Thank you Anne for sharing your family's history and wonderful photos about this home on Lenzen Ave & The Alameda in San Jose, CA
I can remember feeling when I was young that the house was a time capsule. I would pretend I was back in the early 1900s. From that standpoint, I will always be sad that someone with foresight didn’t step in and just make it a museum as it stood. Aunts Nina & Hattie kept everything in good repair, but didn’t change anything! They were still having coal and ice delivered in the 1960s! I would bring ice cream when we came to visit as it was a treat, no freezer section in an icebox! My children would play with the same toys I had played with as a child that my father had played with, that belonged to my grandfather and his siblings. Many of those toys and books I still have and I treasure them.
When Henry Kirk came to San Jose in 1885 he had made his fortune and was retired. He had the first mercantile store, bank, and post office in Sibley, Iowa. He built the first small frame house there as well, and it still is in the Sibley Museum. When he arrived he took over his brother’s store in East San Jose because it was failing and rode the trolley to and from downtown San Jose every day.
Both Henry Kirk Rogers and Mina May Farwell came from old families, their ancestors go back to the Revolutionary War days and well beyond. Henry Kirk was 19 years older than Nina May. He had been married, widowed, and had three children, one of whom died before he married Nina. Their first two children were born in Sibley, Iowa, Thomas Farwell, in 1883, and Hattie Evelyn in 1884. They had four more children after moving to San Jose, Edna Mary, Ruth, Francis Henry (Frank) and Nina Margaret Rogers. Henry Kirk died on 28 Sept 1920, his obituary was in Mercury-News and took up most of a whole page. Unfortunately, I have misplaced it and their internet files only go back to1985.
The Clipping File Index is a subject/topic list of thousands of article clippings from the San José Mercury News, spanning 1920 – 1979. These clippings can be viewed on Microfiche in the California Room on the 5th Floor of King Library. The microfiche is filed alphabetically.
Nina May Rogers died in San Jose, California January 28, 1950, lacking three days of being 88 years old.
Henry and Nina’s bedroom was downstairs, his study was the first room at the head of the stairs on the right. Framed and hanging on the wall of his study just as you came in the door was a poem. I memorized it as a child and used it on Christmas cards and such my whole life.
“A friend is a gift you give yourself, that’s one of my old-time songs,
So, I put you down with the best of them for you’re where the best belongs.
Among the gifts, I’ve given to me, most comforting, tried and true,
the one that I most often think about is the gift to myself of you.”
In the bathroom, there was a huge claw bathtub which someone told me came around the horn, but I can’t verify it… could have been just someone pulling my leg! But it was very long!! Aunt Nina had a wonderful dollhouse the size of a card table on legs in her room.
My two Great Aunts Hattie and Nina lived there until they passed away.
Originally shared on Explore San Jose · November 26, 2020