Time Machine: The Vardy House

CEDAR RAPIDS - John Vardy, born in Virginia in 1800, came to Iowa in 1841 after spending five years in Indiana. When he reached the banks of the Cedar River at Cedar Rapids, there were just three log cabins.

Vardy was a cabinetmaker. According to the Rev. George Carroll, Linn County settler and historian, 'Mr. Vardy was proficient in any kind of carpentry, as he built his own house in 1842, which was the first frame building in the town.”

The house was intended to be a farm house. It stood outside of the village in a cornfield at what would become the corner of Adams and Brown streets (now Third Street and Sixth Avenue).

Vardy's house and cabinet shop hosted church services of all denominations, even though Vardy and his wife were staunch Presbyterians. The first Sunday school was organized there in the summer of 1845. Vardy's wife died in 1846.

The Rev. Bennett Roberts of the Marion Presbyterian church helped Vardy and eight others form First Presbyterian Church of Cedar Rapids in July 1847. The other charter members were Frederick and Martha Grambo, Barnet and Ann Lutz, Isaac and Mary Listebarger, all from the Marion church, and Alexander and Mary Ely from the Reformed Dutch church of Allegan, Mich.

Vardy remarried in 1849. Never a fan of Iowa winters, he moved with his family in September 1856 to Leon County, Texas, where he died in September 1878.

The Vardy House was purchased by Frank Stary and his wife, the former Catherine Martinek, in the spring of 1865. They turned the house so that it conformed with the city street plan and added to it. They lived there for more than 40 years before Catherine died in October 1905. Frank died soon after in early 1906. Both are buried in Oak Hill Cemetery.

In March 1936, the Petersen Baking Co. announced a $36,000 addition and remodeling project. Part of the new addition was a two-story office building that would include a sales room. It was planned for the lot on which the Vardy House sat. The house would have to be demolished.

A committee that included C.G. Greene, Bert Smith, John M. Ely, Fred Higley, C.A. Laurance and B.L. Wick, was formed to find a way to preserve the house. They petitioned the City Council to allow the Vardy House to be moved to a spot in Bever Park and began a fundraising campaign to pay for a new foundation and the house moving. The community stepped up to help with the cost and what wasn't covered was paid for by the committee.

Rain and snow in November 1937 made the move to the park difficult. When the house was finally set on the foundation, repaired and furnished, it was turned over to the city.

In April 1940, the Ashley Chapter of the D.A.R. asked for permission to erect a bronze tablet at the site with a brief history of the Vardy House. They also wanted to plant flowers and shrubs around the foundation.

It appeared the relic was well on its way to preservation, but as early as 1941, rumblings to have the old house removed from the park began.

There was no bronze marker, no flowers or plantings. No one tended the house, and it became the target of vandals. The windows were shattered, the doors broken down, the interior marred with graffiti. It was an eyesore.

A member of the city plan commission, Dr. C.T. Hickok, protested the condition of the house. 'I would have no objection to the house being torn down, but I do object to leaving it as it is,” he said. He suggested the park department place shutters or heavy mesh screens over the windows and board up the doors.

A Gazette editorial opined, 'Certainly the Vardy House in its present condition adds nothing to the beauty of the park and inspires no feeling of civic pride. Either something should be done to make it do both or the house should be consigned to the charitable glamour of sentimental memory.”

B.L. Wick, historian and member of the preservation committee, came to the structure's defense. He explained how the house came to be preserved in the first place. He then chastised the council and the people of Cedar Rapids for their lack of foresight.

'It does not appear that the people of Cedar Rapids take any great interest in things which should be sacred and worthy of preserving. In eastern cities and in other countries age only adds to old things having historical association. Not here. In the heart of the city stands old Washington High School which so many feel should be torn down and the Greene Square, donated by the late Judge Greene a hundred years ago as a place of recreation, should now be turned into a filling station and a place for dispensing ‘hot dogs.' ... Have we lost all interest in what is old and in things which were donated for the good of the public?”

As the city approached its centennial in 1949, efforts were made to repair the Vardy House, but not without the caveat from Park Commissioner Ed Stefan, ' ... if vandals again tear it up, it will have to be torn down.”

The committee shied away from destroying the house then, but by January 1954, the City Council said the Vardy House was in bad shape and cost for repairs was prohibitive. The oldest frame house in Cedar Rapids was to be torn down.

Parks Commissioner Richard C. Jones said his men would go to work with sledgehammers and crowbars and get rid of the building 'in the most economical manner.” Usable two-by-fours were saved. The rest of the house was used as Bever Park firewood.