We are now the proud owners of two burial plots in our town’s historic cemetery. Through a series of events, we actually got them for free. The cemetery holds some of my favorite examples of limestone carving. It was definitely the place we wanted to go. Bonus: the Owenses are there.
Posts in: owens-house
Stove-mas continues! The interior work is done. Tomorrow they’ll finish the chimney outside. There’s a practical reason for the 45 in the stovepipe but I love the character it gives it.
Merry Stove-mas! Woodstove is being installed today. As much as I believe in DIY, the risk of burning the house down convinced me to let the experts handle it.
This is as far as I got with a handsaw. My father-in-law is going to come over with his chainsaw to cut it closer to the ground and chunk it up for firewood. While I was doing that, Rachel pulled all the limbs around front, plus a bunch of other clean-up. Then I took a nap in the sun!
My task today is to take down this tree. We’re having a woodstove installed soon and the chimney goes there. It’ll be a secondary and emergency source of heat for us. I’ll also have to find a place to build a little lean-to for the woodpile but that’s a task for another day.
A steward, not an owner
Peter Hahn: Our sequoia is also special to me because we share an origin story - we are both originally American. There were sequoias in Europe until the last ice age, but all Giant Sequoias today are native to North America, more specifically to the Sierra Nevada in California; the first ones planted in Europe were planted in the 1850s. There are times, especially when I’m working in the vines and look up to see the sequoia standing before the east façade of the house, that the tree becomes a portal into the past: I imagine it being planted, and hear the clattering of horse-drawn carriages pulling up in the courtyard below, and the generations of workers and inhabitants strolling by, the builders, farmers, gardeners, growers, winemakers.
Owens House shadow box
Rachel made a shadow box in honor of our house and all the ancestors and spirits of place. Her description of the contents: The wooden planks that help make up the back panel are from the house itself. I gathered them from the attic. The printouts are from newspaper clippings. Updates began with the Owens getting permits to build the house, and ending the week they moved in. The prickly seed pods are from the sweet gum tree that the Elliots planted.
I’ve added “The Owens House” as a blog category to contain all posts about the history of our house. This will interest exactly one reader of this blog (Rachel)–who will also not like the fact that I’ve called it the Owens House. But I like it, and it’s my blog, so there.
I recently wrote a bit about the Schroers, who were the second family to live in our house. Over the weekend, there was a tour of some of the local historic churches and one of them was First Presbyterian, where Dr. Schroer was a deacon. We definitely wanted to go to that one because we knew from this news clipping that his wife and daughter donated a baptismal font after his death:
Thankfully, it was still there:
We were glad to be able to give the members of the church a bit more background information on their baptismal font in exchange for adding a couple of images to our house lore.
Today at the historical society’s research library, we discovered that our house was built in 1908—two years earlier than we had been told.
