LONG LIVE THE COZINE HOUSE

I spent a very pleasant hour recently in the Cozine House, that gorgeously renovated Queen Anne home on the corner of Third Street and Adams. With its stately presence and bearing, it announces the beginning of downtown McMinnville; its fish-scale shingles, green lawn and blue and purple trim symbolize the entire downtown renovation. Drivers bound for the coast who pass it are suddenly seized with an urge to turn left to explore Third Street, and twenty minutes later they’re drinking wine, planning to buy a vineyard and figuring out how to retire here.

If you haven’t been inside lately, you should go back. The parlor on the main floor serves as a kind of living-room for the whole community, with its floral wallpaper, antique piano and sideboard and photos of Samuel and Mahala Cozine glaring at us from 1895. (Someone should have mentioned that their images would be greeting people for a very long time, and thought to offer hair and makeup services.) The piano is covered with flyers of info from local businesses, and calendars of events like the Linfield Chamber Orchestra’s 20th Anniversary Season performances. A table with padded folding chairs invites sitting and browsing. You half-expect Ginger Williams and Kris Gullo, who run the Downtown Association, to come flying out of their offices dressed in full Victorian bustles and ruffles, brandishing broomsticks and feather dusters and admonishing you to do some chores before you get too comfortable.

Poke around a little further and you find out that the Cozine House, which dates back to 1892, was an eyesore that was nearly demolished before a civic group led by Marilyn Dell found the funding and willpower to completely renovate the old place in 1991. Photos show a ghost of a building, its paint faded and peeling, windows boarded over and roof leaking, that looked like a strong gust of wind could blow it over. It was one of only two remaining pioneer houses – Samuel Cozine was a blacksmith whose original land claim encompassed 640 acres, mostly in the area where Linfield College now stands – and the community was split over whether to keep it or tear it down. His blacksmith shop was on the site of today’s Cozine House, on land granted to William Newby.

Luckily for us, the ayes won, with the then-ungodly sum of $150,000 raised to complete the renovation. While raising the building off its dilapidated foundation, workers found gravestones that were being used to shore up support beams. One of the white, hand-carved markers, in memory of a child named Seth, is now mounted on the wall outside of Kris’s office. He passed away almost exactly 152 years ago, on March 1st, 1859, which was thirty-three years before today’s Cozine House was built.

It’s nice to think that Seth, were he to return today, might recognize the pictures of his parents on the walls (if not the indoor plumbing). And that the Cozine House may continue to greet visitors to McMinnville for another hundred years.