Earlewood hopes to schedule another Tour of Homes event in the coming years!
Many of our homeowners are in the process of some fantastic renovations and there are several beautification projects in the works, so we hope to have another wonderful Tour of Homes event in the near future!
Subscribe to our email newsletter for updates or email earlewoodneighborhood@gmail.com if you’re interested in heading up Earlewood’s Tour of Homes.
Bungalowfest 2010
BungalowFest, a Tour of Earlewood Homes & Gardens, was held on Sunday afternoon, September 12th, from 1 p.m. until 6 p.m as part of Earlewood’s Centennial Celebration.
Earlewood is known for its many Craftsman Bungalows, an architectural design that was popular in the early 20th Century. The American Craftsman Bungalow was named from the Arts & Crafts movement that emphasized simple design and fine craftsmanship. The term ‘Bungalow’ comes from India (via England) and means a modest-sized house with low-gabled roofs and wide porches. Gabled roofs with overhanging exposed eaves and rafters, welcoming front porches and an abundance of windows are characteristics of theCraftsman Bungalow.
Earlewood’s first home and garden tour showcased 10 historic homes and gardens plus two townhomes at the former McCants Elementary School, an award winning property for its adaptive reuse of an historic building.
A lot of work went into preparing for the second segment of Earlewood’s Centennial Celebration – our tour of homes called Bungalow Fest on September 12th. And, we really didn’t know whether anyone would show up.
They did, in droves.
Clayton King, Ira Trotter and Martha Williams registered people and put on bracelets non-stop from 1 p.m. until after 5 p.m.
When the tour was over, between 400 and 500 people had come through the 16 homes and gardens on the tour, as did WIS-TV and WOLO-TV.
Give credit to the home and garden owners who tirelessly prepared for the event. As someone remarked, work was done on their homes that they had been putting off for years – and didn’t even do when family visited.
It turned out Sunday afternoon was a great time to have the tour, and altogether some 100 Earlewood neighbors participated in the event as volunteers.
Besides those in the neighborhood who helped out, a special thanks goes to Landon Johnson, who did the photography, to Debbie Bloom, who helped with the research, to Virginia Bedford, who wrote the history of each home and coordinated the event, to First Citizens for its support of the banners on Main Street and for ticket sales (they sold all of the tickets we gave them), to Cynthia South for her PR work that landed us all over the place, to the City of Columbia and the Hospitality Tax Committee, which believed enough that people would come to support the event financially.
We raised a little bit of money as a result of the strong ticket sales. More importantly, we raised awareness of the Earlewood neighborhood. And a very positive benefit was that we found out a lot about our neighborhood and our homes historically that we did not know before.