Restoring memories
Newark man spends retirement renovating family dwelling.
NEWARK — Fueled by memories and TV dinners, Terry Shipman is slowly restoring the house he loved so much as a child.
Set on more than a city block and with plenty of mature trees, and on a high point in this town midway between Batesville and Newport, Shipman lives in the house built by his maternal grandfather, Thomas Hindman Dearing, around 1890 in nearby Akron.
The house was dissembled and moved to Newark about 1901, and a second story was later added.
Family lore, Shipman said, has it that what was left over after deconstruction and reconstruction “wouldn’t fill a wheelbarrow.”
One hundred and 13 years after it was moved, Shipman works diligently to restore the house as he remembers it.
“There’s a little boy who used to come to Newark every summer,” Shipman said. “He couldn’t wait to come to the mysterious and beautiful house. This little boy loved this house so much, especially the living room with its rosettes and hardwood floor.
“That little boy memorized every detail of this house.
“That little boy wants his house back the way it was. His memories are his blueprints.”
Good thing Shipman has those memories. Because the only photographs he has are of the exterior.
Terry Shipman is 64 and retired after 37 years as a technician for Southwestern Bell and AT&T. The house — formally known as the Dearing House — has been in his family since it was first built in Akron. In 1976, it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, an honor commemorated by a big plaque near the street. The white frame home’s exterior is ornamented with much gingerbread, and features two porches and two bay windows, one of which Shipman has rebuilt.
Inside, where Shipman currently concentrates his efforts on the living room, he plans to have a fireplace rebuilt and eventually to rediscover the mahogany staircase and railings now covered with paint.
A ball is on top of the post at the bottom of the stairs.
“That’s where Uncle Bill” — the oldest of the Dearing children — “used to hang his hat.”
Much of what Shipman is doing is the undoing of what his mother, Lena Shipman,
did in the 1960s and 1970s. She meant well, he said, trying to modernize the house. To her credit, she did put in the first bathroom.
Otherwise, he said, “she took out many of the distinctive characteristics of the house.”
Nowhere more than in the living room, where a carpet covers the original wooden floor. Shipman believes it’s oak, 4-inch tongue in groove construction. Oak was abundant back then, he said as he pulled back some carpet. The floor is rough-hewn, and Shipman doesn’t want to sand it.
Elsewhere in the living room Shipman proudly shows the bay window — “it was in really sorry shape. It had collapsed a little bit.” But the distinguishing features are the two doors and transom windows.
Modernizing in the 1960s and 1970s meant taking out the wide, tall original doors, plus the transom windows which Shipman called a 19th-century version of air conditioning.
The new doors, built to resemble the old, are pine, and were custom-built in Canada. Shipman stained them with Sherwin-Williams Cedar Chest stain, and then varnished them. They are framed by fluted casings with plinths on the bottom and rosettes at the top. The transoms are reproductions. Luckily, there was one left and Shipman used that for the measurements.
The fluted casings have four grooves, same as the original, Shipman said. He used to put his four fingers into those grooves.
Shipman has also rebuilt two closets that flank where the fireplace used to be. His parents took out the fireplace in 1967, he said, to make a passageway from the living room to an adjoining room. Shipman plans to eventually find a masonry contractor and have the fireplace and chimney rebuilt.
Ten of the original fireplace bricks are laid out on the floor to frame where the fireplace will go. The mantel will have to be rebuilt from memory.
“I can’t wait to see that fireplace mantel again,” he said.
... One of Shipman’s favorite, and saddest, curiosities is a gravestone. It’s propped up on the side of the house, and marks the life and death of Ula Una Tanner. Chiseled in the gray stone is Ula’s birthdate of July 15, 1915, and her death on Sept. 28, 1917.
Shipman found the headstone in the 1970s. It was holding up a joist in a nearby rent house owned by his parents. He was rewiring the house, crawled underneath and found the headstone, which his mother remembered seeing as a child.
Shipman has tried to find out more about Ula Una Tanner, but has come up empty.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever solve that mystery,” he said. “That little girl haunts me.”
... Shipman lives simply in the Dearing House. Living alone, he cheerfully admits to plenty of TV dinners. And there’s the local pizza restaurant. The house has one air-conditioning window unit, upstairs in his bedroom.
“Once I get the historical renovations done, I can start to make it more livable,” he said, with central heat and air.
Once he gets past the fireplace and the porch, “the sailing is downhill.”
He admits there’s a long way to go. He has three stepchildren to whom he expects to pass the house.
“There’s a clock running, but I’m in good physical shape and in good health. Dad lived to 94, and he worked on the house until he broke his hip at 87.”
Shipman is optimistic. But also pragmatic.
“No matter how much I do, there seems to be so much more to do.”
Brian Driscoll, a technical assistance coordinator for the Department of Arkansas Heritage, also is pragmatic.
“One of the things about preservation,” he said, “is you’re holding off the inevitable.”