Lafayette Bown Home

132 North Main Street in Gunnison, Utah

From flutterbysblog:
A pair of historic homes stand as prominent pillars of Gunnison’s historic roots and open windows to memories of yesteryear.

The homes, standing on the north end of Main Street, were built by two brothers, Lafayette and James Bown.

The brothers built their homes a year apart. Lafayette, who his friends called “Lafe,” built the Bown Villa at 132 North Main in 1898, and James built his home at 168 North Main in 1899.

Both homes have different styles, but they were designed by the same architect from Nephi, whose name is unknown today.

The James Bown home, also a Victorian Eclectic, has a large portico and entrance hall, front parlor and dining room. It was built with red sandstone from a quarry near Fayette. The foundation is oolite limestone extracted from the same rock quarry used for the Manti LDS Temple. Its dark red bricks were manufactured in Manti.

The Bown brothers tended 10,000 sheep on the open range in Utah, Idaho and Colorado. Two hundred sheep usually grazed in a pasture behind the two homes. Before Main Street was built, a large canal ran in front of the two homes. A small indentation in the gravel driveways is all that remains of the canal today.

Because of their large outfit, the brothers hired staff to assist them with the herd. A sheepherder named “Brooks” lived in James’ home. He disappeared for long periods of time with no explanation. He was “a large frightening man with bad table manners,” reports Sanpete.com. “It was later discovered that he was bank robber, among other things.”

James, whose home is still owned by his family, was financially successful and played an important role in building the community of Gunnison. Lafe, although he lived in Gunnison for decades prior to building the Bown Villa, was forced to move north within 10 years of completing the home, says Marie Sanders, great-niece of Lafe and current owner of the James Bown home with her husband Kent.

Another family inhabited the Bown Villa for almost a century before passing it to its current owners, Bill, Charlotte and Shawn Christiansen.

The Bown Villa
Lafe Bown’s home was purchased by Payton and Bessie Alexander in 1929 shortly after they were married. Payton accepted a job in Gunnison as a high school coach and later served as the high school principal for many years.

Bessie Alexander was born in 1908 to Hyrum and Julia “Jule” Hatton in Provo, where she attended Maeser Elementary School and Provo High School. She also attended BYU, where she majored in physical education and dance and met her husband. Bessie lived in the Bown Villa throughout her married life. Only in the last 10 years of her life did she move to California to live closer to her daughters. She died in 2009 at the age of 101.

Payton and Bessie boarded school teachers in their home, including Wanda Welling, Faye Hills and Jenny Duke.

The Alexanders had three daughters, Jewel, Patsy and Joann. Jewel vividly remembers her happy childhood in the Bown Villa. “Patsy and I played on a small bed [on the front porch] with our girlfriends. We played with paper dolls, colored, read and played board [games] and card games. This would continue until one of the dogs would leap on the bed and disrupt everything,” she recalls.

“Christmas was the only time we had a fire in the fireplace,” Jewel says. “During the rest of the winter [the front room] was closed off to keep the heat in the dining room, bedroom and kitchen.”

“There was a ‘heatrola,’ a coal-fired heating stove in the dining room and the cook stove in the kitchen for heat,” Jewel continues. “The ceiling above the heatrola had a vent about a foot square which took the chill off the south upstairs bedroom.”

Charlotte Christiansen, a long-time Gunnison resident, knew the Bown Villa only as “Bessie’s House” before she purchased it with her husband Bill and son Shawn in 2002. Charlotte Christiansen’s real estate office was around the corner from the house for decades, and she knew Bessie well.

When Bessie moved, she sold the house to Charlotte. “She knew we would maintain it,” Charlotte says.

Shawn Christiansen spent the last decade restoring and updating the home. He painstakingly stripped the walls of seven or eight layers of wallpaper and restored the baseboards. He added central air and updated the electrical wiring. He also restored the main stairwell and the roof’s original wood-shake shingles. Shawn added a bathroom to a bedroom upstairs and modernized the kitchen.

Payton and Bessie Alexander had used what now is the dining room as their bedroom, which had a separate door to the bathroom and kitchen in the back of the house. Bessie painted the bathroom bright pink and adorned it with lace drapes. Charlotte and Shawn Christiansen have maintained the bathroom as Bessie left it.

Shawn also found an original stained glass window in the chicken coop and placed it in the front room.

Today Charlotte and Shawn Christiansen use the Bown Villa as the offices of their real estate brokerage. They also hold family reunions and permit visiting family to stay there.