Presented in Pecha-Kucha format at the Murray-Goltz Archives Building in Bellingham, WA on October 25, 2011 for Archives Month. Presentation slides available at SlideShare.
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On a clear night (1) in November 1882, a young millworker and erstwhile miner arrived by boat on the Ash Street docks in Portland, Oregon, just a month shy of his 23rd birthday. With him were his earthly belongings in a small pack, a mining partner who had traveled with him, and the dollar-fifty the two had between them. Born in Searsmont, Maine, Samuel Bedlington Cobb had hearkened to Horace Greeley’s call to ‘go west, young man,’ taking up whatever odd jobs presented themselves across the Midwest, before landing in Portland to ply his carpentry skills.
By 1880, Portland was a burgeoning and muddy city of nearly 18,000 people. Wooden sidewalks lined dirt roadways. Anti-Chinese sentiment was increasing. Sewers had not long been a part of daily life, and clean water was often at the whim of the currents of the Willamette. Not ten years earlier, a fire had destroyed 20 city blocks, but Portland was on the rise as a major port to the Pacific and the Transcontinental Railroad was on its way. The next few decades would mean rapid industrial and economic growth for Portland, as well as population growth that swelled the city to over 200,000. Opportunities abounded for those - usually white men - who were willing to take chances, invest, and fully embrace capitalism on the farthest edges of the American frontier.
In the industrialized new century, manufacturing took on the trappings of being “scientifically” managed. Even something as fundamental and expertly crafted as the family home could be ordered via catalogue, cut to specifications in a factory, shipped on a railroad boxcar, and put together by Dad. The irony of the kit home is that many of them were designed as Craftsman-style homes, based on the premise that simplifying, rationalizing, and harmonizing production would engender a more Progressive ideal for society - yet these homes were made in factories on the backs of low-skilled workers, not by knowledgeable, well-compensated craftsmen. The first company to pioneer the kit home, Aladdin, even enjoined its potential buyers to “hire an ordinary man to put it up.”
Sears, Roebuck & Co. followed a few years later with their Modern Homes series and, by the teens, kit home companies had sprung up around the country, including here in the Pacific Northwest - Hewitt-Lea-Funck Company of Seattle and Fenner Factory Cut Homes of Portland among them. Magazines like Popular Mechanics and Good Housekeeping were filled with ads that promised a home of one’s own, affordable and easy to assemble. The ads focused on the benefits to the family domain - that a man could not only afford to provide a home for his wife and children, but would erect it with his own hands (and the help of friends, male relatives, or a locally-hired contractor).
During my internship this summer at the National Archives and Records Administration in Seattle, I was able to assist in the processing of a series of exhibits from District Court in Tacoma, originally totaling about 180 cubic feet. Heavy weeding became necessary, as many of the documents or objects couldn’t be tied to specific case files in our holdings. In some instances, a particular wide-eyed intern, who shall remain nameless, made impassioned arguments for saving exhibits that otherwise were destined for witness disposal. One such victory for this intern was an disorganized pile of filthy, oversized envelopes and assorted other smaller documents. Inside each envelope was a set of plans for a kit home produced by the National Home Building Co. of Vancouver, Washington, 85 sets in all. Each one was a detailed set of plans, with front, rear, and side elevations, framing diagrams, floorplans, and detailed specs. Miscellaneous items included plans for a “Cotillion Hall” for Portland, detailed diagrams of architectural flourishes for the homes, such as fireplaces and columned bookshelves, and scraps of receipts for kits sold. The signature that united all of them read simply and tantalizingly, S. B. Cobb.
By 1916, Samuel Bedlington Cobb had married, started a family, and built himself into a pillar of the Portland community. Working his way up in the lumber business, he and a long-time friend eventually took over the Standard Box & Lumber Company and made it successful, expanding one plant, only to watch it burn to the ground two years later, moving operations to a new site. (At the scene of the fire, Cobb had watched with characteristic calm, praised the firefighters’ efforts, and chalked it up to “spontaneous combustion.” [2])
In 1911, using pattern and plan books (3), he designed and had built a house for his family at 1314 SE 55th Ave. in the Mt. Tabor neighborhood of Portland - an eight-bedroom, Craftsman-style home that is now on the National Register of Historic Places. Cobb and his wife, Florence, raised their children in this house and Cobb died here in 1951, at the age of 91, having outlived his wife and three of his children.
