A gift to posterity: Renter restores one of Marion’s most historic properties

MARION — The 10-foot Christmas tree sweeps upward but still falls short of the 12-foot ceilings in Rita Collins' living room.

It's a glorious, colorful tree, one that befits one of Marion's most historic houses, built by William Smyth, an attorney, judge, Civil War Union colonel and a congressman, probably in 1869.

It's one of nine Christmas trees Collins has set up in her apartment, even though she doesn't get that excited about the holiday.

'I do it for the house,' says Collins, a petite dynamo who's worked nine years to restore what was, 150 years ago, the main floor of the Smyth mansion.

This is a different kind of home story, though, than is usual for this page.

Collins has invested those years of rehab as a renter, not a homeowner. And when she moves — she's 70 and thinking she doesn't really need a 4,000-square-foot apartment — she'll leave behind all the work and most of the furnishings for the next tenant.

So this is a love story as much as it is a house story.

Not that love stories always go smoothly.

Collins readily admits thinking, numerous times, she'd lost her mind, in following her heart.

'This has been a labor of love,' says Collins, a property manager and an artist who's lived in Marion for 27 years. 'I would wake up at 2 o'clock in the morning and start painting. My cat thought I was off the wall. But then I'd step into these rooms the next morning and think, 'Wow. This is what it was like 150 years ago.'

'I'm sure there's a reason I'm supposed to be here,' she adds. 'I'm a caretaker, preceded by others who knew this was a special house, too. You look at her, and she's still in really good shape, especially for being a rental all these years. It's a testament to the people who built it.'

Collins' apartment is in the center section of Henderson House, a sprawling, block-long brick building at First Avenue and 15th Street in Marion.

The Sisters of Mercy bought the Smyth mansion in 1893 to use as a school. In the early 1900s, the nuns added two massive wings on the north and south sides of the mansion to open St. Berchman;s, a boarding school for more than 100 boys. The school closed in 1942, and the sisters lived and taught nursing classes there until Alma Henderson bought the property in 1964 and subdivided it into apartments and sleeping rooms.

Henderson, though, left the first-floor apartment in its original glory, with its high ceilings, dramatic woodwork and sense of openness. Just waiting for Collins.

LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT

'I knew when I walked in and saw this place 20 years ago I wanted to live here,' Collins says.

Another 11 years would pass, though, until the day she was touring the vacant apartment with Todd Chambers of Chambers Management, the building's co-owner.

'We were standing in the big parlor, and he just had this forlorn look,' she recalls. ' 'With every tenant, she goes down a little further,' he said. I looked at him and said, 'Then put me in here, and I'll bring her back!'

'That was the first time I thought I'd lost my mind.'

Nine years of elbow grease, buckets of paint and death-defying trips up and down 10-foot ladders later, the place sparkles and seems more like a spacious house than a two-bedroom apartment.

Everyone who visits the apartment, Collins says, loves it ... though Collins laughs and says her daughter, Pamela, calls the décor 'early Victorian mortuary.'

If so, it's a happy mortuary, given that big art, big mirrors and big vases stuffed with big flowers dot every room. Most of the bouquets feature dried hydrangeas that Collins gathered from the bed of the showy flowers the nuns left behind.

Also, Collins likes to entertain, and the home can accommodate a crowd. She had 120 for her granddaughter's graduation. She's hosting six Christmas parties this year, one of them for 30 guests.

GETTING CREATIVE

Collins has been creative in finding ways to manage restoration on a budget.

Confronted with 9-foot windows, for example, she figured out a way to combine four sets of Dollar General curtains that, with swags, look much like brocade curtains in a Victorian parlor.

'It would have cost thousands to have custom-made curtains,' she says.

The place also came with a carpet in the entry way and guest bedroom that she thinks is original to the house.

'It's a lovely chartreuse carpet — an old horsehair carpet, we think — that's worn like iron. It might be some form of wool,' she says. 'But it shows no wear after all these years of young families and artists and other renters.'

