History within the walls

We tore down our old closet this morning to make room for the new one we will be building soon. We found a secret compartment tucked back behind the walls. Inside were some old letters and a stack of intact newspapers dating from 1943-1945. It is interesting to read headlines such as "Spain Denies Hitler Refuge" or "Aussies Land on Borneo"

That's neat! When my parents put the addition on, they discovered that the house was insulated with newspapers! The newspapers were all from 1937 when the house was built. I'll bet that was a sight!

sounds very exciting, like going back in time.

Wow, that must have been neat to find! What are you going to do with the letters & papers?

A lot of people love that stuff and would pay a ton of money. It may even pay for the new closet!

Hissy, that is SO cool!!! I just love looking at old papers and documents like that!!! When we went through my fathers stuff, after he died, we found alot of stuff like that...including an old old school book (history) that had a map of America, and there were hardly any states on it yet, and alot of Indian territory etc...it is fun to look at things like that! What a find you had!!!

Hey Hissy, that's really cool. I love finding stuff like that.

We've pretty well finished renovating our 200 year old house now we've found a few things but nothing too spectacular. Most of the stuff was found on the top (2nd) floor under the floorboards. This would've been either the childrens or the servants room. We found scraps of very old wallpaper - surprisingly bright colours, a cuff (they used to wear detachable cuffs and collars), bits of ribbon and lace, but the loveliest thing we found was a white kid glove with pearlised buttons and the wrist.

The glove is so small I'm convinced it belonged to a child, but Ken thinks it might have been a servants glove. Don't know if they would've had leather gloves though . . .

I've researched the history of our house quite thoroughly, I even when to the library to find out the names of people who lived there on the old census/electoral rolls.

I REALLY wanted to find old newspapers but I think the earliest one I found was from the early 80s.

Hmmm very interesting!! Make sure to keep hold of them Hissy, if they're not already worth alot (which I expect they are) they will be!!

And Yola, that is sooo cool, we wanted a really old house too, but couldn't find one we liked/in our budget, the one we have now was built in 1945.. so, its not new, but its not "old old", so far, we haven't found anything interesting... but we still have alot of rennovation to do!!

Hissy, that's a great unexpected find! I have spent hours going through my family's old photos and documents.

When we started replacing all the electrical wires in our house we have found the walls stuffed with newspapers.

At my cottage, my great uncle built a cabin and stuffed the walls with newspaper as well. When the owners were renovating they found all the paper and gave it to us. There were some interesting New York weekly magazines from the 30's and 40's. I just loved looking at the store advertisements and laughing at the prices back then!

Yola, your place is 200 years old? Wow! And I thought I was doing good with a late 1890's place!

Kassandra, don't worry about it, I consider my house "old"ish and it was only built in 1945!!! :laughing: