TALCOTT W.Va. (Hinton News) – Last Saturday, we started restoration on Granddad Bernard Thompson’s house in Talcott. It started as only two rooms in 1954 when he married my Grandmother, Helen Beatrice “Bea” Thomas Thompson. As their family grew, they added on to the living room, which is what you see here, with granddad standing at the front door shortly after completing the addition.
The living room had very unique old oak baseboards and trim that granddad always told me was mixed in old lumber his grandfather, L.W. Thompson, had stored, who was a contractor in Summers County. I remember admiring that trim when I was a child playing on the living room floor with granddad’s antique toys. We had to change the room around; therefore, we are having to change the trim, so I salvaged the old trim for one of my future repurpose projects.
While removing the trim from around the window, Mom noticed something stuck beside the window casing. Upon removing it ever so carefully, we discovered it was a Hinton Newspaper that had been rolled up and used as insulation. We pulled and pulled others out until we ended up saving 13 full rolled-up papers. Prior to this, we found a date he wrote on the original hardwood floor from when Dad and I laid laminate flooring in his living room in 2013. He had written “Built in 1957.”
When we unrolled a paper that was found around the window, we noticed it was dated 1958. The dates weren’t adding up, so it got me to investigating. After examining this photo more closely, I remembered that the “front door” used to be on the side of the house. Granddad told me that after he built the porch on the front of the house, he relocated the door to the front wall.
Apparently, this was done in 1958, and when he did so, he “insulated” around the new window that was installed, where the door was at first, with Hinton Newspapers from that year. About 80% of the papers are in relatively good condition. We have only begun to carefully unfold them.
Upon reading some of the papers from that year some of the top headlines were: “Hawaiians Watch Nuclear Missile 540 Miles Away,” Civilian Agency To Direct Conquest Of Outer Space,” “U.S. Marines Land in Lebanon As U.S. 6th Fleet Standing By,” “British Paratroopers Land in Beirut Today,” and an ad I found interesting as I was just in the store today.
The ad reads “Lawn-Boy Mower End of Season Sale 2 Models-Reductions up to $30 Hinton Hardware, Inc.” Maybe I will take the ad back into the store and ask Richard if he will honor it? HaHa.
One last thing, as I could go on and on for hours about the “Little House.” This is what the family has always referred to as granddad’s house since it started out as only two rooms.
My brother and I had just been talking about how people called me and granddad “Sanford and Son” because we both liked and bought “junk” so often, just as Fred and Lamont Sanford did on the TV show. David Lee opened the first paper he pulled out and flipped to this Little Liz cartoon. It reads “Junk is the stuff you threw away yesterday just before you needed it today.” It seemed very fitting, seeing as how I was in the process of salvaging the trim that granddad had installed when he built the room in 1957/58.
