Moore, Josiah B. and Sara, House

About this property

The Josiah B. and Sara Moore House is a house in Villisca, Iowa, United States. The house was the site of the 1912 brutal murder of eight people, including children. A documentary has been made about the murder, which remains unsolved. The house was renovated in the 1990s and is known as the Villisca Axe Murder House. Josiah Moore and his family bought the house in 1903 and lived there until 1912. On the night of June 9, 1912, the six members of the Moore family and two house guests were bludgeoned to death in the residence. All eight victims, including six children, had severe head wounds inflicted with an axe. Over the next 90 years, the house at 508 E. 2nd Street had thirteen owners. Among them was the Villisca State Savings and Loan (1963 to 1971), possibly assumed as a foreclosure. The house experienced long periods of vacancy, and was a rental property in the 1960s and 1970s. It had fallen into disrepair by the time it was acquired by Rick and Vicki Sprague on New Year’s Eve in 1994. Sometime between 1936 and 1994, the house underwent quite numerous changes. The front and back porches were closed in, plumbing and electricity were added and the outbuildings were removed or replaced. Presumably overwhelmed by the work needed to keep the property from being condemned, the Spragues approached local real estate agent, Darwin Linn, about buying it a couple of months later. Linn’s second occupation was historian. He co-owned the Olson-Linn Museum in town with his wife, Martha. Intrigued by the home’s history, Linn made a lowball offer with a deadline of midnight, January 1, 1995. To his surprise, the Spragues’ agent called months later to accept. By then, he’d had second thoughts and waited a few months to tell his wife. Once Martha recovered from the shock of learning she was now co-owner of one of the most notorious homes in America, the two historians set about getting the funds to restore to the home to its original condition at the time of the murders. Using a combination of old photographs and interviews with neighbors, the Linns pieced together the physical journey of the home. They removed vinyl siding and undertook the painstaking efforts of restoring and repainting the original exterior wood. They stripped the home’s functional plumbing features and electrical fixtures. They removed the front and back patio enclosures and restored the outhouse and chicken coop in the backyard. The pantry had been converted to an indoor bathroom, which was removed and converted back into a pantry. At the end of it all, the house was in the same condition it was in 1912.

Location

Categories

Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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