Bubble wrap, labeling, heavy lifting — packing up an entire house can strain muscles and relationships. Now factor in three owners and 164 years and you have a situation that calls for a lot of moving boxes.
Since the first week of August, volunteers have been cataloging thousands of items inside the historic Dougherty House on Old Mission Peninsula. The contents of the home, built by the Rev. Peter Dougherty in 1842, will be put into storage as one of the earliest frame homes in the region is restored and turned into an educational museum.
Earlier this month, the brass skeleton key to the Dougherty House was passed from the Larson family to Old Mission Peninsula Township. In just over a year, Old Mission Peninsula volunteers raised funds to purchase the home built by Dougherty, a Presbyterian missionary and the region's first European settler. Community members formed the Dougherty Historic Home Site in 2005 and the Peter Dougherty Society is currently raising funds to restore the home and property.
Future plans for the home and grounds include an extensive restoration that will showcase what life was like in the home inhabited by the Rev. Dougherty, his wife, Maria and their nine children. First, however, every corn planter, oil lamp and horse collar must be carefully packed away.
While it seems like an impossible task — think 16 decades of kitchen gadgets — Paul Burns has the two year project ahead of schedule. In fact, he hopes to have 2,000 or so items cataloged in four weeks.
As the project director, Burns has helped create a tagging system that meticulously identifies each artifact; be it a horse-drawn sleigh or a toy trinket. Each item is also digitally photographed and entered into a computer cataloging system. The cataloging is also coordinated with Morse Moving and Storage of Traverse City; the company responsible for moving and warehousing the Dougherty House contents.
"This way in the future, after the house is rehabilitated, if we need a certain item we'll know exactly what crate it is," said Burns, who served as warehouse manager at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago for 31 years.
Throughout the cataloging project, "antique specialists" have been on site to help identify and assign a monetary value to the myriad of antiques inhabiting dusty nooks and forlorn crannies. For volunteer Nancy Rushmore Hooper, however, many of these items carry a far greater personal worth.
The Rushmore family were the second owners of the property and three generations lived or vacationed at the Dougherty House over the course of a 100 years.
"It was a wonderful place to play as a child," recalled Hooper, who visited her grandmother, "Minnie" Lane Rushmore each year with her parents, Maurice and Mildred. "Our family built the fireplace and I remember sitting on cushions in front of it, all of us playing blocks ... this place is home."