PRINCETON — Princeton lost a piece of its history over the weekend when a fire destroyed the historic Waveland Home, which was 191 years old.
Local historian Carolyn Traum lives right down the block from the Waveland Home, which is located in the 700 block of West Locust Street. Traum said she remembers being woken up in the middle of the night, seeing a slight glow and lights outside. The next morning, Traum discovered that the Waveland Home had been destroyed. The local fire department has yet to determine the cause, though the house had fallen into disrepair years prior.
“Well, actually, I did see the glow from the house but didn’t step outside my house to find out where the glow was coming from,” Traum said. “The next morning, when I realized what it was, I came up here. Then several other people in the neighborhood had started coming to witness to what had happened. I think we were all just kind of shocked. We couldn’t believe it. We knew that the house, no one had lived in it for a number of years, but it was still a piece of the history that was standing.”
The home was originally built in 1834 by Dr. Thomas Logan McNary and his wife, Maria Louise Flournoy. In that era, the many neighborhoods now surrounding the home would not have been present, instead home to fields, lush gardens, a grand driveway leading up to the home, as well as a greenhouse with a hydraulic system to supply water to the town. Some of the property McNary owned even stretched down to what is now known as Princeton’s downtown area, as well as the Butler Building. Much of the property was given to the city of Princeton in the 1860s, after the Civil War.
In a 1955 issue of the Filson’s Quarterly, Maria Louisa Darby describes what the interior of the house looked like during her time there. She was the daughter of a close friend of Dr. McNary’s.
It reads, in part: “From the veranda double doors, with opaque white panes, led to a spacious hall with pale-tinted walls. A Brussels carpet in reds and brown entirely covered its floor. Against the wall opposite the stairway was a long mahogany sofa in red rep. The white woodwork, the faint grey walls, the warm effect of the carpets, the cheerful fireplace, the quaint rosewood furniture with carved roses, the square piano, the guitar, the flute, all made an interior where the charm was enhanced by pretty curtains with rich designs of flowers.” Darby also described orchards, a forest and tobacco fields that once surrounded the homestead.
After the McNary family, the house went into the ownership of the Darby family. When the Darby family relocated to France, the house was purchased by James A. Stegar in the early 1900s. During the Stegar family’s ownership of the Waveland Home is when Traum recalls fond memories of visiting and playing there frequently as a child. Having seen the house destroyed, Traum describes it as “like losing an old friend.”
“To me, it really was a piece of history, because I started coming up here to this house to visit the people who lived here — Mamie Steger Martin in the ‘50s and in the ‘60s, and all the way up until even after my daughter was born in the early ‘80s,” Traum said. “It was losing a lot of the memories that you had there, you know, as you drive by. But it closed an era, and I said, maybe something greater will happen here, as had happened almost 200 years ago.”
Other significant historical details about the house include McNary’s son-in-law, who had studied engineering. He, with the help of others, blasted the land and found water, which is now Big Springs in Princeton. With a hydraulic system and water tower, they would furnish water to the house, stables and gardens. In 1860, McNary gave 6 acres of land to the Princeton Collegiate Institute, a site that later housed Butler High School, which was later called Caldwell County High School. At that time, the town’s population was just under 700.
Multiple residents in the area have remarked that though this is a loss of history for their city, they hope something adequate will replace the home. Traum said she wants something that would symbolize further development for the future of Princeton.
“It doesn’t have to be the grandiose home that’s here,” Traum said. “Now, I don’t know what those plans are, but I like to see that as something goes, something new comes in its place. That something will be developed that would enhance the community going forth.”