Nonetheless, it was a hard color to work with when it came time to paint the walls, given that it shifts from pea green to yellow, depending on the light. So Collins experimented until she found the perfect color — a striking tan with olive and gold undertones. She'd mixed the first five-gallon bucket of paint when she pulled off an old window bracket and discovered the original color of the living room walls. It matched — exactly — the paint she'd just mixed.

'I have the same color as what the colonel had!' she recalls exclaiming.

Collins chose a brilliant white for the 10-inch crown molding around the ceiling in the main living areas, also using it for the molding around those 9-foot windows and the mammoth pocket doors.

'In the period when this house was built, the more elaborate the molding, the more wealthy the family,' she says.

HANDCRAFTED

In all her work on the house, Collins notes, 'I never found a nail. It's all tongue and groove or dowels, all handcrafted.'

Another case in point: the louvered window shutters in the guest bedroom, once the small parlor in the Smyth home.

'Not a slat is missing,' she says. 'They're just like they were 150 years ago. You sense how important this house was in its day. And how people since then have treated the house with respect.'

The back of the apartment — the kitchen, bathroom and the spare room used as a walk-in closet, laundry and storage area — is more modest, given that the nuns were aiming for functionality when they added the industrial-sized kitchen in 1922 to feed all those boarding school boys.

Still, the rooms are huge, filled with charming historic touches — zinc countertops, bins for cornmeal and flour, a tiny staircase that once led to servants' quarters.

'It's not just a 10-by-12 room with Sheetrock walls,' she says of the kitchen. 'This room has character.'

True, there's only one bathroom, but that comes with loving history and character. 'It's never been a problem,' Collins says, laughingly adding, 'and that's from an old person who has to get out of bed and walk four miles to the bathroom.'

Through all the work, through remodeling 'every square inch of this place,' she says, her landlord 'has been nothing but supportive and kind.'

In return, he has gotten a jewel of a renter and a jewel of a restored apartment, one with nine Christmas trees and six chandeliers, all ablaze for Christmas, just as it likely was a century and a half ago.

HENDERSON HOUSE HISTORY

1869: William Smyth — an attorney, judge, Civil War Union colonel and U.S. representative — builds a mansion outside of Marion, at what eventually will be First Avenue and 15th Street in Marion. Smyth bought the land in 1846, and it's possible the home was built earlier.

1870: Smyth dies in his home at age 46 from a relapse of the dysentery he'd contracted in the Civil War. He and his wife, Mary Brier Smyth, who died in 1861, are buried in Oak Shade Cemetery. They had six sons and a daughter, who died in infancy.

c. 1871: Home is sold to Jeremiah Alexander, a lumber baron and banker.

1890: Isaac Tucker, who horse breeder, buys the home.

1893: Sisters of Mercy buy the home and 22 acres to open a home for the elderly.

1895: When that doesn't work out, the sisters open at day school for the children in St. Joseph's parish.

1906: When the parish builds a school, the sisters convert the home to a boys boarding school.

1915-1942: House becomes Saint Berchman's, a boarding school for boys under age 15. Actor Don Ameche was a 1921 graduate.

1915: A four-story wing is added to the north side of the house, with a chapel, office, classrooms and 100-bed dormitory. A two-story gymnasium is added east of the house.

1922: A four-story wing is added to the south side of the house, with an industrial-sized kitchen, storerooms, infirmary, washroom and bedrooms.

1942: Saint Berchman's closes. Sisters of Mercy use property for nursing classes and as a dormitory for nursing students.

1946-1964: The nuns live on the property, Our Lady of Mercy Novitiate, until the Sacred Heart Convent opens on the Mount Mercy College campus.

1964: Building and remaining acres are sold to real estate agent Alma Henderson for $60,400. She remodels the property, which was in disrepair, and divides it into about 50 apartments and sleeping rooms. The rickety gym is torn down.

Sources: 'The History of Marion: 1838-1927' by Marvin Oxley; 'Written in His Hands: The Sisters of Mercy of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1875-1975' by Sister Mary Augustine Roth; Saint Berchman's yearbooks; Marion historian Judith Hull; and Marion Heritage Center & Museum.