Wonderful to see the old homeplace!! Looks like my great grandmothers place in Arkansaw also later surrounded by an oil lease. They let her stay until she passed. Love you happy!!!!!! Dr. BUDDY LOVE.
What an inspiring history, redolent of the strength and resilience your forbears must have had to live there. My son now lives in the granite cottage that was built by his ancestors and where his father grew up. My son moved into the cottage when his granny moved into a new bungalow which made her life much easier. Each generation has “improved” the cottage with bits added on as need and money allowed. When my son took it on he took out rotting floorboards, dug out beneath them to add damp proofing and a solid floor with underfloor heating. Doing that job he found a smugglers hole beneath an alcove cupboard, filled in with soft soil and without any forgotten contraband, sadly. Recent generations had literally papered over the cracks in the walls and we found 16 layers in one place, peeling back pretty florals to the bottom layers of newspaper. Upstairs the rough stone walls were hidden behind a patchwork of boards, the bottom layer planks from thin, wooden boxes with original labels stencilled on them. Across the ceiling, where they ran out of boards, old sails roughly stitched and patched together had been used and in one corner the wall comprised a panel cut from the side of a planked boat. Those who built the house had such skill in shifting huge, weighty, stones, cutting them slowly with hand tools and clearly could afford little but whatever lay to hand or washed in from the sea. The front door sports an oversized lock with huge key, it’s origin lost but most likely it was saved from some wrecked ship along with the masts and spars that became ceiling beams. The house holds much history and maybe that’s what my grandchildren could see when, as babies, they lay chuckling and waving happily at the ceiling.
Wow, Nat! This such a wonderful reply to my story! I loved reading about the patchwork sails and the planked boat and the wooden planks with stencils. As you say, whatever came to hand was the order of the day. And often removing the old layers can mean discoveries which entail a lot of new work, so how interesting that sixteen times people just went for the option of pasting on another layer! I'm sorry there was no contraband left in the smugglers' hole! But what a story they left. Thank you very much for this. I read it with relish and I am SO pleased that your family cottage is carrying on with the family !
Oh, Jeni. This is such a poignant, beautiful, heartbreaking tribute to a place of connection and family, to a homeplace in the truest sense of the word. I am reminded of the 19th-century cabin that still stood near our Blowing Rock place when we first acquired it in the summer of 1991. The old cabin in the woods had been a ruin since at least the mid-50's when the high school music teacher who built our cabin with his own hands had somehow dragged three wooden doors with string latches and the huge timber of the mantlepiece up the rocky road to repurpose them for the house that had eventually become ours. Who had lived there in that remote place? All anyone could tell me was that, by the 1930's, a family of moonshiners lived there in that cabin on the creek with three daughters who scrambled up and down the steep mountainside to the Linville Road to ride a bus to school. I looked at that brambled mountainside incredulously and I watched the roof sag more and more. For a few summers I transplanted day lilies and wild roses that still bloomed where an old garden had been and occasionally found old canning jars buried in the underbrush. Then one summer, the old cabin was gone, simply collapsed into the woods and now so covered with brambles and brush that I'm not even sure exactly where it once stood. But I've never stopped marveling at the way this place I love so much is materially connected to it.
I LOVED reading about the cabin that was connected to your Blowing Rock place! Thank you for sharing this with me. I am SO glad that parts of the old cabin became parts of your own home. What a beautiful future and legacy for those hunks of wood imbued with the spirit of a moonshiners and their daughters. There's a song in those things. And the transplanted day lilies and roses! My grandmother has a rose which once grew at the cabin, too. If only we were allowed cuttings in England. But I do have a little piece of a checked shirt that I found in the floorboards. Love to you!
Loved it! Such history! Your love for the cabin and its past pops right off the page! A bonus to have such beautiful photos to accompany they story.
❤️
Aww, thank you, Pete! And thanks for spending the time with my story. Stanley Bear says hi always, and big cyber hugs from us!
