Negler, then the vice president of sales at Seagate Technology Inc., had lived in an apartment in Willow Glen for several years and was ready to buy a home.

"I just loved Willow Glen and didn't want to leave the area," she says.

She had spent much of her free time looking at homes but hadn't found the right one. Then she drove up to 1252 Cherry Ave. and saw a house nearly hidden behind vines and bushes.

"It was really ominous," Negler says. "But it looked so forlorn. I felt like Nancy Drew. I wanted to go in, maybe find an unlocked door." When she went up to the house, one of the doors actually was unlocked.

"It was really scary," she laughs. "I wasn't brave enough to go in, but I told myself, 'This house has some wonderful feeling to it,' so there was really an emotional bond there."

She had no idea what she was getting into nor had any idea that the home had once belonged to Martin Britton, a prominent landowner and orchardist who had lived in Willow Glen during the 1870s. The real estate agent for the house only listed it as "historic," with no mention of Britton.

"It didn't look like a historic anything—it just looked like an old, neglected house," she says.

The Realtor told Negler that construction companies had shown interest in the house because of its architectural value, but no families were interested because the house needed so much work.

So why would she want to take on such an endeavor?

"I wanted to do it. I felt compelled," she says.

It was a very old house on a huge lot—almost one-third of an acre filled with trees.

"It had character," Negler says. "Most of the original architecture was still intact, and as a history major, anything of historical nature is fascinating to me."

She bought Britton's 3,800-square-foot house in 1987 for $250,000.

Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer Buried Treasure: Hidden in the floorboards of the Britton house were business cards, personal letters, newspaper clippings and even a Mark IX training sight, which was probably used in bombers during World War II.

She soon found that she wasn't going to get much financial help from the city in restoring her home, so she began looking elsewhere. Among the other organizations she called was the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a Washington, D.C.­based agency. She was hoping to learn more about grants and loans, but there wasn't anything available unless the house was brought up to certain housing codes for a historical building. So she focused on ways to preserve and restore the home rather than remodel it.

"Once I started fixing up the house and finding things, such as personal family relics, I was compelled to learn more about who lived here and who built this house," she says.

Her research eventually led her to the California Room at the Martin Luther King Jr. Library in downtown San Jose, and she was pleasantly surprised to find sketches of the house as it had looked in the 1880s, plus old newspaper clippings and other information about Britton.

Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer View From Above: The 3,800-square-foot Britton house, built in the 1800s, sits on almost one-third of an acre. Through 15 years of hard work, owners Valerie and Eric Negler restored the home and its carriage house to their original beauty.

Martin Britton was a prominent figure in the Willow Glen area in the late 1800s, when it was still called the Willows. He was born April 12, 1820 in Jefferson County, N.Y. but grew up in Chicago, where his father, Hiram Britton, owned a large tract of land.

He left for Wisconsin and in 1849, at age 29, married Jane Pierce. Their son Frank was born in 1855.

Martin's health began to falter, and so, with only $100 to their name, the family headed west to California in the hopes the change would do Martin some good. Apparently it did. The Martins arrived in 1861, became residents of Santa Clara County in 1863 and settled in the Willows in 1866.

According to a 1979 San Jose News article by Patricia Loomis, Martin's health returned and he bought 13¹/2 acres, where he built two homes and planted a profitable prune and cherry orchard.

He built his two-story Italianate house on Cherry Avenue in 1885 but didn't live in it long. He died the following year at age 66.

Frank moved to Wisconsin, married and then returned to California with his new wife to help his mother, who continued to manage Martin's orchards until she died in 1914.

In the years after her death, the land and house changed hands several times. At one point it was remodeled and became a boardinghouse.

Negler says that occasionally she gets visits from strangers saying that they once lived in her house.

"One gentleman who lived here in the 1940s showed me where they put the flagpole when Victory in Europe Day was declared. It was wonderful to hear that story."

During her research into Victorian designs she got in contact with the Victorian Preservation Association of Santa Clara County. Through their resources she learned that her house had a distinctly Western Victorian architecture.

She visited the Winchester Mystery House in Campbell and noticed it has similar, if not identical, architectural elements. She suspects that the carpenters who worked on Sarah Winchester's mansion may have worked on Willow Glen homes, too, including her own.

"It's really fun to go to another, older house and say, 'That's my hardware! See! That's the same design that's in my house!"

She also learned how San Jose Victorians differ from others.

"Keep in mind that this was a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere," she says. "San Francisco was a big city, and San Jose was really more of a farming community. Even though San Jose had a distinctive downtown, Willow Glen was pretty much out in the country."

Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer Surprise Pocket: The Neglers discovered an area that had once contained pocket doors. They reinstalled the doors to help bring the home back to its original look.

"When refurbishing an old house there are many compromises you have to make," Negler says. "Do you make it livable or do you make the house historically accurate?"

She said she wanted to refurbish everything she could and only began remodeling when there was nothing left to be restored.

"The tearing down was fun. I had a stressful job in sales and I traveled a lot, so it was wonderful to take a crowbar and just rip stuff apart. That was extremely fun!" she says. "The building up part was hard. You had to make decisions about compromises. How much do you restore? At what cost?"

One part of the house that she wanted to keep true to its Victorian architecture was the floors.

"When we pulled off all the old linoleum we found this wonderful Douglas fir floor," which Negler sanded and treated until it looked like new.

"That's one of the compromises you make," she says. "The floor may have dents and pockmarks, but that's the beauty of an old house."

On both stories, the floors had more than just dents—they held stories of those who had lived there before.

Within the floorboards, Negler discovered documents, such as an old comic book and a copy of Popular Mechanics from the 1940s with the headline "Television Around the Corner!"

Hidden in the floorboards for years were business cards, personal letters, newspaper clippings and a tattered copy of Farmer's Almanac. There was even a brochure for women that said the best thing a woman could do is have babies—that was hidden with another pamphlet from the Young Women's Christian Association titled How Mastery of English Helps Women Earn More Money.

"This definitely tells about what it was like being a woman back then," Negler says.

Also unearthed were newsmagazines from the 1940s with grainy photos from the battlegrounds of a foreign war that would only later be known as World War II.

Negler suspects that the newspapers and magazines weren't meant to be included as special clippings but as insulation between more valuable documents like letters or brochures.

Her other hunch is that when the house was being remodeled as a boardinghouse, the documents were inadvertently misplaced during the reconstruction.

She found lots of liquor bottles as well.

"I can understand why they were hiding those," she chuckles. "To me the historical value is seeing how people lived. It's not like they were living in a vacuum. So finding the letters, finding the things about healthy womanhood, to me, puts the culture and history in perspective. How did they look at things like church and school and family as opposed to the way we do now? That's really come alive in the house."

In the 15 years Negler and her husband, Eric, spent refurbishing the house, there were only two occasions when she discovered something about the house that surprised her.

Loomis' article stated that part of the wagon the Brittons had used to get to San Jose was used in the construction of the house. Loomis' article also states that perhaps an earlier owner inadvertently removed the wood while remodeling; Negler said she didn't come across the piece during her refurbishing.

"And I am still looking for it," she says. "We've torn much of this house apart, but not the front, so that would be my next project: to find it."

The second discovery came when she and her sister were scraping off wallpaper upstairs using putty knives to get to the plaster behind the layers. At one point her sister came across some writing. The pair removed the rest of the wallpaper to find that someone had written on the wall, "General War declared—August 1917." Nearby were two lists of countries. One read Prussia, Germany and Austria. The other read Great Britain, France and Italy.

Negler said she doesn't have any photographs of the writing, "but the story was incredible. We kept asking ourselves, 'Why would someone write this on the wall?' And we thought, 'Well, to memorialize a time and event and place—like a time capsule,' " of when the United States entered World War I.

"Perhaps the earlier residents were working on the room when it happened and wanted to memorialize it," Negler wonders. "For us it was incredible living history."

During the early 1990s, the Neglers brought in Bud Beede, then a longtime member of the Victorian Preservation Association of Santa Clara County, as a consultant to determine what the original floor plan was. Apparently early tenants only covered up or added onto the house. Nothing had been destroyed.

"So when you tore away a section, there was the original," Negler says. "The same with the floor plan and all the moldings. There was so much stuff added on that when we finished it was like, 'Whoa! The original molding is still here.' "

In the remodeling, Negler uncovered an entrance that connected a front parlor and middle parlor.

Beede said that the opening probably would have had a pocket door.

"We carefully began demolishing the wall and we found where the sliding door tracks would have been," she says.

She went to salvage yards and found pocket doors of the period and included them in the remodeling.

Beede says that working on the Britton house was a joy since so much of the original house was intact. "The prior owners knew better than to destroy anything," he says.

He was surprised, however, to see that the home's speaking tubes were still intact. A speaking tube was the 19th-century equivalent of an intercom. The tubes were built into the walls and run between floors, allowing for communication between stories.

The major challenge the Neglers faced was balancing architectural integrity with modern convenience. They wanted the house to be livable, not a museum.

"Bringing an old house up to code can be difficult," Negler says.

