Nearly 200-year-old Klein house moved to nearby history museum – Houston Chronicle

Moving a nearly 200-year-old house would be an expensive and time-consuming process, but for the director of the Klein Historical Foundation, it was worth it to ensure a piece of local history could be restored and displayed for the community.

The Frank House, built in the 1840s, finally found a new home Tuesday after it was lifted from its foundations, loaded onto a truck and hauled down Spring Cypress Road in Klein to nearby Wunderlich Farm, where KHF director Steve Baird hopes generations of future schoolchildren will get to see what life was like in the area all those years ago.

The addition of the house widens the scope of history the museum covers by decades and offers even more insight into Kleins past.

This building allows us to extend our story a little bit further, Baird said. This gives us another piece to the puzzle.

Wunderlich Farm, built in the early 1890s, opened to the public in 1995 and has since served as a window into Kleins rural past at the turn of the century. Every year, tens of thousands of museum-goers, including 4,000 Klein ISD fourth graders on field trips, visit the farm for hands-on tours and demonstrations.

Baird, who began fundraising for the non-profit he leads in March 2021 and raised $95,000 for the relocation, is no stranger to moving buildings. The Wunderlich Farm grounds house a half dozen other historical homes and structures, including a once-segregated two-room schoolhouse that closed in 1966.

To move the Frank House, Baird contracted K. Nelson Services, the company he has used before to transport Wunderlich Farms other historic buildings.

The relocation involved splitting the house into thirds and lugging the parts down the road to the farm-turned-museum. Its complicated, Baird said, but he trusts the movers.

Once I have the money and Im ready to pull the trigger I just leave it to them, he said.

In a way, the Frank House perhaps symbolizes much of Kleins history in just one home.

The wooden house was built by a Scottish family, rented by a French family and then bought by a German family in the 1880s. The three nationalities are discussed extensively at Wunderlich Farm as some of the first European American settlers of the area in the first half of the 19th century.

The Frank family moved there in the 1880s and gave the house its name.

Although it's finally at Wunderlich Farm, Baird predicts it could take six months for the house to be walkable and another two or three years for it to be fully integrated into the museum.

With Houston weather the way it is, we knew it was only a matter of time until it completely fell apart, Baird said.

Extensive repairs will be needed to preserve the houses unique features and architecture, he added. Much of the house's wood panels and floorboards, some ridden with termites, will need to be either replaced or preserved. A new roof will also be installed.

The price tag for the top-to-bottom restoration? At least another $100,000, which Baird said he will begin fundraising soon. Erratic lumber prices could change that figure.

Just like the relocation, he believes the cost is worth it.

We want there to be a big to-do about it, Baird said. We want to make sure its all done right.

jhair.romero@chron.com

Originally posted here:

Nearly 200-year-old Klein house moved to nearby history museum - Houston Chronicle