Forget all the crazy rumors and stories you’ve heard about the Galveston Kettle House. The actual most likely true story of how the unusual Galveston West Beach-area landmark known as the Kettle House came to be — and what’s about to happen to it — has at long last been revealed by the builder’s daughter (and current owner), Mary Etheridge-Rachels, to Dallas-area writer Linda Armstrong.

Among the shocking revelations — well, okay, interesting facts — included in Armstrong’s account of the steel bowl’s history, pieced together from her interviews with Etheridge-Rachels:

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• The home at 1410 Miramar Dr. in Galveston off the San Luis Pass was built by Clayton E. Stokley, a WWII veteran, talented welder, and shop foreman at Graver Tank & Manufacturing Co. in Pasadena, in the late 1960s. Stokley regularly took advantage of his firm’s policy of offering steel products to its workers at cost.
• According to his daughter, Stokley built at least 3 other structures from Graver steel-tank parts and operated businesses in them: “a convenience and liquor store on Navigation Street [sic], a convenience store on Harrisburg, and a nightclub off 45 and highway 646.”
• The Kettle House was originally intended to serve as a drive-up convenience and liquor store.
• The structure takes its shape from the leftover parts made available after Graver had constructed a large sphere for a client out of three-eighths-in.-thick steel. After the deal with the client fell through, Stokley bought it and took it apart.
• The parts were shipped to Galveston on an 18-wheeler, where Stokley, his children, wife, siblings, friends, and assorted relatives worked on weekends over several months to assemble the structure.
• The structure was designed to have an open floor plan suitable for a store, with a spiral staircase in the middle leading to a second floor living quarters for the store manager.
• Stokley suffered a stroke before the buildout could be completed, leaving the second level incomplete. He passed away in 2005.
• The original roof rusted and caved in, so Stokley’s family replaced it with a “traditional, yet oddly shaped, composite roof.”
• Additional work was completed after the roof was replaced: The second level was finished out with a living room, kitchenette, bathroom, water heater, and AC. Also: windows on the second level and a French door over the entrance.
• Among the uncompleted plans for the property considered by its current owner: an outdoor deck and stairs leading to the second-floor French doors.
• No one has ever lived in the house. “We always saw the place as more of a project than somewhere to live or vacation,” Etheridge-Rachels tells Armstrong. “One year I let some friends stay in it for the biker rally. But those are the only people that have ever stayed in it overnight.”
• Vandals broke in recently and spray-painted the interior, so the Kettle House has now been boarded up.

Etheridge-Rachels now says she’s ready to sell the property — and already has a buyer.

• Galveston’s Kettle House: Legacy and Landmark [Galveston Kettle House]

Photos:Suey N. (top); Patti Haskins (middle) [license]; Elizabeth Kendall (bottom) [license];