She kept some elements traditional, regardless of what San Jose housing code required. For example, some windows are not double-paned. Putting in double-paned windows would sacrifice the integrity of the old windows, she says.

The electrical and plumbing systems, however, are up to code. "It's a safe house," she says.

The house's light switches have the old-style push buttons, as opposed to the modern toggle type of switch. Half were already installed; others Negler went out and bought. She could have used toggle light switches but "those weren't of the period," she says. The thermostat knob is an exception. "Well, OK, that's new," she says. "Pay no attention to that!"

The fireplace was originally a coal burner used to heat the whole house. Other tenants turned it into a wood-burning fireplace, but the Neglers kept the fireplace's appearance as a coal-burner.

They also realized that the crumbling brick foundation put the whole house at risk.

"It was so bad that we could pull the bricks out by hand because the mortar was crumbling out from around them," Negler recalls.

"We completely removed the brick foundation and reused the original bricks for the backyard driveway," she says.

They wanted to recycle everything they removed, putting it back into the home in some way or out on the property.

The Neglers had a structural engineer inspect the house, and they had a new foundation installed, with cement and rebars plus some new beams and posts and made sure the house wasn't tilting.

Negler says Eric wanted everything to be "more comfortable and for more casual living. So restoring something to a Victorian is always a compromise because Victorians typically weren't into casual-style living. They were more formal, and so there was always the decision: Do we make it more comfortable and livable or more formal?"

Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer Let It Shine: Eric Negler and his dog, Elvis, sit in the sunroom.

Now the house has cable, a direct subscriber line for Internet access and is retrofitted to be earthquake proof. Lighting and plumbing are "100 percent new and up to code."

Negler brims with pride when she gives visitors a tour and points out parts of the house that took an exceptional amount of work to refurbish, remodel or restore. The staircase and banister near the front door have been restored with mahogany and redwood. "Now, if you see the bend in the redwood," she says, pointing to the carefully curved paneling in the sides of the staircase, "the woodworkers had to steam that wood for many, many days. The labor and the incredible craftsmanship it took to make it are astonishing."

Wood graining is painting over wood to make it look like another kind of wood. Some parts of the house are wood grained for practical or aesthetic reasons.

Wood was plentiful in California in the 1800s, especially redwood and oak, but paint was expensive, Negler says. Nor was there an abundance of higher-end wood like walnut. "What architects did back then was install the redwood and have an artisan come in and paint it to look like walnut." She opens a closet door to illustrate. "They made it look like walnut. See all these stains?" she says. "An artisan would come in and make it look like expensive walnut."

One day a week for the past 10 years, the Neglers' housekeeper, Kay Reynolds, has helped keep that closet door, and everything else, looking pristine.

"I absolutely love this house," Reynolds says. "This house feels so good, even the attic and the basement—everything. It's a wonderful feeling. "

But a wonderful house does have its demands. Ask her what takes the most time to clean and she says, "All this woodwork! But once it's cleaned it looks so good."

The Neglers take pride in having the house look its best, especially every Oct. 31.

The couple has gone all out on Halloween for years, and each year they try to outdo the last in attendance and spectacle.

"We've done several Halloween parties here," Negler says. "We're infamous in this neighborhood. Everybody knows about this house. We started out doing the Addams family—I was Morticia; Eric was Gomez."

The next year's theme was the Alien Autopsy Lab party, which she says drew more than a thousand visitors from around the area. Another year was dedicated to Austin Powers, with the garage decorated like the Electric Psychedelic Pussycat Swingers Club. One of the most popular Halloween parties had a Bride of Frankenstein theme. "I think I lost count at 7,000 people," she says.

Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer History Below: When pulling up the floorboards in the Britton house, a wealth of historical relics were discovered, including old newspapers from the 1940s.

The Neglers spent 15 years refurbishing Martin Britton's home but are now putting it up for sale—with a $2 million price tag—and plan to retire to their new home in her home state of Washington. Her family moved to Willow Glen in 1963, and she graduated from Presentation High School in 1968 and San José State University in 1972.

"I'm drawn back to Washington, but we'll always keep our ties here," she says. "Willow Glen is such a wonderful community."

As for whomever the Britton House's new owners will be, there is some advice about living in and maintaining a Victorian home.

"You have to know how to take joy in the details," Beede says.

Paulette Ornellas, also a longtime member of the Victorian Preservation Association of Santa Clara County, says that the new homeowners should have "a lot of tolerance and patience."

She should know. She and her husband, Tony, live in the William Cozzins Victorian mansion at the corner of Minnesota and Newport avenues, which they also spent several years refurbishing.