The mystery of older buildings

Our home has been called The Busselman House by our family since we moved to this small town and realized that the longest-owning recent residents were John & Thiele Busselman, an elderly couple. When people asked us where we lived, we also used that because they would automatically know where we lived.

Later, when I got some time, I got a list of those who had owned it from the Treasurer's Office at the county level, and found that the White-Cline family had lived in it a long time, but not as long as Johnny and Theile. 

The house itself was built in 1911 in the Fourth Addition of the small town. It was not intended to be a farmhouse, and didn't include too much land. A strip of land between it and the next-furthest-south tract was platted as a street, but never used, that land was used by all the homeowners who lived here as far as I know. 

There is a roomy root cellar here, too, which has been repaired about three times, and I'm guessing it went in shortly after the house did, but there is no documentation for the root cellar.

Charles Riesen was the first owner of the house, from 1912 to October 1916, and Mr. Riesen did not get enumerated in either the 1910 or the 1920 Federal Censuses. I haven't found a trace of him so far.

The property was sold to James E. Jenkins, in October 1916. James, his wife, Elizabeth, their two boys and James' brother George lived there. In 1910, James was a salesman in Cass County, Nebraska, before he moved to TinyTown. When he lived at another location in TinyTown in 1920, he was in real estate and his brother George attended college. They had sold the place to Fred G. White in 1918. James Jenkins and family were in Chicago by 1930, where he was a bank president.

Fred White had been married in 1897 to Edith Bland. They had four children and divorced, with the three teenaged children still at home lived with Fred. Fred married Mattie Cline Mossberger, an Iowa girl and recent widow, in 1915. She had a son, Johnnie Mossberger, a baby, later known as Johnnie White. In the census year of 1920, Fred & Mattie, his three teenagers, Cliva, Orval and Iva, Mattie's son Johnny, now six, and Fred and Mattie's children, Margaret and Jerold, ages 2 and 1, lived there. Add to the nuclear family, Anna Cline, Mattie's mother, Everett Cline, Mattie's brother, and a hired man Will Ramey.

Early in my ownership of the house, and before I investigated further, I thought all 11 of them lived in the house. Certainly in an age when you didn't have a lot of possessions or clothing to store anyway, it could work. Eleven people WOULD have fit in here. In an age where more than one person generally slept in a bed, it seemed doable. It has 3 bedrooms, after all. And there's no reason a living room can't be used as a bedroom each night.

Enter the Woodshed. Actually a refurbished corn crib, very similar in proportion to the building at right, we called it The Woodshed. We discovered it had had electric service, scars from having had a woodstove, and a phone line. 

We initially thought that Mister Busselman fitted this building out so he could have some time away from Misses Busselman, which may have been true, but one corner of the building was fitted out to be a kitchen. Windowless, but a kitchen. Mister B wouldn't need to make food independently from Mrs. B. That would have been a true bit of gossip and a travesty of marriage. Word around town was that Johnny & Thiele were very happily married.

However, it was seriously possible that the hired man might have used that building to live in. The more I work in The Woodshed, the more I know someone definitely lived there. The house was re-wired by REA , but the woodshed was wired for power long before that and never updated to REA standards. Two very small windows faced east, each only about 20 x 20, on either side of a large but house-dimensioned, east-facing door. There's a rather rustic door on the west that would allow for a stupendous breeze shooting through some evenings. The square footage of the building is about 15 ft x 15 ft., plenty of room for someone in the 1920s.

Mattie's mother, Anna Cline had been born in 1865 in Iowa and married William Cline 1883. They had six daughters, and a son, Everett, who was 17 in 1920. It's possible Anna and her son were visiting her daughter, Mattie, in the summer of 1920, and were enumerated while they were here, and didn't ordinarily live here. 

Anna's husband William Cline died in 1926 in Buchananan, Missouri, of heart disease. There is no evidence they were divorced and some evidence that they did not. Anna later remarried. 

Some other arrangement is also possible. Ninety years later, no one knows. Just the evidence of what's in that building, teasing a person, tauntingly hinting at further stories.