During their visit, the great granddaughters – sisters Tonya, Terri and Tasha Nunes – walked across the house’s original heart pine floors, admired historic photos of their loved ones, remarked on handsome crown molding and vintage-looking push-button light switches, and recalled memories of visiting the American craftsman style home when they were little.
“I’m reminiscing, and I’m thinking, to me, how small this looks now that I’ve lived in my own home,” Terri, who graduated from Crestview High School in 1964 and currently lives in Eatonton, Georgia, said of the Bush House. “But I do recognize much of the structure here.”
She also recalled the Bush House’s original second-floor balcony.
“In the ’50s, we were warned not to be on that, that it was not a playground,” Terri said.
Tonya, who now lives in Fort Walton Beach, remembered going to 25-cent movies on Crestview’s Main Street with her sisters when they were small children. Many years later, she would donate an elegant secretary desk to the Bush House to help enhance its charm as the city’s history museum.
The house, which encompasses more than 3,500 square feet, was built in the mid-1920s. At that time, it must have been one of the more impressive homes in the area, indicated Tasha, who now resides in Atlantic Beach, near Jacksonville.
“Oh yeah,” Crestview Cultural Services Specialist Brian Hughes told her. “It has a second story: that was unusual for homes back then.”
Going back
Crestview was incorporated in 1916 and became the seat of Okaloosa County a year later. The Hub City and the seats of several other Panhandle counties grew up along the Louisville and Nashville Railroad line.
Lorenza Bush, who was born in Fort Deposit, Alabama, began working for the L&N in Alabama in 1894, was transferred to Pensacola at the turn of the century and moved to Crestview in 1910 to serve as the track supervisor. He and his family’s home on Wilson Street was built in 1925-26.
Bush was elected to the Crestview City Council in 1935. He retired after 45 years with L&N and lived in the Wilson Street house until his death at age 86 in 1948.
“I always knew he was a great man,” Tasha said. “When people spoke to him, it was always with a great deal of respect.”
Laura Bush remained in the family’s home until 1956, when her health required special care. She died in 1959 at age 98.
Tonya said her great grandmother, Laura, and grandmother, Opal Bush Clarke Dunn, helped feed the hungry and were as kind to senior citizens as they were to bums.
“They always put all people on the same level,” she said.
After many years of serving multiple purposes, such as housing an office for Elder Services of Okaloosa County, the city of Crestview in 2022 oversaw the completion of a major renovation of the house and its conversion into the history museum.
‘Secrets and surprises’
The Bush House originally had four downstairs rooms and three bedrooms upstairs when Lorenza Bush and his family moved in in early 1926.
According to Hughes, the house shared its secrets and surprises during the renovation that was finished a few years ago:
• The central bathroom had rotated 180 degrees — and had a window overlooking what is now the hallway to the current kitchen;
• The staircase to the second floor had also been rotated 180 degrees;
• Every closet had been covered in floral wallpaper. One still remains papered and has been returned to being a closet for early 20th-century clothing;
• As revealed by vintage plumbing, an odd 3.5-foot by 16-foot bathroom on the second floor had been built in the 1940s, not the 1970s as city officials originally thought; and
• A balcony overlooking Wilson Street was apparently not attached very securely and was removed by the mid-‘70s. When porch renovation work was undertaken in 2022, no sign of previous balcony support structure was found.
Artifacts on display at the Bush House/Crestview History Museum illustrate the richness and diversity of Crestview’s past, including tools and equipment used by the L&N Railroad, early 1900s newspapers, county and city administrative equipment, the phone booth from the second Okaloosa County courthouse, and former Congressman Bob Sikes’ hat, according to Hughes.
“Throughout the house are donated 1930s and ‘40s furniture, with a front parlor furnished to reflect a family of the Bush’s stature in the community,” Hughes said in an overview of the museum on the city’s website.
The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday. Admission is free.
