Ms. Gabe, a once-celebrated inventor who died in obscurity late last year, was the creator, and long the sole inhabitant, of the world’s only self-cleaning house.
In January, the only public announcement of Ms. Gabe’s death appeared on the website of The Newberg Graphic, covering the Oregon community where she had long made her home. Spanning barely two dozen words, it gave little more than her death date — Dec. 26, 2016 — and her age, 101. ... With her own money and her own hands, she built just such a house, receiving United States patent 4,428,085 in 1984.
In a 1982 column about Ms. Gabe’s work, the humorist Erma Bombeck proposed her as “a new face for Mount Rushmore.”
Yet her remarkable abode — a singular amalgam of “Walden,” Rube Goldberg and “The Jetsons” — remained the only one of its kind ever built. The reasons, recent interviews with her associates suggest, include the difficulties of maintaining the patent, the compromises required of the homeowner and, just possibly, Ms. Gabe’s contrary, proudly iconoclastic temperament.