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Thornhill House

As the holiday season is upon us once again, my thoughts turn back, nostalgically, (something that I do more often these days) to the Paris of my childhood. I grew up at 845 Graham Street, a huge two-storied structure with a vast attic and a verandah-style porch which runs around three sides of the house. It will be forever known as the old Thornhill residence, (not the old Harvill residence,) and an oversize photograph of it hangs in the Lamar County Historical Museum, thanks to the efforts of Paul Denney.
Thornhill was an early Paris physician, and my mother had the world’s biggest pantry on the west side of her long kitchen with a door opening onto the side street, as this had been the doctor’s office. I remember that it had two small rooms, evidently the reception room and the examining room. As families are wont to do, mine filled these rooms with all manner of overflow, from foodstuffs to canning supplies, and it was a forbidden, hence favorite place for a child to explore.
Being an apartment dweller, my mind cannot grasp the storage possibilities of such a home. The large hall closet was another favorite objective for a child. Stuffed with linens, it also held the secret stash of Christmas presents hidden it the dark recesses of its loaded shelves. Of course, the house only had the small clothes closets of its day, so the wide hallway also held several “wardrobes” to hold our excess clothing.
Such was life in the old Thornhill house. My mother worked herself to death on it—I rarely remember any “house help”—and she proudly hosted her bridge club friends. I remember her dragging the old Hoover up the long staircase to vacuum the rose-carpeted treads, muttering imprecations against the big old house that she loved so much.
I also remember playing dolls with Shirley Mullins, one of my little neighbor friends, on the first landing. Shirley loved dolls, and Mother religiously bought me one every Christmas—until my dad gave me my first saddle and taught me how to ride. I think she gave it up then.
My big brother, eleven years my senior, had a large room upstairs, and being a teenager, he was notorious for sleeping late. My father finally had a loud buzzer installed in the hallway downstairs, with which my parents awakened him in the mornings, as the long staircase was a bit of a trek when the first few trips didn’t work. No one could sleep through that buzzer. Imagine how the mischievous little sister loved to reach as high as she could and blast that buzzer in his sleeping ear. It’s a wonder he didn’t kill me when we were both kids.
It was a wonderful old house. Aren’t memories precious? I’ll probably never see the inside of that house again, and now its days are surely numbered, but it gives me, at least, great pleasure to write down the details that are as clear to me as they were in the very late forties and fifties. I keep them in an electronic journal, which I call “Paris Diaries,” and perhaps some day someone will find them of interest.

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