Two house moving stories

Once upon a time houses in this part of the world were not built on concrete slabs. They were built with the floor up off the ground and there was usually a crawl space beneath them - a wonderful place to meet up with skunks and snakes and other undesirables when for some reason it was necessary to work on plumbing or something.

Building houses this way allowed them some degree of mobility; you ran a couple of long steel beams under the crawl space, jacked them up until you could attach wheels and haul 'em down the road to the new homestead. If the house had to come through town, it added to the excitement. Some agile person had to sit up on the roof and guide phone cables and electrical lines over the roof as the house eased under them. Sometimes they were successful and sometimes they were not. The only time I can remember my father angry - really, really angry - was one night when he was called out to deal with a house mover that had snagged a phone cable and pulled it loose.

My first story dates back to the days when it was more common to move houses, and I found the story in the book Twelve Mighty Orphans, by Jim Dent. I'll post about the book another time, but in short it is about high school football in Texas. and it contains this mention of football in Breckenridge, my home town, in a section that deals with the fact that promising ball players were often "recruited" with financial incentives to the family. I previously wrote about this here.

"A famous story that still makes the rounds in West Texas involves the father of two football-playing sons in the 1920s that refused at any dollar amount to move his family into Breckenridge. The man worked as a math teacher at a country school and enjoyed the lifestyle there. When the Breckenridge money people knocked on his door, he sent them away.

But Breckenridge fans were not the kind to take “no” for an answer. Furthermore, they had had a plan. They would wait for the math teacher to take his family on their annual summer driving vacation. While the family was out of town, the boosters uprooted the house and moved it into their school district. They also left this note on the door: “We moved your house. You can move it back. But you will have to pay for it.”

The family stayed in Breckenridge and, as the story goes, the two boys became All State players for the Buckaroos."

The second story is more contemporary.  An Austin man wanted to demolish an old house built in the early 1930s, situated in the Ridgetop area, but neighbors and the Historic Landmark commission were opposed, wanting instead to preserve it. To thwart them, the owner had the house moved to Lockhart, literally under the cover of darkness. Only problem is, it appears that the owner never paid the house mover, and last week the neighbors awoke to find the house moved back to its original location, again under cover of darkness,  but now spray-painted with messages that said "PAY UR BILLS, DEADBEAT" and "UR HISTORIC HOUSE IS NOT MY PROBLEM."