In a lifetime a family may move many times. But houses seldom move. Maybe some houses will change locations one time, but not many take the second move as is being done by the house that is believed to have been the first bungalow-type residential building erected in Marion.
It is the dwelling at 108 West Goodall which is being torn down to provide an additional parking lot for Mitchell Funeral Home. Built in 1912, it stood many years on North Market Street before it was moved the two blocks to its present location, and it is now being taken down to be put together again at Crab Orchard.
The bungalow which for many years was the home of the late Ralph Norman, former shoe store manager, city commissioner and school board secretary, was recently sold by the funeral home to Lecil Ray and Ronald Cain to be removed from the Goodall Street site.
When it was originally built it stood at the southwest corner of the intersection of North Market and West White Streets, present site of the Eagles lodge home (612 N. Market). It was built there for the family of the late William Sullins, who was prominent in Marion business activities for many years.
Henry Sullins, Marion building inspector, one of William Sullins’ sons, recalls that he was 14 years old at the time the home was built, and the family lived there five or six years. He and other Marion residents of that era have expressed the opinion that the house was probably the first in Marion of the bungalow style which dominated housing construction in Marion through the 1920s, and today still accounts for a large percentage of homes built in a significant period of Marion’s growth.
Sullins recalls that many people came to look at the new house with its arch over the entrance to the porch across the full width of the building. The interior included six rooms with living room, dining room and kitchen arranged in a row on one side of the house and three bedrooms in a line on the other, typical of bungalow style.
The Sullins home was the only building in the first block, on the west side of the street north of the Illinois Central Railroad. Sullins owned the land from the railroad right-of-way to White Street, and while living in the new house, he built the building just south of the corner which has recently been included in the Eagles property. The Stotlar-Herrin Lumber Yard, now Kaeser Lumber Co. was built later.
Henry Sullins remembers pushing a wheel barrow, hauling building materials for the structure his father erected just south of the bungalow on the corner which became the home of the Sullins Automobile Agency. His father became the county’s first Ford dealer, Henry recalls, but gave up the agency after the Ford Motor Co. imposed a requirement that he agree to sell at least three automobiles a year. Henry remembers that the Sullins dealership sold the first three Fords in Marion before his father switched to a Buick dealership which he says provided a cheaper car.
One of the Sullins garage employees was the late Hosea Cagle who later built a garage building across North Market Street that extended all the way east to North Madison Street before it was hit by fire in the 1920s while it was occupied by Hayton Motor Sales. Depth of the building was lessened somewhat when it was rebuilt. Alongside the Cagle garage there remained a dwelling occupied by a Weston family which operated a livery stable that had its entrance on Madison Street where it and the garage represented the end of one era and the beginning of another.
Construction of the Sullins bungalow marked a surge in the development of the Marion area north of the railroad where few houses had been built up to that time. The elder Sullins also engaged in the construction and real estate business.
Henry Sullins and his brother, Leroy, now living in San Diego, California became builders in their own right, and erected many of the later bungalows that featured the post-World War I building boom. Henry recalls that they and their workers built 125 houses in one year. They specialized in bungalows with little or no plumbing and with a minimum of electrical wiring. They sold at from $1200 to 11500 each.
“Once”, Sullins recalls, “we discovered a house had been built on the wrong lot. We were given 48 hours to build a house on the right lot. We did it.”
Most of the houses built in that time were financed through one of the three building and loan associations which flourished in Marion. The Sullins brothers facilitated financing for some of them by accepting notes for the down payment. On the night of October 10,1924 fire struck the northeast corner of the square, burning two buildings housing the Hub Clothing Store and Cline-Vick Drug Store as well as several offices, including the real estate office of William Sullins and Eura Griggs.
“Nearly $50,000 worth of out down payment notes were burned in the fire”, Henry Sullins recalls.
For the persons who had signed the notes the fire was a windfall. Sullins recalls only one who paid for a burned note.
When the depression struck Marion, many homes became vacant, and it has been estimated more than 400 houses were torn down and moved to other communities. Bungalows, because of their contraction and size, were especially adaptable to moving. Carpenters for local building were not much in demand, and Sullins became one of the first to contract for the dismantling of vacant houses, cutting them in sections and loading them on trucks for hauling to sites elsewhere.
(Glances at Life by Homer Butler, written in the 1970’s)