Bromelsick House under reconstruction at Delaware St.

The Murphy-Bromelsick house is currently being reconstructed at the corner of 10^th and Delaware Street in Hobbs Park, Lawrence, Kansas. This vernacular masonry dwelling was constructed in two phases, between 1866 and 1869 at 909 Pennsylvania Street, less than 300 yards northwest of this site. Irish and German immigrants (Bromelsick) built and later occupied the house until 1924.

A construction sign on the west side of the house explains its history.

On August 7^th, 2000, it was relocated to this park by the Hobbs Park Memorial Fund, to serve as a monument to the humble domestic architecture which so typifies the houses of the surrounding neighborhood- Old East Lawrence.

Once restored, the house will also serve as a marker for the farmstead of one of Lawrence’s founders. John Speer, whose home stood until 1940 just up the hill to the southeast of where the Bromelsick house now stands. Speer was an abolitionist newspaper publisher from western Pennsylvania who came here in late September of 1854 to engage the struggle to bring Kansas into the Union as a free, non-slave-holding State.

The Bromelsick house will share the park with a swing set, The reconstruction of the house is intended for August 19, 2001.