to make way for row houses as a result of a city of Portland zone change.  The development value of the 10,000-square foot lot made the future impossible at that location impossible for the house, no matter how attractive it was architecturally.  Several people had been interested in acquiring the house, but Lyons was the only one to step forward with a proposal to move it.

 It was not an easy move, however.  The top story had to be removed in order to fit under power lines and not damage trees during the four-mile trek up Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.  For a fee of $80,000 in 2000, the bottom portion was placed on dollies for towing.  Giant forklifts carted the upper story and eventually hoisted it back into place. 

 “The hardest part was placing no-parking signs along the route,” Lyons said.  “There had to be three or four signs per block.  That is a lot of blocks.”

 The house, often referred to as the Postmaster’s House for reasons we shall discuss in a bit, was built in 1895, during the peak of the Queen Anne architectural style of Victorian era.  The building displays several prominent elements of Queen Anne residences, including the unbalanced or asymmetrical front façade composed of a large gable and the smaller gabled dormer; a fancy wooden decoration at the gable’s peak; fish-scale shingles in addition to horizontal siding; and numerous turned spindles in spandrels decorating the front porch.

We can think of these decorations as celebrations of the industrial revolution, when machines were perfected to crank out the decorative pieces.  The intellectual and artistic rebellion that followed brought us the Arts and Crafts movement, when designs reverted to much simpler creations created by human hands rather than machines.

 

It took about a year’s worth of work replacing the stripped interior and all utilities before Lyons could begin living in the 1895-era residence.  “I still love the house,” he said.  But like any old house, the restoration is still not finished.  “I keep telling myself one more year,” he said.

The house has historical interest in addition to its architectural values.  It was the home of Portland postmaster Frank S. Myers, who was appointed to that job in 1913 by President Woodrow Wilson and reappointed by Wilson in 1917.  Wilson subsequently had second thoughts about Myers and fired him in 1920.

 The source of Wilson’s discontent is not firmly established.  It may have been because Myers was slow to rehire soldiers return from World War I, or because of conflicts Myers had with Portland Mayor George Baker.  Regardless, Myers challenged his termination in court, contending that since his job was filled with “advice and consent” from the Senate, he could not be fired without the Senate’s approval.  Myers asked for the pay that he believed should be coming to him.

 Alas, the case wasn’t decided by the U.S. Supreme Court until 1926.  By then Myers had died, but his wife stood in line in case he won his back pay.  In a split decision, the court said the president had authority to fire anyone in his administration.  The case firmly established the separation of the president’s executive power from the legislative authority of Congress.

 Over the following decades, the Postmaster’s House fell into decline, like many large houses of the Victorian era.  It had been used as a boarding house for many years before Lyons acquired it.  Though its exterior looked forlorn, Lyons said the building was still structurally sound and that much of its original interior woodwork remained.

Twenty years after the move, we can still thank Lyons for his dedication and hard work in the spirit of preservation.  Lyons, who runs a paint-removal and architectural woodworking business, hasn't given up on preservation.  He's currently working on a long-vacant rural farmhouse nearly overrun by blackberries.  

Original site of Postmaster's House