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Note: This is part three of a four-part series highlighting some of the properties on the 17^th Manteo Preservation Trust Holiday Home Tour on Saturday, December 7. Check back soon for the final installment in The Coastland Times.  

Exactly 100 years ago, Malcolm “Big Keith” Fearing and his wife Grizelle purchased a kit house from a Sears catalog for $2500. The building materials came over on boats at the waterfront downtown and were hauled to a large lot in the budding town of Manteo.

The couple didn’t know it at the time, but they weren’t just building a home, they were building a legacy.

“Our children were the fifth generation to live in this house,” said Courtney and Jason Schultz, current owners of the Fearing House at 308 Uppowoc Avenue.

It’s an American Foursquare – a simple style with four spacious rooms on each floor, a centered attic dormer, and a wide front porch that looks like it was built with rocking chairs in mind.

Grizelle lovingly planted oak trees, pecans, dogwoods, magnolias and camellias; some of which still thrive on the one-acre property today.

Big Keith and Grizelle had five children, three of whom were born in the house. When the couple died, the house went to their daughter, Mollie. Mollie raised her family in the house, and upon her death, Grizelle – named in honor of her grandmother – took ownership.

But Grizelle only lived in the home about 10 years when she decided to transfer ownership to her daughter, Courtney, and her son-in-law, Jason.

Courtney, who grew up in the North End of Roanoke Island, met Jason through a friend. Jason was serving in the Air Force at Langley, and he would come down to the Outer Banks on the weekends. After a few years, the two started dating. They were married under a magnolia tree in the backyard of the Fearing House. They moved to Virginia, then to Wichita Falls, and then, in 2008, back to Courtney’s family homestead.

Jason had recently left active duty to enter the reserves and the timing was right, the couple explained.

“We had three small kids and we wanted them to have more stability,” Jason said. “We didn’t want them to be moving around for the next five to 10 years.” Their boys were 6, 5, and 1 at the time, and now, looking back, it’s the only home they’ve ever really known.

“[Grizelle] said that we had three kids and it’s better for us to be in this house than her,” Jason remembers.

So, in 2008, Courtney returned to the island she thought she’d never return to and the home she never expected to own.

Within the first couple of years, the Schultzes remodeled the downstairs and reconfigured the rooms. They turned the dining room into a den, and moved the large dining table into the kitchen, creating one big open space.

“When we have people over, everyone is at the kitchen table,” Courtney said.

“That’s why when we did the remodel, we put in that big table in the kitchen,” Jason added. “If you don’t have anywhere to sit, everyone just huddles.”

Though the family expected to use the living room for relaxing and watching television together, everyone congregates in the den/kitchen area. “It’s our favorite room,” the couple agreed.

There’s a wooden chopping block in the kitchen that came from Fearing’s Sandwich Shop (where Nouvines is now), where the community would come for sodas, burgers, fries and shakes. The story goes, the wooden block was used for chopping the hamburger.

They added a half bath, covered the back porch, and created a separate space for the laundry room.

In the living room, they added built-ins, repainted in warm, earthy colors, and filled the walls with original artwork. The kitchen got a complete makeover, with new green cabinets, butcher block countertops, and a copper sink. Paired with the new are hints of the past – eight-inch baseboards painted a glossy white, stained-glass windows, and original beadboard discovered during the remodel.

Even though Courtney said the house doesn’t look anything like it did when she was growing up, when asked how it feels to live in a house that has been in her family for generations, she replied, “It feels like home.”

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