But in 1916, Cobb was in the prime of his life. He owned land, was successful in business, and provided a good life for his wife and six children. He was a prominent member of the Portland community, was chosen for various civic committees, and had served as a state representative twice, in 1902 and 1914. Always a businessman with an eye for opportunities, he joined his son, Earl, in the creation of the National Home Building Co., a kit home company based in nearby Vancouver, Washington. The 25-year-old Earl Cobb incorporated and managed the company, but his father soon became the largest shareholder, due in large part to the 75 unique sets of plans the lumberman designed himself and sold to the company in exchange for thousands of shares of stock. Newspapers lauded the creation of the new company and its initial sales, crowing that “Anything from a chicken house to a mansion can be made here.” A year after incorporation, the Oregonian declared that “The demand is greater than the company can supply” and that the plant was being expanded to double capacity. Indeed, the series at NARA shows that several homes were produced and shipped out to diverse parts of the country, including one modified to a customer’s specifications. At least two NHB homes were built in the city of Portland. (4) But only a year-and-a-half after the expansion, in October 1918, Cobb lost his son to influenza and by December, the Clark County sheriff had sold the assets of NHB. The company filed for bankruptcy, and claims by creditors snowballed. In 1923, the bankruptcy trustee sued Samuel Cobb over the plans Cobb had used to buy stock in the company, claiming that he had overvalued the plans, to the detriment of the company’s creditors seeking remuneration. Cobb lost. (5)
In an autobiography Cobb wrote for Camp Namanu, a Camp Fire Girls site located on land the lumberman donated, not a word is dedicated to the kit home company he started with his son. Perhaps Cobb kept silent about this period of his life because it didn’t fit the narrative of the successful Portland businessman; perhaps it was because he associated it with the early death of his son, Earl. Maybe the explanation is far simpler: in a life as adventurous as his, maybe the 90-year-old Samuel Bedlington Cobb had largely forgotten about the few years that he spent in the kit home business. And so had the documentary evidence - until decades’ worth of smoke-riddled court exhibits arrived at NARA Seattle to be processed by an archivist and two lowly interns. At the end of his autobiography, Samuel Cobb left for posterity two poems of his own creation, a stanza of which could as easily call to archivists to be mindful of the task before them: “Then, let’s be up and doing / Though sometime the hour be late, / Still keep working, working, / Let not labor ever wait.” (6)
1. “October in Oregon,” Willamette Farmer, 3 November 1882, 1.
2. “Fire Leaps High. Spectacular Blaze Destroys Box Factory. Damage about $35,000. Flames Spread with Marvelous Rapidity. Adjacent Blocks in Danger. Standard Mill is Completely Destroyed, with Docks - Neighboring Buildings Partially Saved - Lack of Fireboat Felt.” The Morning Oregonian, 2 Nov 1903, Page 12, Historic Oregon Newspapers, University of Oregon Libraries. http://oregonnews.uoregon.edu/lccn/sn83025138/1903-11-02/ed-1/seq-12/
3. Ann Fulton, “National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Cobb, Samuel and Florence, House (1911),” National Park Service, November 1998, pg. 2. http://pdfhost.focus.nps.gov/docs/NRHP/Text/99000607.pdf
4. “Activity is Shown in Realty Dealing. Good-Sized Transactions Are Closed and Others Reported Nearing Consummation. War Influence Not Felt. Building Programme Includes Two School Structures in Portland for $170,000, One in Corvallis and Six Elevators,” The Oregonian, 29 April 1917, pg. 23.
5. C. W. Ryan, Trustee of the National Home Building Co. vs. S. B. Cobb, United States District Court, Western District of Washington, Southern Division, Case #2856, 1918. Exhibits and case file in the holdings of the National Archives and Records Administration in Seattle, WA: RG 21, USDC, WDW, SD, Tacoma, Exhibits, 1887-1965, Boxes 77-82 for plans and 82 for these images; Box 88 for Minute Book for National Home Building Co.
6. Samuel Bedlington Cobb, “Memoirs of S. B. Cobb, 1859-1950,” Camp Namanu Alumni Association. http://www.namanu.com/texts/Cobb.shtml
