The Old Farmhouse Tour | Chickens in the Road

Posts Tagged ‘the old farmhouse tour’

Feb
12

Daily Farmhouse Journal

No Old Farmhouse Tour could be complete without visiting the grounds. (If you missed any of the previous Old Farmhouse Tour posts, click here and scroll down to the Old Farmhouse Tour links!) This old farm has been in the family for a hundred years and the grounds carry as much history as the house. Even the road has its own stories. This is a 72-acre farm, shaped somewhat like a butterfly, and the road crosses right through the middle of it. Back when I was a little girl, the pavement ended right in front of this old farmhouse. In the old days (and to some degree, even now) hard road was politically-driven. Power and influence gets asphalt, and my cousins have always been a political family. My cousin is the current county prosecutor. His father, my Great-Aunt Ruby’s son, Bob, was a state house delegate. My Great-Uncle Carl wasn’t a politician per se, but he was a prominent local Democrat, a farmer, and an oil company man. Carl wanted this road paved, and he got it–right to his farm and no further. When they sent the road crew out, they told Carl to cut a measuring rod 9 feet long for the crew to use to make the road. Carl didn’t want a nine-foot road so he cut it 12 feet, and he got a 12-foot road because nobody double-checked him. Carl knew how to get things done.

And my Great-Aunt Ruby knew how to keep her yard tidy, so the farm was divided by more than pavement. She designated one side of the road as the men’s side of the road, and the other side as the women’s. Nothing unsightly allowed on the girls’ side.

One of the interesting things on the boys’ side is this old building where Carl generated his own electricity for the farm for many years. The farm, like many farms in this area, also had gas wells, and the farm enjoyed free gas for heat and light for decades. The light at the pole outside the house was never turned off. Back in those days, they thought the free gas would last forever, but it’s gone now.

Besides working for the oil company, Carl was a real farmer. He had cattle, sheep, pigs, and chickens. They also always kept a pony, for their kids, and later for their grandchildren and other visiting relatives’ children. One of my most vivid memories from visiting here as a little girl was the day I lost their pony. For some reason I can’t imagine, I was allowed to take off with the pony down the road, which was dirt past the farmhouse, and the pony got away from me. I can still see the puddles in the dirt road as I ran screaming and crying after the pony, which I couldn’t catch. I came sobbing around the back of the farmhouse to find Ruby in the garden, where she could typically be found, and told her I’d lost her pony. She told me it would come back, and it did. I don’t remember her ever letting me take off with her pony on my own again, though.

As the current owner of the farm, my cousin’s interests are prominent on the boys’ side of the road now. Back in a holler behind the barns, he keeps his collection of old vehicles. He’s an old engine enthusiast and he likes to take three old cars and put them together into one that works. Which explains why you can find three Scouts, three VW bugs, three Mack trucks, and three S-10 pickups around here. He’s got enough projects lined up to last a lifetime…. Unable to resist an interesting vehicle to add to his collection, he picked up that old ambulance a couple of years ago. It actually runs, and on occasion he lets the kids drive it around the meadow for kicks.

Like ghosts haunting the landscape, reminders of the past dot the grounds. Left, an old, rusted corn crib. Right, a flywheel, part of an oilfield pump system.

And then there’s my cousin’s biggest project of all, a reproduction of an old country general store. He’s been working on this one for a couple of years. The shell of the building is completed, and much of the interior work is done. Inside, there’s an old-fashioned store counter with an antique register. He needs to put up the shelving and clean up. (I’ll take pictures inside the store in another post someday–right now, he has so much stuff stacked on the porch, I can’t get in the door.) He says he plans to sell fireball candy when he opens his store.

Here on the neat and tidy girls’ side of the road are the three houses that make up this family farm. There’s the 100-year-old farmhouse, where I am currently, and the two-story blue house where my cousin, his wife, and their teenage son live.

Don’t you just know Georgia would live across an enchanted little footbridge over a creek in a little fairy cottage surrounded by pine trees?

Also on the girls’ side of the road is the enormous garden (photo from last spring) and a quaint old wash house. Notice the standing farm bell in the foreground to call the men in from the field for supper.

One of my favorite spots is this old well house. I think it’s adorable, though I can’t imagine carrying buckets of water into the house for cooking and cleaning and bathing. I doubt my predecessors in this old farmhouse thought it was as cute as I do.

