Another One Bites the Dust

Sunday night I learned of another sad event for local historic preservation in Minden. Around 1870, four new homes were built in Minden. The Chaffe home on South Broadway, the Spann home on Pennsylvania Avenue, the Vance home on North Broadway and the Watkins home on College Street. These homes were very similar in style, in fact two of them – the Chaffe and Vance homes -- were almost identical. The Chaffe home was later purchased by the Wiley family. That house stood on the site of today’s Regions Bank in downtown. The home was first pulled back behind the “new” Minden Bank building constructed in the mid 1950s and then later was demolished by the bank. The Watkins home was severely damaged by an explosion and fire in the early 1940s and had to be torn down. Today the Minden Church of Christ is located on that property. The Vance home passed through marriage to the Sugg family and then suffered through years of neglect and vacancy until it was restored by the Christy family. The fourth house, the Sumpter Spann home, went through several owners including the Huckaby family before being owned by the Dickinson family, who still own it today.


So, of those four “post-war” houses, two remain standing. However, soon only one will remain. The First Baptist Church is in the process of purchasing, with plans to demolish, the Dickinson home at 315 Pennsylvania. I am sorry to learn this is happening, to be frank, having gone to First Baptist for almost all my 52 years and having been a member for 43 years, I am sad we are once again going to put the wrecking ball to part of Minden’s history. However, no one even raised a question when the topic was presented at the Church Conference Sunday night, and there’s no point in fighting against the powers that be. I understand the church’s need for room to grow and I also recognize that the house has structural problems that make it a liability risk so long as it stands. The church doesn’t need the house; they need the land and the space. In addition, I probably vacated the moral high ground on this issue when I supported the proposal to sell the property at 100 Homer Road for the site of a Walgreen’s.

Just to explain my “hypocrisy” by supporting that change and opposing this development, I need to explain my reasoning. In the case of the property at 100 Homer Road, the true historical significance of that site was not the current home on the land. That house was built in the first years of the 20th Century, about 40 years after the end of the Civil War. The true historical significance of the land was that it served as the campground for the 61st United States Colored Troops when they occupied Minden from May through December 1865. As part of the proposal of the sale to Walgreen’s, a historic park would have been created on a portion of the land to tell the story of that occupation. So, from a historic standpoint, the gain would have been greater than the loss of the house, since there are quite a few homes from the same period standing in Minden. In the case of the Spann/Dickinson home, the house and the role of Sumpter Spann in local education and politics made the dwelling the most significant history on the site. Even though the house has had substantial alteration over the years, it remains the dwelling of a man who influenced generations of local boys as a teacher at the Minden Male Academy and played a role in some of the most colorful and contentious politics of the Reconstruction and Redemption era in Minden. At times like these I truly wish I had money, or power, or influence to change things. But, I don’t , and progress is necessary, so another old home will disappear from the Minden landscape.