The city government planned a breakthrough extension of Nikolai Street towards Aia Street, which would run through the plot. For unknown reasons, the city did not exercise its pre-emptive right, and in 1900 Heinrich Schwartz, who lived in the neighbouring house at Supeluse 2, bought the property from Anna Rudakova.

Heinrich Schwartz soon resold it and the new owner was Aleksander Konks (1876 – ?), assistant to the harbourmaster of Pärnu. Konks, who served as a secretary of the board and later rose to become both a harbourmaster and the chief of customs in Pärnu, had a small wooden house built deep in the plot in 1906.

In 1915, he married his cousin, Ella Amalie Pahl (1879 – ?), a mathematics teacher at Pärnu Girls’ Gymnasium. Both of their mothers were sisters and descendants of Stepan Koserowski, who had immigrated from Poland. The Sindi Broadcloth Factory is said to have been founded in 1833, when the Riga industrialist J. C. Wöhrmann brought over the broadcloth factory he had established in Poland a decade earlier, and with it a number of skilled masters. The Sindi factory rapidly grew into the largest industrial enterprise in the Livonian province and one of the largest textile industries in Tsarist Russia. Additionally, in 1858, a broadcloth factory was opened in Voltvet, Allikukivi, where some of the masters from the Sindi factory were brought over. So Aleksander and Ella Amalie were both born in the factory village of Allikukivi.

Aleksander Konks acquired his primary education in Pärnu and then continued his studies at the six-year course of the Alexander School in Põltsamaa, graduating in 1895. Aleksander’s further studies were interrupted for material reasons. He joined the Pärnu County Police and from 1901, he was appointed as an assistant inspector of warehouses and ships in the Pärnu Customs Administration.

Unbuild cinema building

Aleksander Konks was an ambitious man. The modest dwelling built on the back of the plot was to remain in the long term as a courtyard house for a larger development to be built on the street. First, he planned to build the most imposing cinema building in Pärnu here (project of 1911), then a two-storey stone tenement building (1913). However, for unknown reasons, both buildings remained unbuilt.

During the First World War, the local customs administration was evacuated to the Kursk Governorate. Aleksander managed to return a year later and was appointed acting head of the Pärnu customs administration from 1 June 1919. A few years later, in the harsh winter of 1923, the elderly man caught a severe cold on a horse-drawn carriage during an inspection trip to Mõisaküla. For the rest of his life, he suffered from chronic kidney stone inflammation. When he was appointed customs chief of Paldiski against his will in July 1925, he asked to be relieved of his duties in October of the same year, citing, probably with good reason, the extremely damp and health-harming conditions of the official apartment there as an excuse, and retired. He claimed a pension from the state, and his spouse remained the breadwinner of the family.

Ella Amalie Konks was a long-time school teacher in Pärnu, at the Pärnu Girls’ Gymnasium before World War I and afterwards at the local German Private Gymnasium. In addition, according to newspaper advertisements, she occasionally earned extra money by giving private mathematics lessons. Their only son, Alexis (b. 1917), entered the University of Tartu after completing secondary school at the same German school, where he earned a degree in civil engineering from the Faculty of Engineering. The family decided to leave for Germany during the next wave of resettlement just before 1939. In 1941, an advertisement was published in the local newspaper Töörahva Hääl, where they were selling the furnishings and movable property of their house. The house on Supeluse Street was also sold as real estate. It was bought by August Kask (1896-1942), who, until then, had run a shop in Kastna and had a very eventful life. Nothing is known of the fate of the Konks family other than a single mention in a newspaper, which suggests that they arrived in Austria after the war.

Natsionalisation

The situation here in Estonia was also rapidly and tragically changing. As a member of the Defence League and its company commander, Captain August Kask was deported only a few months later, on 14 June 1941, and with him his family − his Finnish wife Anna Sofia and their four young children.

In their place, the families of Red Army soldiers were housed in the small house on Supeluse Street. Kask was executed in Sosva Prison Camp on 17 August 1942. His widow and children were allowed to return to Estonia in 1956, but as the contract for the purchase and sale of the house had not been formalised, the family could not return to their home. Their house was not returned to them when the Soviet system collapsed, either.

Today, there are 4 apartments in the building, which belong to different owners.