Originally Posted by
majederr
The windows and doors all have history. Windows are from Saint Paul's Cathedral convent in Pittsburg(would love to hear what stories they have) and doors are from Homer Taylor mansion in East liverpool,Ohio, pottery(Knowles/Taylor). A little history on the doors:
EAST LIVERPOOL - An early-morning fire on Sept. 23 destroyed the Taylor Mansion at 894 Park Blvd., writing a sad final footnote to a story of a pottery fortune lost and an aristocratic pottery family humbled but not broken.
The Taylor family lost their wealth and social status in The Great Depression. But they had each other to depend upon and they knew how to make pottery. In a rented chicken coop in Burbank, Calif., they performed the ordinary labor of making pottery and held their family together, even as Homer Taylor was dying slowly of cancer. Once one of the richest men in East Liverpool, he didn't have money to go to a doctor when a skin cancer recurred.
When Homer Taylor took over from his father John N. Taylor as president of Knowles, Taylor and Knowles Pottery in 1914, KT&K was America's largest pottery with 700 workers. Homer's turn-of-the century marriage to a daughter of the Sebring China family had been "the wedding of the century," with a railroad car reserved to carry East Liverpool guests to the event.
When their grand eight-bedroom house on Park Boulevard was built in 1918-20, Homer bragged it was "bigger than the country club."
However, by 1929 KT&K had failed and the family had lost everything in the economic disaster that was The Great Depression. They sold their possessions and moved to California. Homer and his eldest child, John, moved to Los Angeles first, in 1933. The rest of the family followed in July 1934.
Eileen Taylor wrote that she was thrilled to see Los Angeles, feeling "this was the place for which I had been searching all my life." She was herself a young mother when they went to California, with her daughter Patty, Chris Crain's mother.
When Pearl and her children located the hotel where Homer, John and an Uncle Ray were staying, they enjoyed "the most wonderful reunion with everyone crying, laughing, and talking at the
same time. We were shocked, however, at Homer's appearance, as he has been ill and had not written us about it. Some years previous, he had had a small skin cancer removed from his face, and now it had started to return. He had suffered considerable pain and had not consulted a physician because of the expense involved."
Homer also was depressed about the family's dismal financial outlook. "He had been able to sell some cherished letters he had received long ago from his friend, our former President, William McKinley. This swelled our finances a little," Eileen wrote.
The jobs that family members found were lost as The Depression deepened, and in 1937 Pearl and Homer turned back to doing what they knew: making pottery.
Except that now, instead of being the president with hundreds of potters working beneath him, Homer was the labor force, and Pearl and their grown children worked alongside him. They rented one of four buildings that had been chicken coops in Burbank for $10 a month and began making what came to be known as KT&K California ware. Their little pottery measured 80 by 24 feet. At first it did not even have its own kiln. The ware was taken elsewhere to be fired. With modest success the Taylors leased the other three buildings one by one and built their own kiln. It was a bottle kiln, the entrance to which had to be bricked up every time it was fired.
Californian Chris Crain is a great-grandson of Pearl and Homer who collects their ware and is proud of his family history.
"Knowles, Taylor and Knowles of Burbank, Calif., produced art ware for approximately 10 years, from 1937 to 1948," Crain wrote. "In 1942 the number of employees, including Taylor family members, was approximately 15. The bottle kiln was eventually replaced with a tunnel kiln. . . While you will not find K.T.K. California in every antique mall, it has been found in every part of the country."
Homer Taylor died of cancer in 1943, said Crain. After KTK California ceased operations in 1948, Crain's grandparents had a pottery for about a year in Hollywood, on Sunset Boulevard, then moved to Dallas in 1949.
Another of Homer and Pearl's children, Bonnie, married Lee Wollard. They started their own pottery in 1941 in a different building on the same property. Eventually they owned the West Coast Pottery and produced "Lee Wollard" figurines, said Crain.
When the mansion burned, it broke Crain's heart. He had returned to East Liverpool and got into the house not long ago, and dreamed of coming back and buying it someday. (The house was vacant and poorly secured after an owner got into financial trouble.)
The fire devastated Joseph and Kathy Boyd of Coolidge Avenue, Glenmoor, who had bought the house from a real estate agent after the huge old structure had been sold at sheriff's auction. They were in the process of remodeling it as a primary residence for themselves and their large family. They have 11 children, six of them still at home. Kathy Boyd said the house was insured and a house will be rebuilt on the lot, but probably not on the same foundation.
The grandeur and the history that lived in the house now live only in memories and stories such as this.
I have a pic of the doors in the mansion, but can't seem to locate it on my computer.I purchased the doors from Kathleen Boyd in 2006.