Fall pics around the yard.

beautiful pic ck! and i enjoyed hearing the history of your place. our 40 acres was part of a 360 acre farm long ago. we still use an old cistern that was made just as you described, round and with flat rocks instead of bricks. works great!

 

I read your seconf posting with the keenest of interest.
You are a lucky man to live there right in the midst of some interesting history.

 

Cap't, I am really fascinated by the history you are sharing. What did you do with the flat rocks you took out of the old basement? Is the cistern still intact? That would be a really neat thing to see, I'm sure. Do you know who would have lived in the cabin and planted the mock orange? Was it your family back then too?

 

I have the flat rocks laying around in some of the flower beds along the driveway. The old homestead belonged to the McCalister clan. They recorded the property in 1836 and lived in the cabin and I suspect they planted the mock orange. I have a mock orange hedge around my front yard and they are from that original shrub. I figured it up and the original shrub is 176 years old about. In the back corner of my property is an oak tree that I had someone estimate the age of it about 10 years ago. He aged it at about 225 years old then. So that tree was definately here at the time of the cabin. The trunk is about 10 ft through the middle. My parents didn't buy the property until 1950. I bought my 3 acres from my parents in 1974, but didn't build on it until 1981. Now here is a fact that I find interesting. The guy that bought the farmland from us, his wife's maiden name is McCallister and is a direct descendant of the family that owned the homestead. That is about all that I can think of, of the history of it. If the weather is nice tomorrow I will try to get some pics of the mock orange and the oak tree and post them here to give you a better idea. As you can tell local history fascinates me. I had a blast researching my Great Grandfathers history through the Civil War!

 

Wow, I'll bet you did have a blast researching that history. That is very interesting information. I'd love to see your mock orange and oak tree. And anything else around your way. It's fun to imagine what kinds of things went on under the oak tree or around the mock orange.

 

Here are some more pics and a little more history.

This is the oak that is in the corner of my propeerty. It is a very slow grower as I will prove in one of the pictures. The shed underneath it is about 10 ft tall at it's peak, so that will give you an idea of how tall it is.



The trunck before it splits is about 10 ft thick, each of the divided trunks are about 5 ft. Where it splits, the lower part is hollow and has been as long as I can remember. Keep in mind where it splits.



This pic is of the end of a tine from an old hay rale called a buck rake. When I was 10 years old I layed it in the crook of the tree. So 55 years the tree has only grown about 1 1/2 ft.



This picture isn't very good but is off plum trees that grow under the oak tree. They have gone back ti wild status as they have never been taken care of. They do still bloom in the spring and every once in a while will produce a plum or two. But they are very small, about the size of a grape and very bitter. I think there was once a plum orchard in this area and these are decendants of it.



This last pic is of the old mock orange bush. It is about 5 ft thick at the base and still grows and blooms. I trim it every other year and keep it pruned. About 6 or 7 ft to the left of it is where the old homestead cabin stood.



That is about the end of the history lesson. Oh I almost forgot, when I was a kid, there used to be an old apple tree to the right of the oak tree. It was huge and still bloomed but was in the process of dieing from old age. Dad always said that as old as it was, there was a good chance that it could have been planted by Johnny Appleseed. As his travels took him through Ohio, it is a possibility.The oak tree is what we call a Burr Oak. The acorns are huge, almost the size of a wallnut and the shell almost covers the acorn. It looks like a big burr. Thank you for taking this stroll through history with me!