Every so often I come across something completely strange and mysterious, and in this case it is a survivor, a stone house located in the back of a lot in Midtown near the right-of-way of Highway 40, and long since obliterated like the neighborhood that grew up around it, leaving no trace of its existence well into the Twentieth Century.

The house is clearly visible by 1875, when Compton and Dry surveyed the city. Its location at the far back portion of the lot also points to a very early construction on the Manchester or Market Street Road. I would imagine that many of the exurban buildings around it grew up along the major traffic artery out of the City.

Thanks to a reader’s tip, this house was identified as the Phillip Gibson House, which was built in 1845 after the truck farmer bought the land the year before. The house had six rooms with a central hall; this makes sense as there were probably two up and two down in the front of the house and two in the rear service wing. The walls were apparently two feet thick! As the city grew up around his truck farm, he sold off the land in the Gibson’s Addition. Sadly the house was torn down 109 years later in 1954 for the construction of the Highway 40 viaduct.

Likewise, you can see that a whole neighborhood has built up around it by the late Nineteenth Century as the area became more urban. You can even see the stone approaches to the Grand Avenue Viaduct nearby; it must have been a busy, noisy and congested area. The house is in blue in the lower right (the bridge approaches are also in blue, for stone).

The railroads snaking through the Mill Creek yards are to the left in the photo below and Gibson’s house would be to the right behind those trees or slightly out of frame.