Every farmhouse tour ends here, on the perfect porch, where on warm summer days, there is no better place in the world to sip a glass of something cold, sway in the porch swing, listen to the soft breeze making music in the wind chimes, read a book, wait for neighbors to pull over, and talk for hours.

Here on the big front porch, not much has changed in a hundred years.

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Posted by Suzanne McMinn @ 5:03 am | Permalink
Tags: the old farmhouse tour

Jan
22

Daily Farmhouse Journal

My Great-Aunt Ruby’s parlor was open for company when she pulled back the drapes on her front window every morning. Ruby, and her husband Carl Sergent, were well-known denizens of society in their time, and this small, humble room has seen family and friends, farm hands and state governors. The Sergent family was one of the established land-holding lines in this county going back 200 years, and it was no surprise that eventually one of them would marry into another equally longstanding family name here, the Dyes. Carl and Ruby weren’t the first to live in this old farmhouse, but they were the most prominent, and they were the ones responsible for “modernizing” the house (circa 1960) and expanding it to add several rooms and the massive front porch.

The fireplace was converted to gas back in the day when this farm held claim to several natural gas wells and the gas was plentiful–and free. No need to chop wood when you had free gas. (The fireplace stove now runs on propane.)

On the left, you can see the Sergent Wall, with twin paintings of Carl and Ruby holding central position. On the right is the Dye Wall. Most prominent on this wall is an antique photograph of John Morgan Dye and his wife Florinda. Ruby was a Dye, their daughter. My grandfather was also one of John Morgan and Florinda Dye’s children, and he was Ruby’s brother. My great-grandfather John Morgan Dye’s farm is directly across the river from my new farm a few miles away and I can see the bank where his house once stood from my new front porch, which is also where Ruby was born and raised. Once, in a fit of redecorating, I reframed a number of the photographs on the Dye Wall (except those in vintage frames) and reorganized the wall, adding some primitive craft touches. Since I’m not of Sergent descent (and am only related to them through Ruby), I left that wall alone. I did talk Georgia into cutting down on some of the photos on the table in front of the Sergent Wall because the cats kept knocking them over. There used to be, I’m not kidding, twice as many photos on that table.

Ruby was a great collector of many things, including bells, some of which are here on the fireplace mantel. She also collected West Virginia glass, salt and pepper shakers, thimbles, and other items. I doubt anyone had to think hard about what to give Ruby as a gift–all they had to do was add to one of her many collections.

There is also a great collection of heavy antique irons that sit on the hearth. Moving them for dusting is serious exercise.

One of the things I’m grateful to this old farmhouse for is that it stands as a monument to family history that is all around me in the land, but my own great-grandparents’ house (the one that once stood across from my new farm) is long gone and the land fallen into other hands. My great-great-grandfather’s house still stands, but it also is in hands outside our family now. And while I have bought back a piece of our family history across the river a few miles away, there is something about being able to stand in this old farmhouse, to know my great-grandparents stood here in this home when they came over the hill to visit Ruby, as did my grandfather and my father. I visited here often myself as a child. I knew Carl and Ruby. This house is the purest unbroken chain of family history to me. It’s also been a great education to my children, who know their ancestors now and can pick out their photos and identify them as they never could before. My daughter presented a project on John Morgan Dye that won honorable mention at the West Virginia State Social Studies Fair last year.

Living here was not something I ever expected, or planned, and sometimes it can be quite difficult, but I think it was meant to be. The generation of my family that grew up here, moved away, raised their families elsewhere, is disappearing. Fewer and fewer of them return to these hills even to visit. Other than my cousin, through his grandmother Ruby, John Morgan Dye’s children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren are gone from this county, and even he is not as connected to that side of his family history. He is a Sergent. I came back and I bought the farm across the river from John Morgan Dye’s farm, which was as close as I could get to buying back the family farm. I am a Dye. I know the history and the stories my father told me when he brought me here as a little girl. I can point to my great-great-grandfather Abraham Dye’s house–and I am the only one left who can. I know the way.

Except now, my children? They know the way, too. They learned it here, in this house, from the people on this wall–who were, I think, always waiting for me to get here.

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