Belle Avenue, Davenport, Iowa

728 Belle Avenue (now 1518 Belle Ave) Davenport, Iowa

        728 Belle Avenue (now 1518 Belle Avenue), Davenport, Iowa. This house still stands on Belle Avenue. While the porch has been remodeled, the house was identified using the footprint shown on the 1910 Sanborne Fire Insurance map. The Paulson family moved into this house about 1895 on their return from their 2 year stay in Olivia, Texas. They stayed here until about 1903 when they moved into another house on Belle.

        For the 25 years that the Paulson family lived in Davenport, Iowa, life for them and their Swenson relatives would center on Belle Avenue. In the late 1800s, Belle lay on the very eastern edge of Davenport. John Whitaker had bought several sections of this land, plated them and sold the separate house size lots. Thus they are noted as the “Whitaker First Addition,” the “Whitaker Second Addition”, the “Whitaker Third Addition.”

         From 1885, when Paul Paulson bought his first lot from John Whitaker on the southern edge of the Whitaker First Addition, to 1912, when the family left their fourth home in the area, the Belle Avenue neighborhood developed and grew. The earliest homes were a mix of duplexes, apartments, and single family homes on the southern block of Belle. Moving into this area were white lower middle class workers and their families: carpenters, salesman, quarry workers, workers from local factories. Many were first and second generation immigrants, German (like much of Davenport), Swedish, Austrian. While Belle was primarily households, the small German “Holy Cross Evangelical Lutheran Church” stood at 626 Belle (now 1418) from 1902 to 1917.

       While these houses, especially the single family homes, look prosperous, one suspects that the salaries of the children of the family were an important part of the family income.  While married white women of this time did not work, the unmarried young women of the families did, as did their brothers. And so in the censuses, and in the directories of the time, one finds almost everyone above school age in the family working – as carpenters, as factory workers, as clerks, as domestics.

Identifiers:

Negative #: Paulson051 (scanned at 1200 ppi tiff / reduced to 400 ppi jpeg for this post)

Date: Probably circa 1910

Place: Davenport (Scott County) Iowa. 728 Belle Avenue (now 1518 Belle Ave.) Whitaker’s first addition.

People: Paul and Elina Paulson family, see: The Paulsons 

Sources:

Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Davenport, Scott County, Iowa.

Davenport City Directories, 1895 to 1912