Where past meets present

In 1985, Mary and Curt Crowther walked up the front steps of the house on Stratford Avenue for the first time. Even as she crossed the porch, Mary noticed broken windows covered with plywood. She was sure they wouldn't buy the place.

But when Curt got inside and saw the inlay in the hardwood floors, he wanted it. He didn't care that there were holes in the walls and the roof. He didn't care that there had been a fire in the back bedroom. He promised his wife that if she could put up with five years of renovations, they'd have something nice.

And they do. And this Saturday, the Crowthers' home, known as the Claude Richards house, will be one of seven homes open to the public for the Utah Heritage Foundation's annual Historic Homes Tour.

When they bought the house, the Crowthers didn't know a thing about its history.

A few months later, Curt was working in the yard when two women drove up and introduced themselves as the daughters of Hugh B. Brown, who was, before he died, a member of the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This was their childhood home, the women told Crowther.

They wondered what had happened to their yard. He started to explain that he planned to pull the weeds. They laughed and said what they really meant was that someone had built houses where they had had tennis courts and a grape arbor.

This was the beginning of a friendship between the Crowthers and Brown's descendants. The next year, the Crowthers invited the Browns to hold their family reunion at the Stratford home. By way of thanks, the Browns presented the Crowthers with a little leather chair, which had been part of their family's dining room set.

As they began to restore their home, the Crowthers consulted the Utah State Historical Society, the state's Preservation Office, the Utah Heritage Foundation and others. Still, the Crowthers continue to learn details about their home. Five years ago, for example, they had a visitor who took one look at the decorative geese on the dining room fireplace and said, "Those are Rockwell tiles."

In 1997, Polly Susan Hart, a consultant, wrote a nomination to have the Highland Park subdivision put on the National Register of Historic places. In the paper, Hart describes the growth of Utah's capital city in the years surrounding World War I.