Thank you for sharing Jeni! High paw to S Bear and cyber hugs right back atcha!
So beautiful and so sad. Thank you for sharing these lovely words.
Wonderful to see the old homeplace!! Looks like my great grandmothers place in Arkansaw also later surrounded by an oil lease. They let her stay until she passed. Love you happy!!!!!! Dr. BUDDY LOVE.
Love you right back!!
What an inspiring history, redolent of the strength and resilience your forbears must have had to live there. My son now lives in the granite cottage that was built by his ancestors and where his father grew up. My son moved into the cottage when his granny moved into a new bungalow which made her life much easier. Each generation has “improved” the cottage with bits added on as need and money allowed. When my son took it on he took out rotting floorboards, dug out beneath them to add damp proofing and a solid floor with underfloor heating. Doing that job he found a smugglers hole beneath an alcove cupboard, filled in with soft soil and without any forgotten contraband, sadly. Recent generations had literally papered over the cracks in the walls and we found 16 layers in one place, peeling back pretty florals to the bottom layers of newspaper. Upstairs the rough stone walls were hidden behind a patchwork of boards, the bottom layer planks from thin, wooden boxes with original labels stencilled on them. Across the ceiling, where they ran out of boards, old sails roughly stitched and patched together had been used and in one corner the wall comprised a panel cut from the side of a planked boat. Those who built the house had such skill in shifting huge, weighty, stones, cutting them slowly with hand tools and clearly could afford little but whatever lay to hand or washed in from the sea. The front door sports an oversized lock with huge key, it’s origin lost but most likely it was saved from some wrecked ship along with the masts and spars that became ceiling beams. The house holds much history and maybe that’s what my grandchildren could see when, as babies, they lay chuckling and waving happily at the ceiling.
Wow, Nat! This such a wonderful reply to my story! I loved reading about the patchwork sails and the planked boat and the wooden planks with stencils. As you say, whatever came to hand was the order of the day. And often removing the old layers can mean discoveries which entail a lot of new work, so how interesting that sixteen times people just went for the option of pasting on another layer! I'm sorry there was no contraband left in the smugglers' hole! But what a story they left. Thank you very much for this. I read it with relish and I am SO pleased that your family cottage is carrying on with the family !
Oh, Jeni. This is such a poignant, beautiful, heartbreaking tribute to a place of connection and family, to a homeplace in the truest sense of the word. I am reminded of the 19th-century cabin that still stood near our Blowing Rock place when we first acquired it in the summer of 1991. The old cabin in the woods had been a ruin since at least the mid-50's when the high school music teacher who built our cabin with his own hands had somehow dragged three wooden doors with string latches and the huge timber of the mantlepiece up the rocky road to repurpose them for the house that had eventually become ours. Who had lived there in that remote place? All anyone could tell me was that, by the 1930's, a family of moonshiners lived there in that cabin on the creek with three daughters who scrambled up and down the steep mountainside to the Linville Road to ride a bus to school. I looked at that brambled mountainside incredulously and I watched the roof sag more and more. For a few summers I transplanted day lilies and wild roses that still bloomed where an old garden had been and occasionally found old canning jars buried in the underbrush. Then one summer, the old cabin was gone, simply collapsed into the woods and now so covered with brambles and brush that I'm not even sure exactly where it once stood. But I've never stopped marveling at the way this place I love so much is materially connected to it.
I LOVED reading about the cabin that was connected to your Blowing Rock place! Thank you for sharing this with me. I am SO glad that parts of the old cabin became parts of your own home. What a beautiful future and legacy for those hunks of wood imbued with the spirit of a moonshiners and their daughters. There's a song in those things. And the transplanted day lilies and roses! My grandmother has a rose which once grew at the cabin, too. If only we were allowed cuttings in England. But I do have a little piece of a checked shirt that I found in the floorboards. Love to you!