Fulton Guest House
Built in 1898.
There was occasional talk of a rock house on Fulton Street, the former residence of early Mason businessman Will Zesch and his wife, Carrie. Relegated to the hazy recollections of old-timers, the rock house was long thought lost, renovated to extinction sometime during the middle of the century, and replaced with a nursing home which was abandoned in 1985. But in 2016, while surveying the condemned property, an unexpected discovery was made.
On the Verge of Demolition
As plans were made to demolish the badly deteriorated building and level the lot once and for all, hand-hewn stonework was discovered underneath the stucco. Further excavation revealed the majority of the original 19th-century stone structure was still intact. And just like that, a piece of Mason's history was saved from the brink.
Progress Photos Reveal Red Sandstone Underneath the Stucco
Will and Carrie
Will Zesch was born in 1873, into a ranching family that lived eight miles south of Mason. Despite his ranching background, however, Will quickly grew into a savvy businessman, perhaps due in part to his time spent in California as a young man, assisting his Uncles Karl and August dangers with their chicory business. He would go on to open Mason's first ice and electric plant, and also managed, at one point or another, a bottling business, a cotton gin, a saloon, and most famously, a meat market.
Carrie Hey, born in 1874, was the second child of Wilson and Hannah Hey, who experienced the wildest and woolliest days of Mason County’s history. Wilson, an Englishman, came to Mason in 1869. He eventually served as Mason’s County clerk during a range feud known as the HooDoo War and issued an arrest warrant for John Ringo. Carrie's mother, Hannah, is said to have attended a Christmas dance at Fort Mason in 1860 hosted by Robert E. Lee, only six weeks before President Lincoln called Lee back to Washington from Mason to offer him command of the Union Army.
'Life Promised Much'
Will and Carrie's newlywed bliss would be short-lived. Their infant daughter, Elsie, who was born nine months after the wedding, died at just shy of four months old in early 1899. Carrie gave birth to a second daughter, Hilda, the following January, but tragically, Carrie died just a month after the birth, at home on February 27, 1900. The date was two weeks after her 26th birthday and a month before her and Will's second wedding anniversary.
One can only assume that Will was devastated by Carrie's death, even more so from the pain of having to care for their infant daughter, Hilda. As fate would have when Hilda was 33, she too would meet an untimely end, just four days shy of the anniversary of her mother's death.
A Tribute to Carrie Zesch in the Mason County News, 1900.
"No death in Mason in recent years has been more regretted by our people than the passing away of Mrs. Carrie Hey Zesch, wife of Mr. Will Zesch, which occurred at her residence at 3pm Tuesday last...Life promised much for these young people. They were fortunate, and contented with each other's love, and long years of happiness seemed open to them. But disease came and in a few brief weeks its grim and relentless work brought low the young wife and faded the roses from her cheeks. All that human skill could do, all that love could accomplish, was done to save the life of the young wife. In the struggle against disease and death no more devotion could have been shown than Will Zesch gave his young wife. Nothing however could avert the end, and quietly, peacefully, she sank into the arms of the Great Giver of Life, surrounded by those whom in life she held most dear. Through her sufferings, she was most uncomplaining, and thus she faded out of the life of those whom she had blessed in her more vigorous existence and closed her mortal eyes forever in the dreamless sleep of death."
Will's Next Chapter
Like Carrie Hey, Pearl was also the daughter of one of Mason's first families to settle in the area, and, as the 1900 U.S. Census shows, lived very close to the Zesch house at the time of Carrie's death. Will and Pearl went on to have three children together, while young Hilda, his daughter with Carrie, went to live with Will's mother, who also resided in Mason. It is unclear whether Will maintained a close relationship with Hilda, though it's likely the young girl was forever a painful reminder of his darling Carrie.
As for Pearl, it was said that she was in frail health for most of her life, eventually succumbing to cancer at the age of 56. The last few months of her life were particularly difficult as attempts at stopping its spread, like the amputation of a leg, proved futile. When she died in 1935, Will Zesch was 62 years old, and he had witnessed the excruciating death of not one but two wives in the stone house he built nearly four decades earlier. So many hopes laid with each stone, and yet, it is no wonder why, when he married for the third and final time, at the age of 73, he finally bid adieu to the rock house and settled with his brother's widow, Lina Zesch, on a farm outside of Mason. There they lived together peacefully for the last decade of Will's life.
Nearly 15 years after his death in 1956, the stone walls of the rock house where memories of Carrie and Pearl surely still lingered, were covered in stucco and forgotten for over half a century.
What did the house used to look like?
No photographs of the house as it was originally constructed have been found. However, Will's grandson, Don Zesch, remembered the house in exacting detail from his childhood in the 1930s and 1940s:
"There was a wooden sleeping room built into the back screened porch. There was a tank house off the back porch, too. The bottom room was for washing clothes, and on top was a tank to store water from the windmill. There were two bedrooms, a kitchen, a large dining room den, a living room, and a large front entrance hall. There was a pen of chickens behind the house. Further back there was a red wooden barn, a tin two-car drive-through garage, and an enclosed garage."