About 150 yards down a rugged dirt drive off Norman Road, an old stone fireplace stands vigil in a small grove of mature English hollies. The chimney leans slightly forward through branches as if reaching for sunlight, but three horseshoes on the mantel seem to have given it an edge over the tangled and dying cherry tree that struggles to lift it out of place. Resolute and stately, this ruin of better days reminds us how the works of our lives can just move on.
Rose Moran, now 64 and living in Seattle, remembers the fireplace and home that embraced it with great affection. The second child of Mary “Joyce” and Charles Pratt, Rose would often get up early in the morning to go outside and draw the house. It probably wasn’t the building that warmed her heart so much as the love of her grandparents, Fred and Mary Campbell, who lived there.
Rose remembers walking through the front room to see French doors with the fireplace to the left, and a big bear rug in front of it on the floor. The bear rug was real, not some faux fashion rug from the city, hauled home from the woods on top of her father’s Model A Ford. Life by that fireplace, particularly during the holidays, was warm and memorable. Rose loved that house.
As it turns out, the fireplace was a late addition to a home that was likely constructed in about 1923, based on the date of a newspaper found in its walls. The third child, Charlie Pratt Jr., was only 3 or 4 at the time when he and his older brother, Doug, helped their father and grandfather build the fireplace by collecting all the rocks they could find. It was probably 1950 when they built it and their sister, Mary Jo, was born in December that year. That meant four kids for the moment but in total the family would grow to 15, plus mom and dad. There was a “crank phone” on a knotty pine wall, and later on Fred and Mary had the first TV in Kingston. Charlie is now 63 and serving with the Brothers of the Good Shepherd in Momence, Ill. Charlie loved that house, too.
The house’s origins have been forgotten, but the Pratts remember that the family bought it from the grandparents of Robert “Bobby” Johnson. Johnson is another lifelong Kingston resident who still lives next door on acreage he fondly calls “Avalon.” Johnson, 76, recounts that his grandparents, Hans and Minnie Vennes, migrated north from Olalla around 1924 and moved into the home. They sold it in the mid-’40s to Fred and Mary Campbell. Johnson remembers the fireplace, too, but even more he remembers evenings watching Kingston’s first TV.
Charlie thinks it was 1961when his father decided to use the wood from the original house to build another next door to accomodate the growing family. His brother, Augustine “Gus” Pratt, 14th of the siblings, still lives there today. The fireplace was left standing with hopes there would be a guest cottage some day but it never came.
The 15th sibling, Elizabeth “Izzy,” was the first child born in Kitsap County in 1968. She is now a Flaherty and lives in Hansville with children of her own. While neither she nor Gus experienced the original home, both remember hunting eggs and picking blackberries near the towering stone structure. For Izzy, the fireplace was simply “meant to be”, just as it is still meant to be for Fred and Mary’s great-grandchildren today, and just as it was meant to be last year when it helped hide the golden egg from 11 siblings and more than 50 other family members during Joyce’s final Easter on Norman Road. Charles Pratt died at the age of 68 in 1991. Joyce passed last August at 84, having lived within sight of the fireplace all the while.
For 61 years the fireplace presided over the lives of four generations of Pratts who worked, played, dreamed and loved. Who would have thought that out of all the nooks and crannies we have in North Kitsap, such strong family memories could still bubble up from an aging fireplace set amid mature English holly.
I bet the fireplace loved that house.
Johnny Walker posts regularly at http://blogs.kingstoncommunitynews.com/johnny His photos can be viewed at Cuppa Bella Coffee in Kingston and at www.almostcandid.net.
