All that anyone on Gum Springs Circle calls it is the Oliver Rent House. It has a history though and I thought that since I walk past it everyday that I would start to record part of it. 
The core of the house without the eastern side room, upstairs and enclosed back porch was built in 1938 so it's celebrating its 70th birthday this year. Just a plain old farm house that will soon be a thing of the past around here. Not a huge old house like you see in the movies. Ordinary Arkansas rural farm house down the road that has lost it's memory unless someone jogs it.
I ask Eddy the other morning for details about the house so that I could record them. He told me that Will and Dose(I'm not for sure how to spell her name but I have done the best I can phonetically by listening to Eddy), okay, let me start over. Will and Dose Davenport(the creek on the highway 62/412 with the 3 lane bridge is named for them). Eddy can remember them living way past 80 years of age and having no children of their own. Dose had a child from a previous marriage. Will and W.O. Oliver(Eddy's grandfather) bought this farm in 1911. Will and W.O. were first cousins.W.O. Oliver probably couldn't get the money by himself so they went in together.
Will and Dose originally lived in a house out on the highway by the bridge. You can see the foundation still today for that house and hundreds of naturalized jonquils bloom there every spring. The house was too big for Dose and that's when they built this house in pictures. The farm originally included all the land we own now and the Shelton place across the road. Eddy couldn't remember all of the owners in between us and the Davenports. One name he could recall was Ronnie Worsham who owned the house in the 1960's. The Marlatt family bought the place-house and 40 acres in the mid 1970's. They had a houseful of children that I remember well as we went to church with them. Mrs. Marlatt was a Cadenbach and her parents live just off the highway right past the Sturkie Road.
When the Marlatts after he got back from Vietnam) took possession, they added the upstairs.
This room on the side was added by one of the owners who followed the Davenports.
When our niece to be, Ashley, Cline's fiancee, used the house last summer, she and I tore out the carpeting in the front rooms down to the original board floors.
We painted this shelf in the kitchen this french country blue and displayed her dishes there.
This room was originally a bedroom just off the kitchen and now holds the freestanding stairwell. The steep stairwell!
This is looking out of the upstairs bedroom window and I always thought that this might have seemed like a castle window to some young child. Some of our renters have used this window as a glorified tree stand for deer hunting as the pasture behind the house is home to 40 or more deer every fall.
The upstairs bedrooms run continually one to other.
I love this old sink and have wished many times that I had had a drainboard like this attached to my sink in my current house.
Ashley never stayed in the house again after she came home and there was a black snake curled around the faucet. The house sits directly in the ground and the cabinets underneath the sink open to a large hole underneath the house.
The shed out back has at one time housed chickens and numerous other rodents, fair and foul.
I always liked this bedroom in the back with the two large windows that look out on the monster walnut trees next to the house.Eddy could have bought the place, house and pasture in 1976 for 21,000. 00. He passed. We did buy it from the Marlatts in 1996 for 50,000 dollars! It was a chance to own part of what Eddy's grandfather had owned at one time and it would expand our current property. It realllllllly stretched our coffers at the time but somehow we made it with a little help from the good ole' bank!
