As I've been fixing up this old house it's gotten quite a bit of interest from the community. Everyone here knows everyone, and the whole community is either related to the old folks that owned the place or had been in it for some other reason. Every time I go to the store or gas station somebody I don't know tells me that they love what I've been doing to "The old Burns place".
This morning a 90-year-old man that I had never seen before showed up at my door with a photograph of my house that he took...
...in 1932. Apparently he worked at the farm just up the hill and across the road and decided, for some reason, to take a pic. Keeping in mind this was 1932 taking a pic wasn't just a matter of grabbing the digital camera, pointing, and shooting - it took a bit of commitment. Imagine the commitment to hang onto it for 75 years, too!
He also gave a bit of the history of the place. Apparently the large barn is the building that was dismantled and the lumber used to build my garage, but more interesting is the building between my house and the garage (no trace of this building exists now). This building housed the post office on the main floor and the jail in the basp00get.
Also interesting is the pond across the road. That pond is no longer there - it fills up with water when the brook floods, but is generally dry. Back then they dammed the brook in the fall to flood that area so as to make ice, then drained it in the summer. This pic was taken in late fall - note the lack of leaves in the trees.
You can also see the train track passing behind the house - those tracks have been gone for about 25 years (I can remember when they were there, as the same set passed near the cottage).
Pic #1 shows the full pic the guy gave me, pic #2 shows it cropped for my house
jail? that would be pretty kinky... lol
nah, but that's awesome.
Man thats interesting as hell!
Cool. Your house has quite a bit of history in the area. You should rebuild the jail;)
Ha thats what I was thinking.. rebuild the building... and the jail!
+1 on the jail Carm!!!
That's pretty cool. Wonder if there any other pics of your property anywhere, like an old newspaper, or even in the towns library. Because of the pond area, there may be old historic poster in some book or something. Just a thought.
take a pic from the same vantage point to compare.
yeah that is cool!.
I agree, lets see how the background has changed.
You'd have to ask the owner of the property of course, and hopefully they haven't let the field on the hill grow in. I think you should try and get the two pictures and get them framed together (one frame, two openings in the mat). Keep it out of sunlight and you've got yourself a great piece for posterity.
I love this kind of thing. Anthropology of any kind, but local history is something to get into. Last summer, after blueberry season was over, I went down to New Ross with my parents to search my father's family history. You've probably heard of Ross farms, Carmen. The whole town is littered with Reeves and the town's archives are actually kept in the basp00get of the main reception/gift shop at the living history farm. It was really cool searching through all those old clippings. We found out our family line started here when John Reeves (and wife) arrived in Chedabucto (which is now Halifax) in 1749. From where or why, I couldn't tell you, but we think considering the point in history when he arrived that he may have come here from New England either as a loyalist or a soldier/officer. (New Ross was a popular spot for soldiers of the Napoleonic Wars as it was founded as Sherbrooke by Captain William Ross 60 odd years after my family arrived).
Get digging. It's a lot more interesting than it sounds when it's about you or your people. ;)
That is really cool. Surely there are no traces on the surface of the post office and jail but how about digging maybe you'll find it's foundation. That's if you want to tear up your property. :giggle:
Yup, bout fell out my chair when I read that... Doubt you'll go that far, but to have the picture is really nice... A current shot and framing them together would be really neat...
Keep an eye out for skeletons...
I was thinking the same thing about taking another pic from the same vantage point, but it'd have to wait until fall to look right (and to be able to see anything - 75 years of tree growth has changed the landscape quite a bit)
...As for rebuilding the jail it'd be a pretty cool idea, but it would also require tearing down the garage. The one that I just spend $1200 and two weeks on siding it. The one that for as long as I can remember and after years of working on cars outside in the driveway I finally have a place to work on cars in. Ain't gonna happen :hick:
OldRaven: I do indeed know of Ross Farm. I went there on a field trip in grade six. I don't remember much of it except one particular incident in which the whole class was taken on a hay ride and I was selected to sit next to the driver. It was pretty cool, except that one of the horses decided to evacuate its bowel during the ride, and I was about four feet from the horse's arse. I didn't get any on me (in case you were thinking along those lines) but I did get to see what a horse's mud valve looks like when he's... um... making mud. Up came the tail, it started puckering, then the floodgates opened. The puckering was the most memorable moment, one of those things that if you see in person you can never forget, no matter how hard you try. You can well imagine how a wagon load of sixth graders reacted to seeing this. Four teachers, a prinl, a custodian and a wagon driver could not get us under control again. The horse, meanwhile, did not miss a step.
The only time I'll get that close to a horses arse is when I visit the inlaws. ;)
Maybe someday you can build a wicked garage that looks exactly like the old building, but garage doors at the back. Give me a call and I'll sketch something up for you one day. (I've been dying for a client who wants a nice working garage). From the road no one has to know that it's a garage at all.
Here's a picture from the visit. There are even a lot of Reeves who work the farm.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v613/oldraven/00070022.jpg)
lol and THIS is what you remember from it some 17 years later (give or take a few)?
Must have been traumatic![/COLOR]
My grandma has a picture of her house and the surrounding area (taken from the hill above it) from I think about 1920 or so...and it's amazing the kind of differences that are in the picture.
In the old picture, there's almost no trees on the hill behind her house (it's entirely wooded now). The railroad ran through right across the creek from her house (now gone, the tracks were torn up when I was about 7 or 8 but had been unused for 20 years before then), and there was a stockyard, piles of logs, a watering tower and a small switching yard where there now sits a small general store.
I like that kind of old stuff.
17 years? Try more like... um... born in late 1971, started school in '77, trip would have happened in late spring of 1983... we're talking 24 years later. And yes, it was that traumatic :hick:
6th grade= 9 or 11 or so... 37-10=... Opps, yup I lost ya about 10 there didn’t I?
That’s what I get for adding off the top of my head, lol I should know better than that. especially these days
Wow, that's neat. My mom lives in a town called Milford in Massachusetts, and they found out the house they live on was the first one on the block and was actually a farm. The funny thing was that the barn was later converted to a house and is just down the street on the corner, it's crazy because it had this wierd sort of tower built into it that was built to overlook all the farm land and keep an eye on the property, but they left that in there when they converted it. Oh and also her house was built in like 1883, so I thought that was really cool that it's still standing strong.
Ok, I couldn't wait until fall, so I walked up the hill with the camera. I couldn't get to the exact place the pic was taken from because of a row of spruce trees, but I got as close as I could. You can see the vantage point is different because you can't even see the part of my house that holds the kitchen and office (you can see it in the 1932 pic though).
You can also see that summer foliage was an issue, so I will end up going up that hill in fall anyway, but the pics do show a considerable change. The middle pic is of the area that used to be a pond
i bet ghost hunters would want to check your jail out thinking there might be some ghost or something there... its always jails and places like that that supposedly has ghosts roaming in them...