Levi and Laura Leach "Doll" Mellor sit proudly with their children on the front porch of their Neiman Street home in this early 1900s photo retrieved from my Grandmother's attic. A carpenter by trade, Levi came West in the 1880s and relocated from Towanda to Brainerd to take advantage of the town's need for housing and schoolhouses.

The house burned down sometime in the past 20 years, and the site it occupied between the railroad tracks and Neiman Street, on the East side of town, bears virtually no signs of this comfortable dwelling's remains.