KRULL HOME TO GET NEW LIFE
KENDRA WALTKE/Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Saturday,
December 1, 2007 6:00 pm
photos by Eric Gregory
The 140-year-old stone house was
almost forgotten. Inhabited by trees
that had forced their green fingers through a patchwork roof. With roots that
had cracked its foundation. The place
was filled with animal filth and the vestiges of 50 years’ abandonment
and vandalism. But the Krull House —
which may be one of the oldest structures still standing in Lancaster County —
could again become a home.
Two years ago, Matt Steinhausen
bought the two-story limestone house that was built by German immigrants in the
1860s. He’s on a 20-year plan to
restore it and, he hopes, make it his home.
For now, fearing vandals, he’s hesitant to pinpoint its location, beyond
noting it’s in southern Lancaster County. It’s off the beaten path, in a draw,
near a creek.
Steinhausen’s roots run deep in
the Salt Creek soils of southern Lancaster County. His knowledge of the area
has helped him track down the history of this almost-lost home.
He’s heard stories passed down
from Krull children and their children — tales of hardship, hard work,
migration, Native encounters and other aspects of early Nebraska life. The neglected house, with its 18-inch-thick
limestone walls, still has a long way to go before it’s habitable. But if anyone can save it, Steinhausen
appears to be the one. A history buff
with a love of fine craftsmanship and years of construction experience, he once
worked as a home restorer, specializing in badly burned-out houses. “After the things I’ve seen,” Steinhausen
said, “I look at this and say ‘easy.’ ”
Seven-year project
The project began with a
book. Steinhausen learned about the
Krull House from a 1903 Lancaster County plat book owned by his grandfather’s
grandfather. “I wondered what kind of
house could take seven years to build,” Steinhausen said, and so the mention
stood out in his memory. Sometime
later, he heard the Krull House was standing. “I nearly jumped out of my
chair,” he said. He contacted those who
owned the farmland and house, and began a few years of research in 2001. He learned the house is one of a
handful that remain from the 1860s in Lancaster County — only five or six
farmhouses are older.
The first steps to build the
home were taken in 1863 by Frederick Krull, a German immigrant. Recollections by Krull’s son William,
recorded in the 1903 plat book, say the family moved to the spot in late 1862,
living in a covered wagon before moving into a dugout they built on the
property on Jan. 7, 1863. The stories
tell how the Krulls spent that first night sleeping on straw-covered ice. Rain
washed into the dugout and froze because Frederick Krull had yet to finish a
fireplace. Steinhausen believes a
depression near the Krull House is where the dugout had been. For seven years, as the story goes, the
family lived more or less in the ground, waiting as a sturdy but modest
stone home took shape.
Frederick Krull hauled the
lumber from Nebraska City. The limestone was quarried in Roca, though two years
passed before he accumulated enough stone.
Today, hand-hewn marks are still visible on the rough blocks.
Known as Black Fred, Krull was a
blacksmith by trade, one who reportedly knew how to shoe oxen. Steinhausen
guessed a nearby cut-off trail, well-traveled in those years of western
migration, would have kept him busy.
Otherwise, in the early years, the Krulls were largely bereft of nearby
neighbors. The village close by
wouldn’t be founded for almost 25 more years.
House has provenance
Steinhausen’s preservationist
nature led him to spend four years looking for stories about the house. He didn’t plan to buy it. “I dove into this thing head first. I looked
up all the descendants and found histories and diaries. I realized this house has
a provenance like no other, a history that had been forgotten or unknown for 60
or more years. “I told the owners they
had to save it; not only because it has great architecture, with its pioneer
construction, but it has a historical significance, a cultural
significance.” In the end, Steinhausen
sold himself on the idea. But the Krull
House yard was choked and impassable from dozens of Siberian elm trees. The
rough land around it was unfarmable and unbuildable, in a designated flood
plain that’s zoned agricultural. Even
years before the roof sprung Swiss-cheese-like leaks, an unwise 1912 renovation
had let in water that damaged the house.
No matter.
