Discovery

As displaced city mice, we are totally outside our areas of expertise. We rely heavily on other people, particularly family, as we negotiate our way through this project. During one of the many conversations in which we speculate about the history of this place, someone asks if we found the dump yet. What dump?

Back in the day, the best way to dispose of household garbage was to put it someplace on the land, maybe somewhere out of sight (and smell) and conveniently located along a path of frequent travel. Maybe near an outhouse. An outhouse? We have one of those.

The outhouse is located to the east, downhill from the house just inside the treeline. Downhill from the outhouse through the forest is the primary brook that establishes the eastern property border. There may have been a path at one time from the outhouse down to the brook, but we find everything overgrown. As we clear the area to re-establish a path, we begin to discover things. This must have been the dump!

There are shards of glassware and china scattered all over the place. Collecting shards of colorful china is apparently a common practice among country mice; many of our neighbors have various craft art images created by gluing together such bits of glass and china. The porcelain half doll is our favorite to date. She may have been part of a pin cushion, or even a handle on a whisk broom. Other finds include buttons, a boot, wood stove parts, an empty quart of Texaco motor oil, saw blades, and more.

The house

Our visitors often comment on some of the home’s remaining fixtures and features, creations either very old or part of a home-engineered item.

Upstairs we find the wooden brackets that once held some kind of a water tank. We suspect they once filled this tank manually with jugs of water from the rustic spring well. A copper line runs through the floor and ends up in three locations: the kitchen sink, the commode, and a narrow shower beside the commode. A loop of copper tubing with small holes drilled in the lower surface serves as the shower head with a conveniently located gate valve for turning on/off the water. One line, one water temperature.

The commode has definitely seen better days. At its base, we can see daylight through the shed addition floor. There’s an old pump nearby, but the seller mentioned never being able to get the toilet working so that may explain why we find empty plastic gallon jugs inside the door to the stairway.

Each of the two bedrooms has at least one “closet,” a wood shelf lined with a festive ruffle of fabric that hides a series of hooks. The front bedroom has two of these, one on each side of the room divided by a cable on which curtain rings are still suspended.

There are a couple of cabinets in the kitchen. Each door has a keylock and there’s a padlock hasp on the pantry door. After spending time in and around the house, we guess the prior owners left the house open when running errands but locked the pantry and cupboards to secure food and kitchen goods. The front door sports a vintage Elgin lockset with an original key. There are two wall-mounted propane lamps, both with tin foil behind them to better reflect the light.

Summers can get plenty warm here (most locals will claim there’s no need for air conditioning here, which is a tough story to swallow for us Texas peeps). Keeping windows open would keep the heat from building up. Electricity was added to the house at some point, but we’re not able to make sense of surface-mounted lines in some of the rooms with only outlets, recessed metal electrical boxes in some of the rooms with nothing but wires in them, and the only permanent light fixture in the kitchen ceiling with a low-voltage bulb socket.

Who knows what else we’ll stumble upon as work progresses. Everything has a story — oh, if only these walls could talk.