Not that I have a lot of time on my hands, but I was looking at the Title Abstract to our house the other day. It’s fascinating reading. I don’t understand all the “land belonging to (so-and-so) thence westerly on the center of said road 2 chains and 7 links…” but the litany of names is interesting to look through, and occasionally a partial will is included in the abstract. This property was originally sold by the Holland Land Company (the same Holland Land Company I found boring in U.S. History in school) to a Joseph Ellicott in 1811. It was a pretty decent size piece of land back then, and either there was something wrong with it, or it was a really good investment property because in the following 50 years it was resold a total of twelve times! It’s unclear to me on first perusal when a house was actually built here, but it seems likely sometime between 1840 and 1864. I’ve heard talk that the house here was a one room affair with an attic for sleeping, and a three-seater outhouse. (Don’t ask me why someone would build a three-seater; perhaps they were an extremely close family.) I can see the original house from the attic, which is more like a tall crawl space, and I can visualize the one room below it, mostly where the floors take their roller-coaster ride under my feet. Most fascinating to me however, is the stone basement. It’s positively beautiful, or could be with some money and imagination. I wish I had the wherewithal to renovate it, keeping the sparkling pinks, grays and blacks of the granite. As it is, it will simply remain a haven for mice and voles to explore.
I love stories about old houses. There’s a book called Dreaming in the Dust by Katherine Chrisman that I found when living in Minnesota. It recounts the renovation of a lovely old place on Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis and you can tell the author loved that house. I’m sure hundreds, if not thousands, of poems and stories have been written about houses and homes. You may recognize Joyce Kilmer as the author of “Trees” (“I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree…”) but he also wrote a rather lengthy poem about an empty house, “The House with Nobody in It.” When I was very young, two or three years old, I can remember my mother holding me in a big wicker rocker and reciting that poem… “Whenever I walk to Suffern along the Erie track…” and it wasn’t long before I could recite it word for word myself. It always brought tears to my eyes when we got to the part about the house with a broken heart. My siblings had the same experience and at one time or other we could all recite it.
But there’s another poem, not famous, that is very near and dear to my heart. My great-great-grandmother, Lucinda Shaw Near, lived here in Chautauqua County in Ellicott (isn’t that interesting, the same name as the man who first owned my property) in the mid to late 1800s in a big rambling farmhouse. And as things are wont to happen, the porch on the house needed repair, or perhaps demolition. Many hours were spent on porches back then, when the world was a slower place, and that old porch meant a lot to her. Generations of family shared that porch; she raised seven children there, and lost a young daughter to one of the many deadly childhood diseases. She wrote the following poem about her beloved porch and I want to share it with you.
The Old Porch Floor by Lucinda Shaw Near
They have torn up the boards in our old porch floor.
They have scattered them near and far;
And never thought as they threw them aside,
How dear to me they are.
And now, tonight, with my work all done,
As I sit by the open door,
I think with a sigh of the years that are gone
Since we laid that old porch floor.
There grandpa sat in the summer time,
And I fancy I almost hear
The sound of his feeble step, as he goes
O’er the porch to his old arm chair.
Then in after years, when the babies came,
Some less than half a score;
They laughed and played with their dolls and toys
And romped on the old porch floor.
I love every one of those old pine boards,
Every inch of that dear old floor,
From the place where the matching is all worn through,
To the knot by the kitchen door.
But alas! One day that knot fell through,
And left a hole in the floor;
And knives, forks, spoons and clothes pins
Went through it by the score.
And there today we have found them,
Old and rusty they look;
But to me they tell a tale of the past
As plain as a printed book.
But now my darlings have all grown up,
And gone from their parent’s door;
And one has gone to never return
Over the old porch floor.
Now as I sit alone tonight,
I wonder o’er and o’er,
Who will think of me kindly when I am gone,
As I do of The Old Porch Floor.
And I fancy I almost hear
The sound of his feeble step, as he goes
O’er the porch to his old arm chair.
Then in after years, when the babies came,
Some less than half a score;
They laughed and played with their dolls and toys
And romped on the old porch floor.
I love every one of those old pine boards,
Every inch of that dear old floor,
From the place where the matching is all worn through,
To the knot by the kitchen door.
But alas! One day that knot fell through,
And left a hole in the floor;
And knives, forks, spoons and clothes pins
Went through it by the score.
And there today we have found them,
Old and rusty they look;
But to me they tell a tale of the past
As plain as a printed book.
But now my darlings have all grown up,
And gone from their parent’s door;
And one has gone to never return
Over the old porch floor.
Now as I sit alone tonight,
I wonder o’er and o’er,
Who will think of me kindly when I am gone,
As I do of The Old Porch Floor.
2 comments:
Great post! I, too, love the history of old houses. We once lived in a house where the livingroom was the original cabin built in the 1st decade of the 1800's. The logs were exposed and were huge. The Father died roofing the house and she lost a son when the house was still being built, thus began the cemetary across the road. Ohio was frontier then with Indians still, but that woman stayed put. What tenacity.
I'm even more impressed with the house after talking with you. So many of these old places get torn down. Most of them are probably beyond saving, but it's a crying shame people don't at least record the history of the places.
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