Ronald and Priscilla Frizzell House (1518 Court St NE) Salem, Oregon
National Register of Historic Places Data
The Ronald and Priscilla Frizzell House (1518 Court 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shown here, minor errors and/or formatting may have occurred during transcription, and some information may have become outdated since listing.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 Some information may have become outdated since the property was nominated for the Register.
1518 Court Street, NE; Assessor's Map 26BD 7-3W
Tax Lot 55435-000 Owners: Herbert Freeman, et al, 11122 State Street, Salem, OR 97301 Secondary Contributing
A complete remodelling of an earlier Rural Gothic house, this structure was converted in 1935 to a Georgian design. It has a side-gabled-on-hip roof with a front-facing (north) gable joining the main wall. This gable presents a Palladian window, located on the same vertical axis as the pedimented front door below. Paired double-hung sash windows (with six panes over six) flank the Pallddian window upstairs and the front door below, giving the facade a precisely symmetrical design. Green shutters hang to either side of the paired windows. A brick exterior chimney is located on the west wall. A one-story, flat-roofed rear addition houses a family room/study.
From the exterior, the house appears to be of two stories but in fact is a story and a half. Eight-inch clapboard siding put on in the 1935 remodelling now is covered with aluminum siding. (Siding removed in 1987.)
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.
The house was redesigned to approximate the Raoul Walsh estate in California, as it appeared in a painting on the cover of the March 1934 issue of American Home. Priscilla B. Frizzell, who with her husband, Ronald Frizzell, acquired the house in 1934 and remodelled it, describes the project in American Home for November 1936.
The article includes a photograph of the pre-remodelling house—a story-and-a-half vernacular structure perhaps dating from the 1870's. The house is said to have been moved to this site from the corner of Court and Capital Streets. The early history of the house is uncertain. The early history of the lot begins with the Watt family selling it in 1892 to L. H. Rowland, who apparently built a house here, for in 1904 B. T. Rowland sold the property for $2100 to Sophia Marsh. The pre-1914 Sanborn Insurance Map shows the house, a two-story dwelling, but in 1914 this original structure in fact seems no longer to have stood here, for Sophia Marsh sold the property for only $500 to J. P. Frizzell in February 1914.
Jason Porter Frizzell was treasurer and general manager of the City View Cemetery Assoc.; his parents had crossed the plains to the Willamette Valley in 1852. It was presumably Mr. Frizzell who moved the house from Court and Capital some time after 1914 and apparently used it as a rental; he and his wife, Alice, never are listed as living here.
Alice Frizzell sold the house in 1934 to her son Ronald and his wife Priscilla, who were married in 1934. Ronald Frizzell was department manager for Nelson Brothers, Inc., Plumbers, Sheet Metal Work, Neon Signs, Paint and Roofing, Gas Burners, Washing Machines, etc. In the American Home article, Mrs. Frizzell describes her husband as "a graduate mechanical engineer" who "has put all his talents into a complete air-conditioned heating system, fired with gas." She describes the kitchen as "a model work room with built-in ironing board, Magic Chef stove, Electrolux refrigerator, and handy built-ins." The Frizzells sold the house in 1943.
In the early 1950's, Ellen and Bryan Goodenough, a Salem attorney, purchased it. A native of Astoria, Mr. Goodenough moved to Salem in 1907, graduated from Willamette University College of Law in 1926, and until 1948 served as Oregon Supreme Court bailiff and court reporter. From 1939 to 1948, he was state code commissioner and became an expert on Oregon laws. He was in private practice from 1948 to 1983. Mrs. Goodenough was born Ellen Martha Savage, a member of a pioneer Salem family. She attended Willamette University. The Goodenoughs lived in the house on Court Street until their deaths in 1985. (See: obituary for Mrs. Goodenough, Statesman Journal, Nov. 5, 1985, and for Mr. Goodenough, Statesman Journal, Nov. 12, 1985)
