Here is the basic timeline and happenstance of my major historical find... the people from HGTV's "If Walls Could Talk" show have already been in contact with me for an upcoming program (j/k).
So like I mentioned, I had a large wall mirror in my 1927 house that has never really stood out to me. It was painted to basically match the trim of the doors and floorboards, which kind of made it hide on the wall. I just decided on a whim to strip all of the paint off and stain it, to make it look nice and "pop" off the wall, rather than be forgotten.
I forgot to take a "before" picture, but here is slightly after beginning the work.
Once I stripped enough paint off of it (in all there were like 7 layers of paint) and it wasn't painted to the wall anymore (I already took out the old brass screws), I peeled it off the wall, and to my surprise, there was an old niche behind it.
I think it was a phone niche, but I'm not entirely sure. It definitely originally had some type of wooden ledged bottom (gone, to put the mirror on the wall), and there was a hole coming from the top of the arch along with some old screw holes. I'm just assuming it was a phone niche.
This niche was a treasure and a great find to me. However, the best part was finding several pages (about 12 in all) of the Sunday Morning, October 8, 1939 Arizona Republic tacked to the back of the mirror.
Being a relative WW2 junkie, the headline talking about the Nazis is so cool to me. This is about 1 month after the Nazis invaded Poland. I'd hate to be the person debating the side that the Nazis
aren't a threat to the U.S. If they only knew!
One of the sections must have been the real estate as there are several articles talking about newly constructed homes and under construction buildings...
Pretty cool that it talks about the old Montgomery Ward building downtown and several other small buildings downtown (including one that is still there - 4th Ave and Van Buren).
Finally, after all weekend of stripping paint and staining my old mirror, I finished:
I debated whether or not I should bring the niche back to life and move the mirror somewhere else... I still could. But the mirror has been there since the 1930s, it's just as original and historic as the niche. It would require a hell of a lot of work to get that niche looking good, so I decided to keep the mirror. I could always change my mind later.
I was also originally hoping the mirror would have a manufacturer's name on the back, maybe a label. At first I was sad to find out that it was basically a home-made mirror (good quality, just definitely home-made). Then I thought how cool it actually was for it to be home-made. It's a nice, unique, basically rustic piece of furniture from the late 1930s.
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