Tuesday, March 28, 2006

The Flavel House Museum, Astoria, Oregon

This is one corner of the Flavel House, one of Astoria's most prominent and most attractive landmarks. One of the things I find most interesting about it is that it was built about a year before my grandmother's house in Corona, but about "that much" more ostentatiously.

If a moulding was 8 inches tall in her house, it was 10 inches tall in the Flavel house. I haven't measured, I'm just saying the Flavel House, although in about the same style, was a little more showy. I think by square footage, Grandma's house was a lot bigger, but I don't know for sure. Looks can be deceiving and I'm not used to measuring property. Her house, built by her grandfather, George Lewis Joy, was considered "the finest house in Corona." It also had a lot of land with it, and fruit trees. The Flavel house was certainly that to Astoria. Well, what happened to Grandma's house will take a lot longer to tell than I want to write tonight, and it's best left for other posts, but its destruction is one of the reasons I wanted to tour this house in Astoria - in some way, it must give a similar impression to the one given by her place in its heyday, which was over before I was born. I always wondered what the house had looked like, felt like, and been like to live in. And I've always regretted what happened to it.

It's hard to get a picture of the whole Flavel house without getting the power lines. Today I opted for a partial view and no wires. I've posted more pictures of the Flavel House in one of my web albums.