O’Shea’s Georgian Colonial Made News
In 1937, O’Shea Builders founder John O’Shea got a contract that made the local paper. He and his son, Harold, were building an “eight room Georgian colonial” home at the “angle of Willemore and Wiggins Avenue” for local dentist Robert T. Curren.
Perhaps the big news was that it was designed by the New York City architectural firm of “Montague, Harris and DeGiberville.” However, architectural historian Anthony Rubano, with the Illinois State Historic Preservation Agency in Springfield, says he isn’t aware of the firm and can’t find any records or mention of it. Georgian colonials weren’t unusual in Springfield at the time, he adds, so that couldn’t have been the reason for the news splash. The interest in the Colonial style dated back to our country’s 1876 Centennial when builders started recreating the look of early American buildings, according to Rubano, so the house’s architecture certainly wasn’t worth a headline.
Only two months before the Curren build was reported, the Daily Illinois State Journal noted that Dr. A. E. Converse was constructing the same style home – an “eight room Georgian colonial” – at 2124 Illini Road. It didn’t state who the contractor was.
Dr. Curren’s house certainly wasn’t newsworthy because it was the start of a new subdivision. Springfield Historian Curtis Mann says the Wiggins area was originally developed around the 1910s when industrialists, merchants, and professionals relocated there from downtown’s “Aristocracy Hill,” where the well-off lived, just south of today’s downtown area.
Maybe the house was noteworthy because it was constructed for a prominent person in the community. Dr. Curren was a World War I Army veteran, he served with “American expeditionary forces in France and Luxembourg and with the Army occupation in Germany,” according to the July 26, 1942 Daily Illinois State Journal. After the war he became a dentist with an office in the Myers Building on the west side of the downtown square and was appointed the Chief Dental Surgeon of the Springfield Installation of the Reserve Officers’ Association. He was involved with other community groups as well, according to the Journal.
About four years after his home was likely finished, he left for World War II. This time he served in the Army’s Dental Corps. Dr. Curren returned to Springfield after the war and died in 1973.
His O’Shea-built, red brick Georgian Colonial with its two stories and two chimneys still stands at 2211 Wiggins Avenue.