The Dead House by Emily Mauldin

Emily Mauldin is a senior at William Jewell College. She is working toward a double major in Molecular Biology and English, though she does not yet have any plans regarding what to do with her interesting choice of degrees. She is completing her Molecular Biology degree through the Oxbridge Honors Program, which included a year abroad as a fully matriculated student at Homerton College of the University of Cambridge in England. She is a member of the English honors society Sigma Tau Delta, and the biology honors society Beta Beta Beta.

The Dead House

Old homes build the character of a town. The very presence of historic buildings creates a vibrant museum where the past is still very much relevant to our modern lives. On Franklin Street near William Jewell College leans a tattered red brick home, like a ruined castle complete with a turret. In its days of glory, this odd and dilapidated construction was well known and respected, much like the family who once filled its crumbling walls.

Though no longer in its former glory days, this decaying house is still a defining feature of Liberty. Its history gives it ample space in the town archives, and its ghosts haunt the dark corners of the citizens’ minds. In a previous time, forgotten by all but the oldest Liberty residents today, this ruin shared its name, the ‘old Routt house’ with a home in a different location, at the corner of Mill and Main. This house no longer stands, and is not even remembered by most Liberty historians today, but to the people of Liberty at the time it was certainly significant.

In the mid 1800s, a vibrant young doctor came to Liberty from the east coast. He quickly passed from quiet speculation to unchallenged prominence due to his vast medical knowledge and willingness to pass on this knowledge. From 1847 to 1854, Dr. James Madison Wood lived and held classes in the house on the corner of Mill and Main. Dr. Wood dedicated a room on the ground floor to the right of the front porch to his classes. He lectured to his students and demonstrated his scientific knowledge with the help of a human body and a dissecting knife. The bodies were mostly those of slaves, purchased upon their death from their previous owners, which he could use without any restrictions. During these years, the house had a different name, the “Dead House.”

Despite his success and the esteemed position he held in Liberty, Dr. Wood sold his house and moved to Kansas City. Selling a house can be a difficult feat in the best of times, but Dr. Wood’s house boasted an excellent location near downtown Liberty, proximity to several schools, and of course a dissecting theatre. What went on in Dr. Wood’s classroom was no mystery to the citizens of Liberty, and yet in 1954 Dr. Wood did sell his house – and classroom – to a mysterious single woman named Christiana M. Riley. Ms. Riley is remarkably absent from the town’s records. Despite the fact that the Riley family was a well-established Liberty family that kept very detailed records of all births, death and marriages, no mention of her name is included in these pages. Did whatever prompted Ms. Riley to purchase a house with such a history also estrange her from her family?

In a 1940 article, Mrs. Madison Miller, who was a school teacher in Liberty for 50 years, reflects upon the old homes which she feels most embody the character and shape the identity of the town. She recalls a day in 1884 when she had breakfast at “Mrs. Rout’s boarding house on the corner of Main and Mill streets.” By 1884, and perhaps much earlier, the former Dead House had passed into Routt ownership. In 1940, Mrs. Miller does not speak of the house as if it is no longer standing, which is interesting considering that it is gone by 1943. It seems, then, that it was torn down sometime between these three years. Journalist Virginia Stewart, writing in 1943, ends her article about the “old Routt house” on Mill and Main with the lament that “like many old houses it is now only a memory,” though she does not disclose what happened to it. The destruction of the house must have been something everyone in the town was quite familiar with already, and thus there was no need for her to elaborate.

With the same house having such diverse functions as a dissecting theatre, a boarding house, and the sanctuary of a reclusive woman estranged from her family, it is certainly a place with a colorful identity. The Routt house still standing with its ghosts and broken body is much better known today, but writers from the 1940s certainly felt that the Routt house on Mill and Main was an important part of the town’s history, and worth writing about. It surely had its fair share of ghosts as well, and thus a similar appeal to the Routt house today. Considering the similarly jaded characters of both Routt houses, perhaps the Dead House was torn down due to hauntings like those which have caused the present day Routt house to fall into a state of disrepair.

Although there is a wealth of history to be found in the old buildings still standing, to know only about them is to forget a large part of a town’s identity. Just as history is preserved in old homes, when the homes are lost history often gets lost with them. Remembering the history of the other Routt house that once stood on the corner of Mill and Main streets will keep it from becoming, in another way, a dead house. \

Works Cited

Eldridge, Vera Haworth. “Routt’s ‘castle house’ Circa 1859.” Mid America Advertising
Publishers, 1987.

Miller, Madison. “Residences.” Trails of the Passing Years. 1940.

Noble, Jason. “Spook House.” The Kansas City Star. Kansas City: 2007.

Stander, Kathleen. “Home sweet haunted home.” Dispatch Tribune.

Stewart, Virginia. “The Frame House that Once Stood at Mill and Main Streets.” Ed.

Edna McKinley. The Changing Years – Or Liberty That Was. Kansas City, MO: 1943.

Wensel, J. “Historic Preservation.” The City of Liberty.
http://www.ci.liberty.mo.us/index.asp?NID=484