This old farm house is just about melted into the landscape, and I spent a few minutes looking at it the other day and tried to reconstruct a bit of the history. The trees that have taken over the yard look to be about forty years old, so the home was probably abandoned in the 1960's. One of the cisterns is on the left side of the photo, and the pipe sticking up tells me that the family had running water in the house.
Most of these old home sites have flowers, and to me, that means that the farmer had a wife. The house had a floor in the loft, and if there were kids, their bedrooms were probably up there.
This part of the country was electrified around 1950, and there is a base for an electric meter visible on the corner of the house. The old cream separator tub tells us the family had a cow. There is no way of knowing if the family bought a new-fangled electric separator or if they continued to use the old hand-cranked one. I couldn't see any sign of the remains of the barn, maybe it burned long ago. Nature is doing a pretty good job of reclaiming this spot.
3 comments:
The remains of the house look somewhat scattered; has the melting process been helped along to its present degree, do you think, or would 40 years be sufficient? When I see pictures like these I always wonder about the lives of the occupants.
- gsc1039
Now that you have asked, I realize a second look may be necessary. We have had several storm events with high winds in the last twenty years, and that may be why it is down. If the roof was going bad when the occupants moved out, the house would have deteriorated quickly.
I am a seasoned serial house restorer over here in England but I think that the house shown may beyond even my talents.
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