Photo by Virginia Harold
On the first Friday of each month, the owners of a stretch of Victorian-era homes in historic Belleville gather for a potluck dinner. Most of the owners are in their 20s and 30s, and rather than call on their neighbors to borrow a cup of sugar or a stick of butter, they tend to seek their wisdom, sometimes a can of paint stripper, or perhaps a hand taking down a drop ceiling.
Emily and Ash Smith are one of those couples. They bought a 6,000-square-foot Queen Anne Revival in September 2017 and jumped right into their first project: the restoration of a beat-up staircase in the foyer.
“It would be one thing to remove a layer of paint,” says Ash, “but the paint is so old that it took us days.”
Ash, a missions planner at Scott Air Force Base, and Emily, a writer, moved to Belleville from North Carolina with their two boys, ages 9 and 6. The two are history buffs—they spent their first date in a university library’s archives—so it’s fitting that they’re restoring a house and piecing together its past. Emily documents their findings on her Instagram and in her blog. She likes to share information about the home’s décor, such as the fact that the side entryway tile was traced to Boch Frères on the French/Belgian border, and stories that old-house aficionados will appreciate, like the day a skeleton key to the side door was unexpectantly found hanging, somewhat concealed, inside a coat closet.
1 of 5
Photo by Virginia Harold
2 of 5
Photo by Virginia Harold
3 of 5
Photo by Virginia Harold
4 of 5
Photo by Virginia Harold
5 of 5
Photo by Virginia Harold
Other discoveries have involved the home’s owners, including the Romeisers, its first occupants. Emily says Peter Martin Romeiser founded the Romeiser Company, a retail store, in Belleville in 1878. Emma, one of eight children born to Peter and wife Elise, died in the Hindenburg explosion, in 1937. Emily notes that there may have been a ninth child, Leonora, the couple’s niece, whose name appears to be carved into a second-story window, indicating that she may have lived in the house for a time.
“The fact that there are still some unknowns [makes] it almost like a game,” she says.
To learn about the house, the couple has delved into library books and pored over ancestry.com. They’ve visited the Belleville Historical Society and combed through online city directories.
Ash has found remnants of the home’s past—a pair of pants, an old broom handle, a baby shoe, a soda bottle from the former Belleville Glass Company, a frequent-shopper punch card from Romeiser’s—inside the walls.
The thrill of finding such treasures is sometimes muted by the challenges posed by the home: old pipes, leaky windows, out-of-date electrical. “The downside of owning an older house is that they’re hard to maintain,” says Ash. “You have to be willing to put in the work.”
Yet even with the unknowns, the couple has never felt buyers’ remorse, Emily says: “There are times when we’re completely exhausted, but it’s never been, ‘Why did we do this?’”
