A Piece of Marietta History Brought Back to Life

Three years made all the difference.  

In 1998, Douglas and Rachel Frey bought a house on Trammell Street in Marietta. They loved old houses, and this old house had just the character they were looking for–a big Queen Anne-style place that needed plenty of the work they loved to do.

But before the first sledgehammer could be raised, they had to wait. The 111-year-old house had been divided into three apartments, and two were occupied.  So the Freys settled into the vacant rooms and let the leases run their course. 

“It gave us a chance to study the house,” Doug Frey said. “A lot of people move into these old houses and make rash decisions.”

It gave them a chance to educate themselves, Rachel Frey said, and not just about their home.

“We were old-house lovers,” Doug Frey said, “but we weren’t preservationists.

“Through this process, we’ve become preservationists.”

“There’s a huge difference,” Rachel added.

Work began in 2001, and the results can be seen today in the meticulously renovated Trammell House, a Victorian steeped in Marietta history brought back to life.

As he did his painstaking research, Doug Frey began gathering information on other historic homes, which led him to write Marietta, the Gem City of Georgia: A Celebration of Its Homes–A Portrait of Its People, a 432-page coffee-table book published this month by Cobb Landmarks and Historical Society.

Frey chose 50 of the city’s oldest homes and the families who lived in them as his focus, and with photographer Jim DiVitale, captured what Cobb Landmarks calls an intimate window on Marietta’s historic past. 

The book is on sale through the Cobb Landmark Web site. A first run of 2,000 copies were printed along with 175 special editions in honor of Marietta’s 175th anniversary.

The Freys have immersed themselves into Marietta’s preservationist community since moving here 13 years ago. They have done work with Cobb Landmarks, and Doug is now on the city’s Preservation Historic Commission.

The transformation began in an East Cobb ranch house, where the couple, who met at the University of North Carolina, was living in 1995. They finish each other’s thoughts as they remember the move.

Rachel: “We went of all the old-home tours. Inman Park, Druid Hills …”

Doug: “And we wanted to do projects. Of course, we’d do small projects on the ranch house but …”

Rachel: “You soon run out of projects.”

They were house hunting in Marietta one day when they walked down past 55 Trammell Street after looking at a nearby home for sale. They loved the look of the Queen Anne but it had no for-sale sign.  As they walked away someone called out their names.

A college friend lived in an apartment next door. “We had known he had moved down here but we had no idea where he was,” Doug Frey said. “He said he knew someone who lived in the house, and he thought the owner wanted to sell.”

They got in touch with the owner who said she in fact already had a buyer but would show them the house.

“She met us the next day,” Rachel Frey said. “As she was getting ready to put the key in the door she said, ‘I have to tell you I believe in signs, and when you called me I had already signed an acceptance letter [to sell the house] but I felt so bad I hadn’t put it in the mail.’

“The people she was selling to were going to turn it into nine apartments. She was not feeling very happy about that.”

The house, Doug Frey said, had been in her family since the 1940s. “So she had the sign and we had the sign.”

Sold!

“We decided we wanted to know everything we could about the house,” Doug Frey said. “Who built it? Exactly when was it built? Why was it built? So we started doing research. We learned it was built in 1887 for a guy named Leander Newton Trammell.”

Trammell, Frey learned, served in the state House and Senate, fought in the Civil War and later served on the state Railroad Commission (now the Public Service Commission).  The street is named after him.

Three years later–with a solid history of the home in hand and the beginnings of a book in mind–the “tremendous challenge” began.

“Bringing it back was quite difficult and time consuming as well as expensive,” Doug Frey said. “I made a decision that rather then hire anybody to do most of the work that I would leave my job [at an Atlanta design and remodeling firm] and stay here and be the contractor and do most of the carpentry, demolition and painting.  Do as much of the work as I could to save money.”

Frey was a geography major at UNC but always had an affinity for old houses and carpentry.  “This was not something new to me,” he said. “My parents had a farmhouse in upstate New York that we renovated.

“So we jumped in. Rachel would come home [from her job], and I’d put her to work.”

With the help of  architect Michael Pope and others, the Freys say they did two years of hardcore demolition and renovation and another three years of recreating a wraparound porch [with help from a historic photo], painting and many other projects.

There is always something to be done, Rachel Frey said, but they “finished” the renovation in 2005 and were on the Marietta Home Tour.  “We finished two days before the tour.”

Along the way they found clues that guided them toward preserving the original features of the house, now 124 years old.

“There are so many components to these old houses, and you have to be careful to get it right,’ Doug Frey said. “Something just clicked with Rachel and I. What makes these old houses special are all the old components that have lasted all these years, that other people have touched, that other people have painted, that other people have looked at and admired.

“When our house was on the home tour, the first thing people say when they see something they admire, like the floors, they say, ‘Oh, are these floors original?’ And you say, ‘Yes.’ They see old glass in a window and they say, ‘Oh, is this an original window?’ And you say, proudly, ‘Yes, it is.’

“Imagine if all those components had been replaced.  It just wouldn’t be the same. You’re taking the soul out of the house.”

On a video they made about the renovation, Rachel Frey admits it was stressful living out of boxes and amid the construction debris for so long, but said it was well worth it.

“Do you know how much you’re saving by preserving this house instead of tearing it down and putting it in a landfill?” she said. “Plus, you’re tearing up somebody else’s labor who put it up 100 and some years ago. That’s so disrespectable.”

That kind of passion does not stop at the Frey property line.

“We get very disgruntled with the state of historic preservation in Marietta because the current ordinance has no teeth whatsoever,” Doug Frey said. “We see inappropriate remodeling all the time.  And once it’s gone it can never come back.

“All the houses on Church Street that go from the square to the Loop–in 25 years they’ll all be gone. Some lawyer is going to say, ‘I need a new office building, you know, two or three stories. I’m not going to fix up this old raggedy house.’

 “There’s no protection for those houses.”