Approximately 77 percent of Centerville’s male residents worked in the mines, and William Berryman, who owned this one-story, wood-frame, hipped-roof cottage, was no exception. One of the more common house types in Centerville, these four-square homes cost about $750 to build in 1900. An English (undoubtedly Cornish) miner, William Berryman arrived in the United States in 1879 at age 17. Mary emigrated from England three years later at age 14. The two married in 1890 and purchased the land on which to build this house in 1897. The Berrymans still lived here in 1910, along with their 19-year-old daughter Anne, a music teacher. Centerville’s substantial Cornish population attracted families like the Berrymans. These working-class emigrants from Cornwall socialized together at the Hall of the Order of St. George and worshipped together at Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church, both an easy walk from the Berrymans’. Though its architecture speaks more to utility than ethnicity, the Berryman cottage stands as a reminder of all the Cornish mining families who made Centerville their home.
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