Connecting the pieces
With help of students, an old journal finds its way
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Students turned into detectives at Phillips Elementary School when they took a 100-year-old journal and tracked down the owner's family friend.
Peggy Bloomfield, librarian at Phillips Elementary School, found a box while cleaning six years ago containing the old journal. The artifact remained in storage until recently.
"We were reading Encyclopedia Brown. We would read the story and try to solve it and say, what were the clues, and it just kind of hit me one day. We could be detectives," Bloomfield said.
Also in the box was a scrapbook with sketches of the library's mural as well as an article from the Times about the mothers who painted it.
One of the original artists, Michelle Stevens, will be returning to talk to the classes on April 29 about the mural and answering any questions they have.
The classes worked together to research records on George Hovey who wrote the journal. Turning up that he has no living heirs, they ended up finding his family home.
Also on April 29, the journal will be passed onto Steve Arnold, current owner of the Hovey home and former Phillips Elementary principal.
Arnold said he and his wife plan to add the journal to a collection of other Hovey antiques and donate them to either the Washington County Historical Society, the Campus Martius Museum or the Marietta College Library.
"We have a very early document box that tells of Mr. Hovey's grandfather coming here in the late (18)30s and bought the house in late 1841," Arnold said. "The box is documented by the Hovey children. They documented that the box was made by John Hovey over 100 years ago. Then there is a sampler that has some needlework made by Melissa Sprig and is related to original settlers in Marietta."
Arnold and his wife came upon the Hovey house when they first got married in 1975 and met the three Hovey siblings.
"We used to take walks around the neighborhood. We would walk around the cemetery and the Hovey house. The Hoveys would be sitting on their porch," Arnold said. "We loved the house and we were bold enough one day to stop and introduce ourselves. We told them that one day we would be interested in buying the house. They snickered because the house had been in the family for around 105 years."
The Hoveys and the Arnolds grew closer because he used to do odd jobs for them during the summer months
"Probably in the early 1990s after one of the siblings had passed, the two sisters called me that they wanted to talk to us. They said they weren't interested in selling but they wanted to know if we were still interested in buying," Arnold said. "We assured them that we wouldn't tear it down, that we would restore it. They said that if you are interested that when the last Hovey dies, you can buy the Hovey estate."
George Hovey was a noted builder architect, Arnold said, and his achievements included designing and building the Washington County Library and designing the Campus Martius Museum.
How the box of artifacts got into the storage room of Phillips Elementary remains a mystery to both Arnold and Bloomfield.
"I don't see a connection with (George Hovey)," Bloomfield said. "He was an architect and he was going to design the public library. So I thought maybe he did that with the school but I don't see any evidence of that."
Kyle Nichols can be reached at
knichols@newsandsentinel.com