A history

A pioneer's grandson

In 1853 William G. Cathey crossed to Oregon by ox team and took a donation land claim near Gresham. His grandson Cecil, a son of Dr. Cathey of Corvallis, is the Cathey this house is named for.

Cecil was a traveling sign painter and advertising man. In June 1908 he began work on a billboard opposite Albany's depot that was to run two or three hundred feet long and ten feet high.

A secret wedding

In February 1903, Cecil Cathey and Merle Simpson were married at the St. Charles Hotel in Albany, by the Rev. W. P. White, with only two young friends there. Afterward they spent the evening at the theater, at a comedy called "The Man From Mexico," and went home by private conveyance. Then came a honeymoon in Portland.

"The young couple stole quite a march on even their most intimate friends."

That was the Corvallis paper's verdict. Merle was the daughter of John Simpson and a niece of Mrs. Margaret Monteith of Albany.

Built among friends

The house was designed by Alexander C. Ewart, an architect who started out in Corvallis, worked in British Columbia, and settled in Portland in 1903. One of his Canadian buildings, the Kaslo City Hall and Court House, is now a National Historic Site of Canada.

Ewart wasn't a stranger to the family. An Albany paper of the day called him "an old friend of Mr. Simpson," Merle's father.

Columns, cornice and a balcony

The National Register describes a house of two and a half stories, its symmetrical front dominated by a two-story portico: paired, square, tapered columns with Ionic capitals, standing on rock-cut stone bases. A full entablature, with a dentil course and a bracketed cornice, runs all the way around the house.

Over the entrance is a semi-circular balcony with a wrought-iron railing. On the second floor of the north wing is a sleeping porch with Tuscan columns, from a time when sleeping in the open air was thought to be healthful.

Inside are inlaid wood floors, beamed ceilings, a carved staircase and the original light fixtures.

The Monteith District

The neighborhood takes its name from Thomas and Walter Monteith, Scottish brothers who came west from Albany, New York, in the 1840s, named the new town after it, and built its first frame house in 1849. That house is now a museum, a few blocks away.

In 1980 the Monteith District joined the National Register of Historic Places, with 381 properties built between 1849 and 1915, and the Cathey House is one of them. Today it's stop 60 on Albany's Monteith walking tour, and locally it's known as the White House, for its white two-story portico.

A house that's always been shared

Over the years the house has been opened for historic-homes tours and community fundraisers, and in 2012 it was featured on Albany's annual Historic Homes Tour.

Today its doors open to guests.