Last year, my aunt made the painful decision to sell her family homestead.  The McCall Homestead was purchased in the early 1900’s, and the house pictured on my page was bought from the Montgomery Ward catalog and built in 1917 by my aunt’s grandparents, my great-grandparents (step, but we don’t make that distinction in my family–family is family, period).  She offered the property to the two closest property owners, one a neighbor and one a cousin.  The cousin’s bid won, and we felt somewhat better knowing that the homestead would be staying in the family.

During the ensuing auction, I wandered around the property a bit and took a few pictures of my childhood home.  I’m glad I did, as the house is no more.  I wish I had taken more.  At some point after the auction, the cousin razed the house.  It was in a state of disrepair, and did need a lot of work.  The plumbing and wiring all needed to be updated, as they were still pretty much original to the house other than any work that my dad and grandpa did back in the 70’s and 80’s when we lived there.  Some of the plaster was cracked on the walls, and the porch was rotting and needed to be replaced.  The stairs to the dug-out basement could no longer be used, and windows had been broken.  The dinner bell by the back door had been stolen by a farmhand or vandals years ago, and the decorative wire fence around the yard had been removed.  Years ago, I tried to help my aunt apply to the state registry for historical sites and try to get a grant to restore the home, but we reached a dead end.  So the home silently sat there and wasted away.  The cousin dug a hole in the front yard where I spent many of my childhood days lying on the buffalo grass watching clouds drift by.  He knocked the home down and pushed it into the hole to be buried.

So my childhood home is gone forever, unless I win the lottery and buy the property someday and reorder the home and have it rebuilt.  Hey, I can dream, right?  But what will never be buried and gone are my memories of my home, where I discovered my love of dirt roads and peaceful surroundings.  I’ll share my memories here from time to time as they drift through my mind, and in this way my home will remain.