Cochran-Blaylock House
A Tribute to
Little Dixie Heritage
By Jim Muench • Photos by Jennifer Kettler
When they bought their red brick federal-style farmhouse near Midway in 1974, Jack and JoAnn Blaylock had the idea they were embarking on a rebuilding project that would last decades.
“It’s a work in progress,” JoAnn Blaylock says. “We are in the 33rd year of a five-year plan.”
Before moving into the home in October 1975, they employed as many as 35 workers to shore up the grand old home, which proudly stands in shaded rural solitude, a monument to the craftsmanship of the many homesteaders from the south who built the Boonslick region.
Its original owner, William Cochran, came to Missouri in 1818 with his eight adult children and a year later purchased 160 acres of land in then Howard County, only a few months after the Smithton Co. bought the land that would become Columbia. The family built a four-room cabin on the land and began construction of the brick I-house, which was one room deep and two stories high.
The log cabin they built may have been the one that once stood in back of the house and was used as a cookhouse. Because of the ever-present danger of fire, it was common in southern homes of the time to place the kitchen in a separate building.
In the 1980s, the cabin collapsed one night after workers removed the roof to prepare for renovation. Underneath it, the Blaylocks discovered a stone-lined cellar. After removing debris, they realized it was a 16-foot deep ice pit that was engineered to drain into a pond several hundred yards away. Ice would have been hauled in from a lake or river to provide refrigeration and to keep the kitchen cool in the summertime.
The Blaylocks wanted to keep the cabin, so they moved it, rebuilt it 60 feet farther west, and added a basement and other amenities in the early 1990s. As for the ice cellar, they hired Kerry Bramon, who built an 18-foot octagonal gazebo to cover the 13-foot-diameter hole. The gazebo has become a site for family events.
It was a stylish solution worthy of the pioneers who homesteaded the property. Born in 1754 in Broad River, S.C., William Cochran was a Revolutionary War artillery veteran of Scots-Irish ancestry. He first settled in Kentucky, where he married Margaret Gamble in 1789 before moving to Missouri for unknown reasons. Unfortunately, Cochran would not last long in Missouri. Before the house was finished, he died at 67 in 1821, the year Missouri became a state. Construction workers building Interstate 70 in 1960 found the family cemetery one mile east of Route O.
Cochran’s eldest son, Robert, continued the construction. Three courses of four-inch thick brick form the exterior walls, with two courses thick for the interior walls. Two fireplaces on the sides of the house were built to heat the home, along with a large front porch. The oak framing, rafters and studs, the walnut floor joists and baseboards, and even many of the doors, were built using wooden dowels. In order to make them square, Jack Blaylock ‘s army of workers had to disassemble the dowels in the cross-and-bible doors and put the pieces back together.
And shoring up the bricks was even tougher. The lime mortar in the center wall upstairs was so soft that the wall would move when people touched it.
“We had to drill out and re-mortar every brick in the house one at a time,” Blaylock says. “I had to buy the stonemason four new drills. The job wore them out.”
Cochran’s will gave equal parcels to his four sons, Robert, John, William II and James, and deeded the land on which the house sits to his wife, who lived there until her death in 1845 with Robert’s three unmarried sisters, Jane, Fanny and Sarah. The remaining sister, Anna, had married Robert Walkup in 1820, but she died two years later after giving birth to a daughter, Sarah Ann.
Robert Cochran owned the house until his death in 1859, and the land and house passed to his wife, Nancy Crews Cochran, and six children. Nancy died in 1873, and the property was divided equally among the children, with the home going to two of Nancy’s sons. The house and land stayed in the Cochran family until 1903, when it was sold to Friedrich and Mary Fleer, who sold one acre to the First Independent German Church of Christ, which later reverted back to the farm when the church no longer wanted it.
In 1908, the Fleers sold the home and farm to John W. Harris, who a year later resold it to J.G. Schotte, who then took the house and about half of the 319-acre farm, and H.W. Schotte, his mother, who took the other half. Schotte and his wife, Esther, sold the home and their farm in 1936 to Malinda Niederhelman. Lloyd Simpson purchased the home in 1940 from Malinda and Alfred Niederhelman and sold it three years later to Hartley Richardson.
Upon Richardson’s divorce, Henry J. and Edith Pauline Brown bought the house in 1945, and Edith was left in sole possession when the Browns divorced in 1947. She and her new husband, George Dometrorch, owned the house until the Blaylocks bought it in 1974.
The Blaylocks had settled in Columbia’s Parkade neighborhood after they married in 1955, but wanted to live in the country and saw potential in the aging home.
Fixing it up was an adventure, as Jack Blaylock found out when they took the roof off to build an extra story on top of the then one-story addition at the back of the house. As they prepared to repair the wall, they found a frightening crack that ran from top to bottom, and the wall leaned backward at least five inches. It would never be able to support the floor plan Jack had drawn.
He frantically drew up a new floor plan that moved the kitchen to the other side of the house, finishing within minutes of the workers arrival.
As for the costs of the ongoing renovation, Jack Blaylock says he quit worrying about it years ago. “I stopped counting at $90,000 on the house back in 1975, and $60,000 on the cabin,” he says.
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