MOUNT VERNON — When people attend funerals at Dowds-Snyder Funeral Home, 201 Newark Road, they often ask the funeral directors, “What’s up there?” or “Can we go up there?” indicating the curving chestnut and walnut staircase that leads all the way up to the fourth floor and the belvedere atop the historic house.
Wes Snyder, vice president of Snyder Funeral Homes Inc., led the way up the antique staircase to the fourth floor, then up an only slightly narrower stairway into the belvedere. Unlike most of Knox County’s high places — which are old, out of use and dusty — the belvedere is spotless. Not even a dead fly is in sight. Snyder gives credit to his mother, Shirley, for her high-energy housekeeping.
Except for one replaced pane, the wavy glass in the belvedere’s windows is original. The spacious yard north of the house spreads out below. To the east is a large house that was once the Dowds Funeral Home. To the south, Mount Vernon’s Main Street dips into downtown, then rises again at the square, so that even the public library on North Mulberry Street can be seen. The Knox County Courthouse clock tower and the Memorial Theater’s cupola rise above the trees.
The brick house was built in 1868 by Jonathan and Elizabeth (Updegraff) Weaver, with Italianate Villa features such as twin chimneys and a two-story verandah. The original entryway of the house has 18-foot ceilings; elsewhere in the house are 12- and 16-foot ceilings.
A Leland electric motor in the basement is evidence of a dumbwaiter that ran between the basement and the second floor. The basement shows signs of perhaps having been servants’ quarters long ago. A thick, heavy weight-operated Richmond Fireproof Door — “Kalamen & Tinclad Firedoor Equipment, Richmond, Ind.” — guards the furnace room where a huge old safe stands empty.
Marble fireplace mantels grace the rooms. In the hallway, two tall ornate mirrors face each other, set in polished wood and marble frames that are better described as elaborately carved antique furniture.
“An antiques dealer offered an exorbitant amount of money for both of them once,” said Snyder. “Nothing in this building isn’t old.”
The old staircase was created by master carpenter and former physician Dr. Maximilian Paazig, who was born in 1834 in Richland County. A resident of Mount Vernon, he lived to be 98 and was well-known for his staircases. Snyder said Paazig built staircases with hand-lathed balusters in several Mount Vernon homes, but when a group of his descendants came to visit from South Carolina to see the Dowds-Snyder staircase, they told the Snyders that theirs is the last remaining example of Paazig’s work.
Over the decades, the house was occupied by Dr. Robert C. Kirk, physician, state senator, lieutenant governor of Ohio and minister to the Republic of Argentina under President Abraham Lincoln, and was later was in the possession of Percival Updegraff, then Harry Strodtbeck. Paul and Hazel (Fishburn) Dowds purchased it in 1953 and converted it to the Dowds Funeral Home, with their residence on the 5,200-square-foot second floor. Their daughter, Kay, and her husband, Paul H. Wiggins Jr., joined the business in 1965. The house and the Dowds-Wiggins Funeral Home business were purchased by the Snyders in 1989.
Harry Strodtbeck was a building contractor who, according to Frederick Lorey’s “History of Knox County, Ohio 1876 to 1976,” arrived in Mount Vernon “from Ashland in 1925 to pave some streets with brick, and stayed on to make his home here and become one of the major landowners of the county. He paved numerous streets in Mount Vernon in the 1920s and 1930s and also launched a building materials business which evolved into the Ellis Bros. firm of today.”
Strodtbeck’s daughter Anne — an artistic girl who studied classical piano and ballet — hosted parties, dances and horseback rides at the house for her friends. At the age of 21, she married her childhood sweetheart, Brad Williams, and moved away.
Anne Strodtbeck Williams became a famed jazz singer in New York City and San Diego, made many appearances on television and radio and was known for her loyal support of jazz events and artists.
Before her death in October in San Diego, at age 79, Williams returned to Mount Vernon for a visit. Snyder said she was very emotional as she toured her girlhood home, and was often unable to speak for crying. Snyder said Williams reminisced about descending the ornate staircase in 1949, dressed in her wedding gown, lightly holding the railing with her left hand, to be married in the entryway at the bottom of the stairs.
Snyder said Williams also remembered the day the barn, north of the house, burned to the ground, and that the Mount Vernon Fire Department wouldn’t come out to the countryside on the gravel road to fight the fire because the city was its jurisdiction.
“Anyone is welcome to come by and see the house and the tower,” said Snyder. “Just not during funerals. We’re too busy then. But we like showing people around.”
The Knox County On High series will continue on Monday, Feb. 18, with a visit to the Bridge of Dreams near Brinkhaven.
