History Then and Now

Bill May realized a dream when he and his wife, Pam, purchased their home on East Pearl Street in Butler 15 years ago. "I always wanted to live in this house," says Bill, "I loved the big front porch." Even to a youngster, the porch clearly is special. Scalloped shingles frame the openings, covering unusual "bell-bottom" shaped columns. Growing up a block away, Bill has special memories of the house he now occupies - of the two elderly Bartley sisters, who'd lived in the house since 1914, inviting the children in when they came trick-or-treating at Halloween and asking them about their families. Bill remembers sneaking with his buddy onto the porch, standing on the rail and jumping onto a branch of a huge adjacent tree, then swinging and jumping down. Bill's passion for history and place meshes perfectly with this Victorian-era home, which he continues to keep painted in traditional white with green trim. It was built in 1872 as part of a neighborhood populated by professional families. George Fleeger, who built the house, had been a schoolteacher, Civil War veteran, attorney and two-time U.S. Congressman, who married three times but died childless in 1894. Bill, a Civil War buff, was thrilled to meet a Fleeger great-nephew, who provided him with a photo of Fleeger in Civil War uniform, now framed in the entryway. The next owners were the Duffy family, who owned department stores, but they soon moved next door. Then came the Bartleys, who struck oil on their Penn Township farm and in 1914 purchased the house, added the porch and moved in. "The porch is what makes the home," Bill says.

The May family, which includes two children, ages 11 and 15 - the first children to ever live in the house - and a rather-large Labrador dog named Huckleberry, has breakfast on the porch every day in the summer. Bill believes that windows at the western side of the porch were to shelter porch sitters from the bad weather that comes from the west. And they do.

On summer evenings, friends stop by the May porch, and the family holds an annual July Fourth picnic and many family events there. "I always feel as if I'm in a Norman Rockwell painting," Bill says.

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