How to Go
What: WASSO’s annual Holiday Home Tour & Cookie Sale
When: 2 to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday
Where: Five Springfield area homes
Tickets: $20 at the homes the day of the tour or $15 in advance.
Details: Go to www.springfieldsym.org or call (937) 325-8100
Other homes on the tour:
• 727 Edenwood Drive, the home of Tom and Diane Ericksen. Look for grandpa’s train under the tree and a centerpiece by Glen Garden Gifts of Yellow Springs.
• 2726 Wildflower Drive, the home of Brian and Toni Hellwig. Look for nativity scenes throughout the house and enjoy a short video in the theater room and an arrangement by Bill’s Enchanted Flowers of Urbana.
• 3118 Campbell Drive, the home of Cathy Donahoe and DeWayne Campbell. Here a backyard fireplace and interior stone fireplace add a rustic feel to a modern house brightened with an arrangement by Schneider’s Florists.
• 802 Kenton St., the home of Chery & Leroy Abston. The tour of the former St. Joseph Parish house will commemorate the 100th anniversary of the 1915 blizzard during which the first priest took up residence. The floral arrangement is by Flower Craft.
Had a version of “The 12 Days of Christmas” been written about Mary Jo Groves and Rob Baker’s house a dozen years ago, it likely would have included verses about raccoons racooning, vagrants vagranting, bats a flying, asbestos rotting and even dung a drying.
No more.
The light, joyous feeling of the more traditional “12 Days” will be in the air from 2 to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, Dec. 12 and 13, when their place at 818 N. Fountain Ave. serves as one of five stops on the annual Holiday Home Tour & Cookie Sale to benefit the Springfield Symphony Orchestra.
Just as the event is made possible by the Women’s Association of the Springfield Symphony Orchestra, the renewed 5,500-foot square structure was made possible by a partnership between Turner Foundation and the home’s current owners.
Wanting to save the grand structure finished in 1909 by noted Ohio architect Charles Shawver, the Foundation was willing to restore the three-story home’s tile roof, tuck point the brick and redo the stucco and rotting wood if it could find potential owners willing to spend as much as it might cost to buy a new house to redo the interior.
Groves, who at the time was the Wittenberg University physician, and Baker, a professor in the school’s Political Science Department, seized the opportunity.
Married in 2003, “we looked at new construction we couldn’t afford,” Groves said. Although neither was interested in doing the actual rehab work — “we’d both done that in previous marriages,” Baker said — both also were drawn to the project, both for the home it could provide them and the chance to play a part in saving it from the wrecking ball.
That the two of them fell in love with the place while standing on the porch probably was a good thing, because what they saw once they walked in the front door on that first visit might have scared them off.
“It looked like Iraq after we bombed it,” Groves said.
Although the house itself wouldn’t have survived the actual “shock and awe,” its construction with studs placed six inches apart rather than the current standard of 15 inches means this old house lacks the creaking sounds of others the same age.
That feeling of solidity helped them see potential in a place their neighbors disliked because of bats that seemed to circle it like fleas.
Nearly 10 years later, the story of the bats is safely tucked away in the home’s nostalgia file next to three others related by Barbara Sipp of Columbus, a granddaughter of the home’s second and longest owner, Preston P. Crabill.
A great-grandson of one of Clark County’s founding families, Crabill graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1900, worked for Foos Gas Engine Co. out of school and seven years later founded Central Brass Fixture and made his mark as the designer and patent holder for wrap-around bumpers for horseless carriages.
In 1909, “Daddy Pearl,” as he was called, moved into the house and had what might properly be called a taxing relationship with a representative of the Internal Revenue Service, who was a regular visitor and who took a particular interested in a big, black Cadillac — one of the earliest models — that Daddy Pearl kept in the garage.
Legend has it that Crabill willed the car to the IRS man with a note saying, “Thank you for all your good service over the years,” knowing it would get the man fired, which the story says, it did.
The second story comes from the house’s third floor and dates to the 1960s, by which time Crabill had died and his widow had donated the home for use by Wittenberg’s Art Department.
During that time, members of Delta Sigma Phi, directly across Fountain Avenue, broadened their appreciation of art by ascending to the third floor of their fraternity house in the afternoons to observe the progress being made by art students drawing live nude models in the third floor studio.
The third and saddest story also involved former fraternity members who were enjoying refreshments on the porch of the by then abandoned Crabill place when two guys claiming to be repairmen walked off with a large stained glass window that had been just above the second floor landing on the house’s south side.
“They were stealing it,” Groves said.
Those who take the weekend tour will see it has been replaced by another stained glass window whose central panel was designed and made at Bonadies Glass Studio of Yellow Springs and whose framing panels Groves made with her late father, Joseph Drexel.
After years of his trying to persuade her to take up stained glass, Groves took a class at the Springfield Museum of Art and “fell in love with it.”
The window they helped restore together is now a part of both the home’s and family’s history.
Groves and Baker are effusive in their praise of contractor and carpenter Paul Kencheff and his ability to both see and help them realize the place’s potential.
Starting with what Groves describes as the house’s “great bones,” and not hampered by restrictions sometimes placed on historic renovations, they knocked out first floor walls to open up the interior and replaced the original windows with much larger expanses of glass to let in light needed to appreciate the wood interior.
The only original woodwork on the first floor is the flooring of the living room, though two period mantels from neighborhood houses provide accents.
The wide open spaces make it possible for Groves to do the cooking she loves for family and other gatherings occasions while sharing that time with the people she’s cooking for.
For his part, Baker, in low-maintenance husband style, asked for and received the three things he really wanted: An ottoman, his own closet and a commodious refrigerator.
(The house came equipped with a “guy” bonus: A full length urinal in the basement, an inspiring ceramic piece left over from the house’s days as the Art Department.)
Among the things to look for while touring the home are:
• The living room piano, which once was used to accompany silent films shown in Pittsburgh’s Loew’s Penn Theater, current home of that city’s symphony orchestra.
• Groves’ use of colors in the second floor bedrooms, a scheme that employs neutrals on the outside walls and a bold color on the inside wall and sets the palate for the room.
• Original leaded glass panels her father hung and repaired for display in the second floor parlor.
• The “Queen’s Trusses” in the second floor’s northwest bedroom, huge pieces of hardware architect Shauwver installed to bear the weight of the tile roof.
• Groves’ intentional modernizing of style and lightening of color leads from the first to third floors, ending with a massive finished attic that features track lighting and a beige coloring scheme.
• Also look for the book Christmas tree on the third floor, an idea Baker said he filched from the internet but that nonetheless combines a love of the holidays with their love of books.
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