stage set

I've written before that I think that houses are like theaters, where we set-up the productions of our lives.  This weekend, I came across the title work on our house passed on from two previous owners, the sort of stuff that is no longer given to homeowners.

In legalese, we learn about the Indians who are quickly dispatched from here in treaties of 1818, the competing claims of Britain, Spain, and France, and later Virginia and other American states.  Settling all of this, the world of families buying up the land is detailed, beginning in the late 1820s.

There are divorces, muddled facts about heirs, liens, marriages that were going to happen and tat did not, the sub-division of the land beginning in the 1920s, a bankruptcy or financial downfall in the late 20s, and a big suit of some kind among the family that developed the townlet in the 1940s.

I knew that Indiana was a hotbed of Klan activity in the 1920s. Still, it was painful to read the deed restriction calling for only pure white Caucasian purchasers.  Race, that bugabo of human naming, is stretched among these words of pure, white, and Caucasian.  Exceptions were made for non-P-W-Cs who were hired servants.

The biggest houses in the townlet came during the 1920s, many of them sitting on double and triple lots.  The more modest, like ours, were built in the 1940s and 1950s.