William
Curtis, father and founder and builder of
When he was 26 years old, he "emigrated" to Eugene (now
Evertonville), Vermillion county, Indiana. He met,
courted and won the heart of Miss Permelia Hubbard, a Yankee girl, then 21
years old. They had a family of 14 children, seven sons and seven daughters.
William Curtis became greatly interested in the
The Curtis family arrived in 1860, William Curtis bought 200 hundred acres from
Louis Pappan (William Curtis was to Eugene (North Topeka, Kansas of that day,
about what John D. Rockefeller and J. Pierpont Morgan were to the Wall Street)
and his wife Julie Gonville Pappan, fronting the Kaw river in Eugene (North
Topeka) and started the building of a large colonial house that stood on Curtis
Avenue
Still standing,
but in a sad state of disrepair, the old Curtis home at 905 North Van Buren is
the survivor of two great floods (1903, 1951). It was one of the mansions of
Mrs. Curtis was the mother of fourteen children and reared eight of her
grandchildren. The most illustrious of the grandchildren was, of course,
Charles Curtis - successively representative (1893-1907), senator (1907-1913,
1915-1929), and Vice-President of the
The home on North Van Buren was a social center for years, the scene of
countless parties and club meetings. It was known also to the less elite of
Charles Curtis was always proud of his fine horses. His half-sister, the late
Mrs. Permelia "Dolly" (Curtis) Gann, used to tell a story of the 1903
flood. The family stayed in the home on North Van Buren as long as they dared,
but when they realized that they must leave, they summoned the Negro stable man
and told him to hitch up the horses. "Lordie, I done got them away days
ago", replied the old man.
Shortly after that flood, the Charles Curtis family moved to the brick house at
the southwest corner of
Unfortunately,
the house on Van Buren, had a fire and the current
owners were working to restore the house, BUT, the City of
© copyrighted 1998, by Ann Andrews