Phillip and Tamara Walsh restored their historic home on 716 W. Main St. Wednesday, June 15, 2022.
Tom Russo| Daily Reporter
By Elissa Maudlin
GREENFIELD — When Phillip and Tamara Walsh bought the house on 716 W. Main St. in September 2012, they knew they wanted to restore it to its original appearance because, as Phillip said, “architecturally, it’s beautiful.”
However, they didn’t know all the surprises they would find in the estimated 170-year-old house that would win them a preservation award from Greenfield Historic Landmarks one year later.
The Walshes moved out of their previous Indianapolis home because they wanted to find a safer place for their family of three with one on the way, and ideally were looking for an historic house. Originally, the house on Main Street was listed as a two-unit rental property, not desirable for their search for a family home. However, when the listing changed to a single-family home, a decision Phillip assumes was because of the house market at the time, they bought the house.
“I was seven months pregnant and I had my heart set on a different house, and we lost it by not much money,” Tamara said. “It was nighttime when I came and looked at [the Main Street house]. So I didn’t see a lot of the ugly. And then, after he had already signed on it and everything … I came in the daytime, and I cried.”
Tamara said the house “wasn’t livable” when they first bought it.
“There’s windows that were broken. There was ivy growing in one room; the walls looked like Jumanji,” Phillip said, referring to the 1995 movie.
This wasn’t the first time Phillip had dealt with houses that needed work. He bought and renovated houses from the 1920s and ’30s that were falling apart so he could rent them out, and he owns rental properties. But those houses were not like the house on Main Street, he said.
For the first two months after they had bought the Main Street house, the Walshes had four to five other people who helped fix the outside. After that, the Walshes mostly worked on the house on their own.
As they worked on the house, pieces of its history started to see the light of day, including the footprint of a grand staircase hidden underneath the flooring and horse bones. Many walls are three bricks thick and logs with bark still on them are used as floor joists under 70% of the floors, Phillip said. Burnt cedar shake was found behind a porch that was falling off the house.
“I used one of my bucket trucks to literally push the porch back onto the house, banging it with sledgehammers,” Phillip said. “And it was shaking the entire front of this brick house.”
The Walshes learned from people in the area that the cedar shake burned in a fire in the 1930s. These people knew the history of the house, which had been passed down for generations, Tamara said.
“When we moved in, our daughter was six and our son was not born yet … There’s this man and woman walking down the sidewalk. And the woman was like, ‘I love what you’ve done with the house,’” Tamara said. “And then she was like, ‘My grandma died in your living room.’”
The Walshes believe their home was once the county vet, and think the door and narrow staircase on the side of the house led to the servants’ quarters.
The second floor, meanwhile, “is boring,” Tamara said, the result of a renovation in the early 2000s, and Phillip said not everything in the house is from the original time period.
In 2013, the Walshes earned the “Restoration in Progress” award from Greenfield Historic Landmarks, which has been around since 1980 and aims to encourage preservation in Hancock County, Cathleen Huffman, board president of Greenfield Historic Landmarks, said via email.
“Certainly there’s some work involved, but it’s a labor of love and so worth it,” Huffman said via email. “We appreciate the people working to save our county’s historic architecture.”
The Walshes didn’t know they were nominated for an award until they were invited to a ceremony at the James Whitcomb Riley Boyhood Home and Museum. Huffman said via email board members are usually the ones to nominate houses and Greenfield Historic Landmarks gives five to seven awards a year.
Phillip said it felt good to be recognized for the work they had done.
But the work is ongoing, Tamara said, and surprises from the house’s history still peek out from the shadows. When he had someone till their garden, Phillip found a new sidewalk.
“When you have a house this age, everything’s a surprise,” he said.