Steinhausen paid $60,000 for 10
acres and the house, knowing that if anything happened to damage the structural
integrity of the home, the county would never let him do more than just
bulldoze it. “If this doesn’t work, I’m
just out,” Steinhausen said. Since then
he’s “mothballed the house” — covered the roof with steel, shuttered the
windows and doors, cleared all the rubbish and stabilized some crumbling
stone. The yard looks like a yard
again. The Steinhausens even painted
the window covers to look like friendly blue curtains. But inside the house still has large gray
chunks of fallen plaster, huge holes in the floorboards and interior walls and
a fine mist of musty ashlike debris.
And it’s never had electricity
or indoor plumbing.
Stories told
Steinhausen heard the
stories of the children born on the Krull place, passed down by their children
and grandchildren. A story of fetching
a doctor all the way from Nebraska City, who came too late to save Fred and
Dorothea Krull’s little girl Caroline.
That story came from the daughter of the couple’s second Caroline,
born a few years later, who lived long enough to see the completion of the
stone house. During his work, Steinhausen had found a little metal tag
engraved with her name. He heard
stories of how Dorothea went to midwife a baby and got lost on the
darkness of a pitch-black prairie until their dog came and led her home. Of how the Krulls and others once fled their
homes for fear of a Native attack — and how Fred and Dorothea believed the
stress of that exodus injured the baby the expectant Dorothea was carrying at
the time; daughter Frederika would be born mentally challenged. Other stories told how a Native man gave the
Krulls a pony to thank them for their kindness.
Eventually the house passed to
son William, who grew up to become a banker. Presumably, he sold the house
before he moved to town in 1912, and it passed through other hands until the
last family, the Moormeiers, moved out in 1949. All that history is based on the stories Steinhausen has heard
and accounts he’s discovered. He
uncovers more tangible pieces of the story as he works, finding marks left by
an earlier workman’s hands.
As he recovered the lumber from
the Krulls’ collapsed timber-frame, tenon-and-mortise barn, the boards he found
bore Roman numerals. They were put there to mark where each piece would fit
into compound dovetail joints. “Someone
would have carved these joints in the winter and assembled them in the spring,”
Steinhausen explained. As Steinhausen
talks, his hand brushes over faint square impressions on the barn wood — marks
you can tell were made by a blacksmith’s heavy square hammer, he said.
He’s even researched the names
of carpenters who left their names carved in boards inside the house.
The Steinhausens like to work
and picnic together at the Krull House. He and his wife, Kim, assign little tasks
to their children, ages 6 and 8. “I
always tell the kids, here they’re doing all this work but they’ll never
live here,” Steinhausen joked.
Historical integrity
Steinhausen started to clear a
way for the house’s future in 2005.
With help from county planners, he was granted a rarely used special
landmark permit that will allow him to fix up the house. The trick is, he has to preserve the house’s
historical integrity but also make it safe for habitation if he ever wants to
live there. “There is no code for, say,
18-inch-thick stone walls with no insulation. And when it’s been empty this
long they require you to bring it up to current codes,” he said.
His career as a home inspector
helps. “Everyone knows I’m careful,” Steinhausen said.
His hobbies help, too. “I’m a
scavenger. I’m already stockpiling late 1800s stuff.” He’s been joined in his quest by neighbor Marvin Bice, who’s
given countless hours of free labor. It
also helps that Steinhausen knows the time period of the home’s construction so
well. He’s dismantled
painstakingly built barns and documented and photographed falling-down
barns across the area. He knows
masonry, too. He’s worked in restoration. He has a degree in construction
management. He’s also an amateur
photographer with a love of Nebraska history, pursuing historical questions
such as searching for the grave of Standing Bear’s daughter, who died in
Southeast Nebraska during the Poncas’ forced march to Oklahoma. Those are skills he’ll need to save the
Krull House and contribute his own story to the tales he’s gathered.
The house will retain an 1870s
feel when it’s done, he said. The
family plans to add a wing with at least a modern kitchen, bathroom and laundry
room. Nearing 40, Steinhausen sees the
Krull House as a place to retire someday. “That’s why I say I’m on a 20-year
plan,” he said.
While dozens of new rooflines
can be seen from the family’s home just a few miles from Lincoln, living in the
Krull House will put him and Kim further out from the path of development.
On this place almost forgotten, once hidden in a thicket of trees. But, to Steinhausen, the perfect
location.