Could this be our house?

 

Last week I received some photos in the mail from a descendant of the guy who built our house. This is a photograph of a photograph of an original oil painting that was painted by Marianna Edgar Gebhart who was born in our house in 1848. As a landscape painting goes it resembles how our neighborhood would have looked around 1860. The topography is correct. The position of the fences would be where roads are now. The wooded hill beyond the house is how Woodland Cemetery would have looked. The position of the barn buildings is about right. The fact that the farm house has three chimneys in the exact location as ours and that the building has the offset addition on the right hand side is uncanny. There are a few things that have me confused though. The direction of the main roof is wrong and the number of windows is also wrong for our house and I can't figure out what the spires in the left background belong to.I can forgive the roof if this was in fact painted from memory. If it was painted after 1887 the roof line was dramatically changed to a mansard and even I can't remember how the roof was on the houses I lived in as a boy. The landscape wouldn't have changed much before 1895, so it is likely that our neighborhood was indeed the setting for this artwork. I can't figure out why the churches are there though if they didn't exist. I'll have to get a good high resolution photo of this picture and have it reproduced as an oil painting so I can hang it on our wall above a fireplace. Here is what the place looked like in 1875 from the front. Unlike most of you, I did absolutely nothing on the house last week. In fact I was hanging around at the Irish Festival in Dublin, Ohio in my heavy wool clothing playing Mr. Musketeer for three days getting just as dirty and twice as smelly though. Hmmm, gotta love blackpowder.......