Picked up the Spring issue of Mizzou magazine (my undergrad alma mater’s alumni publication) last night and came across this nice little item about the first house I ever lived in:
In 1906, three MU professors acted as their own contractors to build houses for themselves made of homemade concrete blocks finished with a veneer of local stone. They were Winterton Curtis, a zoologist known for his role in the Scopes Monkey Trial… (A photo of young Dr. C. here)
Dr. Curtis reflected in 1957 on that house and the lives it sheltered, at 210 Westmount in Columbia, MO:“It is a thing to make life worthwhile to have lived so long in a home that one planned and built in part with his own hands on a street freshly cut from a cornfield, to have planted the trees and watched their growth until they arch the street, and above all to have lived in a university community. I think the best life in America is to be had in university and college towns such as Columbia.”
Tags: Columbia MO, Scopes Trial, Winterton Curtis
Up@dawn 
July 28, 2017 at 4:14 pm |
Westmount has since been renumbered, the Curtis house is now 504 (not 210) Westmount.
June 18, 2020 at 1:58 pm |
I lived in the middle ‘Curtis’ house, now numbered 608 Westmount, from 1957 to 1973. My father continued to live there until 2013. They were fabulous old places in the best neighborhood in Columbia.