W. Fred Lamson: The First Owner of The Lamson House

Originally published September 2016

The Lamson House was built for William F. Lamson. The “F” stood for Fredrick so to his friends, family and the physician who took care of him in his final days, he was Fred Lamson.

Lamson is one of the older family names in Bedford. They owned considerable lands in the township. There is even a street in Bedford named for the family. One of the more famous of the Lamsons was even a judge in the city of Cleveland. But Fred Lamson did not appear to be part of the wealthier branches of his family. His father, Marshall, died when he was 10 and he worked at the Taylor Chair Company as a young man to help support his widowed mother.

His story between age 19 to age 39 is a bit clouded. We know that he married Frances “Frankie” Skeels in 1882. We know that he left the chair making business to become a book publisher. And to be able to afford to build a house like the Lamson House, he must have been a very successful one. But what he published and how he got into the business of book publishing after working in a chair factory is unknown at this time.

We know that they constructed the Lamson House in 1899. And very shortly after that, something wonderful and odd happened. The Lamsons suddenly had two babies come into their life in rapid succession, Nelson in 1900 and Lorna in 1901. The house was built with a nursery on the third floor, which was odd. After 17 barren years and at age 38, why had they expected that Frankie would suddenly get pregnant not once, but twice in two years? While we have not discovered any records one way or the other, as an adoptive parent myself, I can’t help but wonder if Fred Lamson not only built the house of his dreams, but also adopted two bundles of joy to go in it?

Regardless of how that third floor nursery was filled, their happiness was short lived. In early October in 1904, Fred Lamson was rushed to the hospital where he later succumbed to an “intussusception of the bowel”. He left behind a grieving widow with a small child on each hand standing on the porch of a house now too large for all of them.

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