Amy Falls in Love with the Flavel House Museum

After visiting Fort Clatsop on Monday morning, we drove back into Astoria and toured the Flavel House Museum, the retirement home of Captain George Flavel. It is a beautiful Victorian-era home whose construction was completed in 1886 and is now owned and run by the Clatsop County Historical Society.

Captain Flavel, his wife (he married her when she was only 14 years old) Mary Christina Boelling, and their two daughters Nellie and Katie lived in this house for many years until it was passed down to Flavel's great-granddaughter, Patricia Jean Flavel in 1934.

The house was very modern for the time and boasts indoor plumbing including flushing toilets. The exterior of the home is in the Queen Anne style and very much reminded me of Anne of Green Gables. It also has a lovely wrap-around porch and a beautiful "Ornamental finial," an iron sunflower sculpture (Sunflowers represent longevity, good fortune, and happiness) in the upstairs hall that used to be on the top of the tower part of the home where Captain Flavel could look out at the ships floating down the Columbia River.

Above the front door is a lovely hand-painted stained glass window depicting a ship on the ocean with a backdrop of clouds. It looked so beautiful with the afternoon sun shining through. I like to think of the family and their loved ones walking beneath it on a daily basis as they went about their business.

There are several little areas at the corners of the home that reminded me of breakfast nooks. The prettiest one was in the dining room, where a small table and chairs sat near the window that overlooks the back garden that used to have a garden. The Flavel daughters played croquet and tennis on the lawn and cared for their fruit trees beneath the window. I loved seeing that part of the house because I know they spent many happy mornings there, drinking their tea and enjoying meals together.

On the second floor are the family bedrooms and some lovely artifacts. It is a self-guided tour, so you can walk through the rooms and look into their closets and touch the fireplace mantles, etc. I thought this was so lovely because I have been in many wonderful historical homes where you were not allowed to go into the rooms or touch anything. I know that can be dangerous when it comes to preservation, but this time it was really cool.

The Flavel daughters never married but were very accomplished young ladies who played piano and sang and even went to Paris, France to perform. I looked for a book about them in the gift shop but didn't see one. This made me very sad because I feel their lives were worthy of being put into a book.

The museum did have a copy of Nellie's journal which tells of their experience surviving the San Francisco earthquake. Her words make you shudder as you read how they clung to each other and worried about whether or not they would live through it.

The house was quite empty when we were there, so we took pictures on the porch and slowly walked through the high-ceilinged hallways and studied the family portraits hanging on the walls. Dad and I really liked this part of our trip and were glad we took the time to tour it. Our tickets only cost six dollars, so it was well worth our time. Supporting historic homes such as the Flavel House is an important part of being a tourist.