House of the week: A historic Wilmington home for sale for $699,000
The Frawleys moved to the Queen Anne house in 1981 and raised three children there.
Bonnie Frawley grew up in Ohio and her late husband, Daniel, grew up in upstate New York, so neither had lived in anything like the five-bedroom, 4½-bath Queen Anne home they bought in Wilmington.
Daniel, a lawyer who was mayor of Wilmington from 1985 to 1993, was “really gung ho about it,” recalled Bonnie, a retired teacher who worked as a reading specialist in the city school system.
The couple lived briefly in Philadelphia, where they were enamored by the sense of history.
Daniel was working for Wilmington-based chemical company DuPont, so they took advantage of the urban homesteading program in 1974, which awarded properties to qualified buyers for $1 under the agreement that the buyers would fix them up and make them their homes. The Frawleys moved into a townhouse in 1974 that Bonnie said was in “horrible” shape.
In a tribute on the U.S. Senate floor following Daniel unexpected death in 1994, then Sen. Joe Biden said that the Frawleys “lived in that same $1 house for a decade, and turned it into a national showplace, and the centerpiece of the renewed and revitalized urban neighborhood that grew around it.”
The Frawleys moved to the Queen Anne house in 1981 and raised three children there. Bonnie is now downsizing to a property she owns in the Wilmington suburb of Arden.
The house is in the Cool Spring-Tilton Park historic district, which has many late 19th-century and early 20th-century houses in the Queen Anne, Italianate, Colonial, and Second Empire styles.
The Frawleys’ home was probably built sometime in the 1880s, Bonnie believes.
She jokingly refers to it as “the left-handed house” because the classic turret is on the left rather than the right side.
The first floor has a large foyer with a fireplace, main sitting room with gas fireplace, formal dining room, updated kitchen, den, and powder room.
The second floor has the en suite primary bedroom, a laundry, and two more bathrooms.
The third floor has two bedrooms and a shared bath, and there is an additional bathroom in the tower.
There is a screened-in porch and a back patio in the yard.
There is a detached one-car garage with a private driveway for ample off-street parking.
Total square footage is 3,625.
The house is listed by Margaret Simpers of Compass Realty for $699,000.