“Go at your own pace. Life is a journey, not a race.” ~ Unknown
I’ve been reading about how culture creates Place, our attachment to it, and how Place, in turn, preserves culture. Of course, that brings me back to West Liberty. This is the old Treadway house from whence the Baystown neighborhood of West Liberty was born. In its day, which would have been from somewhere between 1910-1930 to 1992-sh, it was a showplace demarcated by white picket fences (for real), gardens, fruit trees, and beautiful flowers, including a field of tobacco. Today, it’s a non-descript law office. Not only is the loss of the surrounding beauty a shame for the casual passerby, but the bigger tragedy is its loss as the anchor for the neighborhood that sprang from it, or rather from its owners, Gay Bays and Earl Treadway. The anchor and neighborhood could have survived the passing of the Treadway couple, but they couldn’t survive the loss of their purpose. To be a vessel for life. No one loves this house how it needs to be loved, but that’s a story for another day. The house as a structure is interesting for Eastern Kentucky, not just West Liberty. I’m calling it a Dutch Colonial Revival. Its gambrel roof is classic Dutch Colonial, but its continuous dormers, wide eaves, and wrap-around porch are more modern conventions. They can often be associated with Colonial Revival, but since only about 10% of Colonial Revivals have a gambrel roof, I’d prefer the more exacting style of Dutch Colonial Revival. Its construction was a mark of capitalist success, particularly in the period it was erected and in this place that was mostly simple agrarian people with similar structural styles. The only other comparable structure to the Treadway house was the coal mine manager’s house in Cannel City, which was sadly demolished maybe twenty years ago for no good reason. Eastern Kentucky coal companies at the turn of the twentieth century, when the Cannel City house was built, were owned by robber barons from the Eastern seaboard. The Dutch Colonial style was, as the name implies, a product of the Dutch who settled New York and New Jersey and along the rural landscapes of the Hudson River. The style then makes sense for Cannel City, but how does that translate to the Treadways? Earl was an engineer who came to West Liberty to build a bridge. He has relatives in Floyd County, but his demeanor, as I remember it, was one of an Easterner. Perhaps it was his education, but more research is needed to confirm. Maybe one day, someone will love the Treadway house again, and in the meantime, I’m going to learn more about this house and Earl Treadway.
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