I liked “67 Nutt Road” better

This is my first (!) house. A basic Cape. 26’ x 34’, about 1,400 square feet of living space. Sky-blue vinyl siding (sorta like the background color to this webpage, by golly). Luckily, I’m inside looking out, so I don’t have to see the color.*

I moved here in July 1987. At the time, the address was 67 Nutt Road. In September 1997, there was an address change. I call it a virtual move in that the house number changed, the street name changed, but the house didn’t change.

This address change is a result of Emergency 911 standardization finally coming to Auburn. 911 demands that each road be uniquely identified, and all houses on a road be sequentially numbered from some end point, with all the odd numbers on one side of the road and all the even numbers on the other.

This is actually a good idea, just a little late in coming When I moved here, FedEx, Sears, UPS, Courier, Airborne, and even the Express Mail service of the United States Postal Service had trouble finding 67 Nutt Road. You see, there were two Nutt Roads: paved and dirt. Actually they were the same road, but the maps didn’t show that the two parts of Nutt Road were separated by forest, a washed out culvert, etc. So, people following the map invariably wound up on paved Nutt Road. And few townspeople from the other side of town knew of dirt Nutt Road. This is why Auburn’s 911 committee decided to uniquely name this side of Nutt Road for the emergency crews (police, fire, EMS, etc.)

After four years of dickering, reassigning numbers, and such, the committee finally announced the new street names and numbering scheme for the entire town. The committee also handed out a list of the changes in street names. No map. So, it took about two months before FedEx, UPS, Courier, Airborne, and even the Express Mail service of the United States Postal Service to find 21 Steam Mill Road!

Truth be known, I was the one to suggest the name Steam Mill Road to the 911 committee. I forget what they were going to call this part of Nutt Road. It seemed mighty inefficient, and somewhat confusing, to change the name of this small portion of the road, especially if one looked at any existing map of Auburn. Steam Mill Road already existed, even though nobody lives on it, and for the most part, it’s shut off from traffic. Why is that? Because it was a logging road to a steam-powered wood mill way-back-when. The mill no longer exists, but the sawdust from years of sawing lumber into planks is still around.

And the trees are still around. This satellite photo shows my house (betwixt the arrowheads) nestled on about 2 acres of sandy soil and mostly pine forest. You can see the property owned by the neighbors across the street—their house, the 3-car garage (now a wood shop), horse barn, and area for walking and training the horses.

*Update: 6/27/07. Well, there went that conversation piece. The house has now been re-sided to “Ash Gray.” Last fall a tree toppled over in a wind storm and and left a “line” of broken vinyl siding across the edges of about a dozen sidings. That line measured from about an inch to maybe 4” at its widest. Not much damage, but the sidings being over 20 years old and faded couldn’t be matched. Thank you Amica Insurance.