Watt Cottage (1458 Chemeketa St NE) Salem, Oregon
National Register of Historic Places Data
The Watt Cottage (1458 Chemeketa St NE) has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places as part of the Court Street--Chemeketa Street Historic District. The following information has been imported from the National Register database and/or the Nomination Form . Please note that not all available data may be shown here, minor errors and/or formatting may have occurred during transcription, and some information may have become outdated since listing.
- National Register ID
- 87001373
- Date Listed
- August 26, 1987
- Name
- Court Street--Chemeketa Street Historic District
- Address
- An irregularly shaped area of appr. 38.57 acres bounded by the closures of Court Street & Chemeketa St. on the west, Mill Creek on the north & east, and on the south by the rear lot lines of properties on the south side of Court St.
- City/Town
- Salem
- County
- Marion
- State
- Oregon
- Category
- district
- Level of Sig.
- local
- Areas of Sig.
- EXPLORATION/SETTLEMENT; POLITICS/GOVERNMENT; ARCHITECTURE
Description
Text courtesy of the National Register of Historic Places, a program of the National Parks Service. Minor transcription errors or changes in formatting may have occurred; please see the Nomination Form PDF for official text. Some information may have become outdated since the property was nominated for the Register.
1458 Chemeketa Street, NE; Assessor's Map 26BA 7-3W Tax Lot 86010-000 Owner: Barry L. Haney, 1458 Chemeketa Street, NE, Salem, OR 97301 Compatible/Historic Non-Contributing in Present Condition
This is a small one-and-one-half-story side-gabled Vernacular house with a full attached Craftsman front porch, the right bay of which has been enclosed. The porch's shed roof is supported by doubled (at the corners, tripled) tapered piers atop a wood balustrade. The piers are similar to those on the Hughes House (#77) of 1908, and the porch is probably an addition of about that time to an older structure. The rafters exposed in the overhangs of the main roof suggest an indeterminate earlier date.
Windows are multi-pane over one; a boxed oriel window is on the west wall, facing the alley. Above this, the second-story window is a 3-part variation of a Palladian window; W. M. Cherrington's 1902 photograph of East Salem shows that originally this was a single vertical light.
The house has a shed dormer on the front (north) face of the main roof. Siding is clapboard, and the house overall is delicately scaled and detailed.
History
Text courtesy of the National Register of Historic Places, a program of the National Parks Service. Minor transcription errors or changes in formatting may have occurred; please see the Nomination Form PDF for official text. Some information may have become outdated since the property was nominated for the Register.
This house occupies a fraction of Lot 1, Block 1 of Watts Addition, subdivided as such in the original Joseph Watt Addition of 1871. It was built by the Watt family, possibly soon after the lot was subdivided.
Assuming that the original address of this house was 500 Chemeketa, it was lived in by 1891 by James Watt, who with his wife, Flora, and their children had moved into Salem in 1887 and who in 1892 built the large house nearby at the southwest corner of Chemeketa and 15th Streets (cf. commentary on #126).
By 1907, Flora Watt, apparently widowed, and her daughter Alma again were living in this Watt cottage. It, and the somewhat later Watt cottage next door (#125), remained in the Watt family until Alma Watt Chessman sold them in 1946.
