Scot and Bea Collins Hebert live in a beautifully restored and elegantly furnished 136-year-old home with a storied past.

According to Adley Cormier, advocacy chair for the Calcasieu Historical Preservation Society, the house at the corner of 504 Ford and Pine Streets is the home place of an important Lake Charles pioneer family, the Reids.

“The Reids provided generations of lawmen, sheriffs, marshals and deputies,” Cormier said.

Cormier and Scot Hebert also noted the important role of the granddaughter of one of these lawmen: Maude Reid, born in 1882, donated scrapbooks of photos, memorabilia, official papers and personal letters to the Calcasieu Parish Public Library. Items chronicle the lives of her family, other Lake Charles pioneers and the people she met while traveling as a public health nurse. A valuable resource in and of themselves, the loss of records during the Great Fire of 1910 makes them more so. Materials are archived at the McNeese University Library.

Maude Reid was living in only a couple of rooms of the house and had it on the market when Georgiann Dressler Watson, now Georgiann Compton drove by and asked her husband to stop.

Georgiann wanted to adopt a child at the time. The adoption agency said the adopted child – Georgiann wanted a girl – couldn’t share a room with the Watson’s daughter.

“I offered Maude Reid around $6,000, less than the amount she was asking,” Georgiann said

The Watson family rewired the homes and and lighting fixtures.

When the roof needed replacing, the Watson’s swapped a cabin boat for the work.

The brick fireplaces were mainly used as an escape method for one of the Watson children to flee the babysitter, according to Georgiann. Bricks were eventually removed from the fireplaces and added to the exterior of the house.

Jimmy and Georgiann Watson never got around to adopting.

“I went in the house with three and one on the way,” Georgiann said. “We raised 10 children there.”

The Reid House was home to Jimmie and GeorgiannWatson from 1962 to 1973.

Monte and the late Anne Hurley bought the house around 1979. Scot and Bea credit them with making the house what it is today. The renovation took four years. They lived there until 1994.

Anne Hurley was posthumously honored as a preservation champion during a statewide conference hosted by the Louisiana Trust for Historic Preservation and the Calcasieu Historical Preservation Society in Lake Charles this summer.

The Vilton and Brenda Matt family owned the home when it was placed on the CHPS Landmark List in 2001. They replaced porches missing for 82 years as a result of the Hurricane of 1918 and restored the 1400-square foot carriage house, according to a 2001 American Press article by Mike Jones.

The home is purported to have ghosts.

“We moved in around 1982,” said Monte Hurley. “The first night we stayed there, Anne and I heard breaking glass and came running out of our bedroom. My son was living there at the time and heard the same thing, but we never did find any broken glass.”

The sound of the breaking glass is said to be the haunting of a prisoner who died trying to escape the house when one of the Reid law officers relocated parish prisoners to the top floor of the house after the downtown Lake Charles parish jail was leveled by fire.

Hurley also said that he had a couple of experiences that made him feel like his late wife was visiting. The Heberts have not had heard or seen anything out of the ordinary.

Scot and Bea Hebert purchased the 5,000-square-foot, three-story house in XXXX and have recently repainted the exterior.

Although Georgiann Compton said the house looked like a ghost lived there when her family first moved in, she never saw or heard a ghost. She did hear noises.

“I was nursing one of the babies and looked up,” she said. “Hanging from an opening my husband had cut in one of the upstairs bathroom floors and never covered were four baby possums.”

The Reid House took four years to build and was completed in 1879. It’s possible that acquiring some of the lumber took longer than the norm. The interior is all black curly cypress. Downstairs floors are oak. Upper floors are yellow pine.

Ceilings are 12 feet downstairs. Upper floors have 11-foot ceilings. Doorways and openings are 10 feet. Original transoms still open and close. Six massive sliding wood pocket doors, original to the house, close as easily as they must have done 130 years ago.

The house has five fireplaces that were meticulously restored by the Hurleys. Distinctive tiger oak lumber was used and the marble was ordered from Italy, according to Hebert.

Tara Landry, known for helping friends with decorating and decluttering, calls the house, “magical.”

Recently she helped the Heberts create a more tranquil master bedroom.

“I wanted to simplify our lives,” Bea Hebert said. “We can get so attached to things, even things that don’t hold any particular meaning.”

Landry said the master bedroom was full of tchotchkes and the look of the room had never really jelled for the Heberts.

“It’s more restful now,” Bea said.

Scot and Bea said they probably would not have been able to declutter without help from Landry. Items were set aside. Friends and family were offered the chance to take anything of interest.

They haven’t changed much about the house, but they did move a wall to make a larger bath with a shower and added a closet.

“You won’t find a more interesting house,” Landry said. “People stop their cars on the street and just look at it. When it’s all lit up with the period lighting and candles, it’s truly breathtaking.”

Scot said that living north of Broad Street seems to have finally shed its early stigma.

“We love living here,” Scot said. “Neighbors come out and sit on the porch like they did in the old days.”

If a spirit can be said to dwell in the house at 504 Ford Street today, it is one of healing communion between people who enjoy each other’s company.

“What makes a house a home has nothing to do with any of the things in it,” Bea said.

The Heberts agree that it is the love and warmth between the people who live in a house and how they choose to extend that love and warmth to family, friends and even first-time visitors that separates a mere house from a place called home.

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