This is a story about possibly the oldest rental property in Morgantown.
Which, naturally, begins with the discovery of an empty whiskey bottle in another house, not quite as old, but still perfect for Adelheid Schaupp’s point.
Said point being that while college towns are transient, in-the-moment places where new things are being built every day, there are still enough houses and buildings remaining in Morgantown that aren’t just “old” — they’re historic.
When the present-day owner of one such house was in the middle of a remodeling project a few years back, and he spied that aforementioned bottle — which had been tucked between two walls all this time — he laughed and promptly gifted it to the Morgantown History Museum.
You know: Just because it was old and cool.
The label and raised lettering on its sides said it came from the Monongahela Rye Whiskey Co., in Pittsburgh, a distillery that dates back at least to the early 1800s.
Which means it likely got here on one of Micheal Kern’s flatboats: He, of the oldest rental property here — and a Colonial entrepreneur who has everything to do with Schaupp these days.
Schaupp knows all about history.
She also knows all about contracting. She has a license.
And plumbing — she has a license for that, also.
Oh, yeah: She’s also a certified HVAC technician.
But before all that, she was a Ph.D. student in history at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University who decided she preferred flipping houses over doing time in the Ivory Tower.
So she walked away and came back to her hometown of Morgantown, where she bought her first house at the age of 21 and turned into an inviting dwelling soon thereafter.
The most-recent house she acquired is at 305 Dewey Street, in the city’s historic Greenmont neighborhood.
“I had been trying to buy it for years,” she said.
How we got here
This address has so much history on its own, she said, that one could write a dissertation just by walking through the front door.
And, yes — in typical college-town fashion — people are still living in the house that Kern built by hand in 1772.
That was when the Dutch immigrant and entrepreneur took an ax to a towering stand of chestnut trees — what is now Morgantown was 600 acres of dense forest — and went to work.
The humble abode was known alternately as “Michael Kern’s Cabin” or “Kern’s Fort.” (Sometimes, depending upon the historian doing the chronicling, it was “Kerns Cabin” or Kerns Fort” — with the apostrophe excised).
Punctuation or no, it was a home office, of sorts.
Kern (or Kerns), as said, was business savvy.
He founded a grist mill at Deckers Creek and then launched his flatboat line, as river traffic was the only traffic.
That’s the Monongahela River we’re talking about, which begins in neighboring Fairmont, Marion County, and does something a lot of aquatic arteries don’t: It flows south to north, opposed to the other way.
It bisects Morgantown and Westover on its 128-mile burble into western Pennsylvania, where it eventually meets up with the mighty Ohio River in Pittsburgh.
Whatever the direction of its current, in the region back then, the Mon meant business.
The river was the gateway to the West and the burgeoning settlement of Morgantown was isolated by rugged terrain.
If you wanted something and you didn’t salvage it or make it, you had to order it.
When you ordered it, you had to have it shipped.
And when you had it shipped, you received it by way of a commercial flatboat — owned by Greenmont’s pioneering resident.
Remember that whiskey bottle?
Extra pepperoni on that Colonial pizza?
Schaupp, meanwhile, said she’s amazed the house built by Kern has survived and thrived for 251 years.
For a long time, it was home to Maurice Brooks, who taught biology for four decades at WVU and was a renowned authority on Appalachian plant life.
Two WVU students were renting it in 1993 when the paperwork was applied to get the house on the National Register of Historic Places.
These days, it’s still being rented out — and Schaupp is helping its current occupants line up other lodging, so she can go to work using both her contractor’s and doctoral student of history hats.
Kern’s cabin has been added onto over the years, but Schaupp wants to bring it back to as close to 1772 as she can.
That includes exposing the massive, rough-hewn chestnut logs from those ancient trees felled by Kern that one can only regard from the inside right now.
The current occupants, she said, are enjoying their soon-to-be footnote status in Morgantown history.
“They said, ‘Are we gonna be the last people to ever live in the house?’ I said, yeah, they probably will be, if it works out.”
What would have to be worked out first would be some re-zoning in Greenmont.
She wants to restore the house and turn it into a museum, with a public place that could include a sit-down café, perhaps.
“I’d need a helpful nudge from the city for that to be able to happen,” she said.
“I just want people to know what we have,” she continued. “There’s just so much history here.”
For now, she’s starting with some basic, decorative touches.
She put a new coat of paint on the exterior and began adding some period-appropriate trappings out front, for some Colonial curb-appeal, as it were.
The wagon is especially appreciated, Schaupp said, chuckling.
“Now, when they have pizza delivered, they can say, ‘Hey, we’re the place with the wagon in front.’”
Colonial history bumping up against pizza cartons, she mused.
Some things in Morgantown, she said, never get old.
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