Actually, Stephen Foster's home has been preserved, and is still a tourist attraction. It was moved to Greenfield Village at the Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, MI. I've been there, and it's pretty cool.
Well I'll be damned. The world never changes. Marilyn Manson, you're next.
Wow! What an amazing coincidence! Thanks for the information.
It's a nice-looking house, worthy of keeping (unlike Starr's, in my view)
Also, it's a whole lot easier to move a wood-frame house like that than a brick one. You just jack it up, put it on a huge flatbed trailer ("lorry", for our dear British Friends) and off you go. None of this business of painstakingly disassembling it brick by brick, numbering each brick, entering the number into the 3-D CAD database, carefully trucking it to a huge warehouse, carefully unloading and stacking the bricks so that none are chipped or broken.....and then carefully reversing the entire process when you decide where you want to build it....a HUGE difference.
If the Foster house had been a completely ordinary-looking brick box as the Starr home apparently is, would you want to pay to move it? I'm not so sure that I would, considering the nonexistent architectural value and the incredible amount of trouble required to disassemble and then faithfully restore it as they intend to do with the Starr home.
What do you think?