- Thread starter
- #11
Prairie Rose
Deeply Rooted
- Joined
- Jul 20, 2019
- Messages
- 342
- Reaction score
- 688
- Points
- 162
- Location
- Central Illinois, zone 5/6 line
This is a really awesome old property...was a dairy farm, built somewhere around 1910. At the time, it would have been right between a pair of the biggest coal mines in the area, a few miles from several of the local towns. A doctor bought the place when the family that lived here quit farming, intending to raise horses here after he retired. That plan never played out, and the whole property was folded into a trust fund when he died. My father has lived here for more than 40 years. He tried for years and years to get the family to sell it to him, but nobody will break the trust, and we remain renters.
Once the doctor died the land went into the care of a farm management company that doesn't see the value of the old buildings left on the property. At this point all that is left is the cellar and the old barn, whose roof collapsed just over a year ago. We are still waiting for some kind of official permission to finish pulling it down, or if we can take the roof off and put a new one on, or what. If something needed work before the old doctor would go halves on everything, but this management company would rather see us gone and it all tilled under into cropland, I think.
...that was a really long-winded way to say I don't think the cellar can be fixed. Inside it is a room about ten by ten, with an arched brick ceiling. I remember it having two sets of doors, one at each end of the stairs when I was a child, as well as a covered metal chimney for ventilation. The doors were lost to weather and time, and scrappers stole the chimney, so water and time has done their job on the mortar between the bricks. I don't think there s anyone left locally with the knowledge to fix it without digging it all out and just starting over. Maybe twenty years ago there would have been someone with the knowledge, but not now.
I have lots of childhood memories of playing down there in the hot summer days...it was always cool and damp. It wasn't unusual for there to be three or four local families crammed in there every time the tornado sirens went off either. This end of town has lots of mobile homes, and very few basements. I will miss it, but I still have the memories!
Once the doctor died the land went into the care of a farm management company that doesn't see the value of the old buildings left on the property. At this point all that is left is the cellar and the old barn, whose roof collapsed just over a year ago. We are still waiting for some kind of official permission to finish pulling it down, or if we can take the roof off and put a new one on, or what. If something needed work before the old doctor would go halves on everything, but this management company would rather see us gone and it all tilled under into cropland, I think.
...that was a really long-winded way to say I don't think the cellar can be fixed. Inside it is a room about ten by ten, with an arched brick ceiling. I remember it having two sets of doors, one at each end of the stairs when I was a child, as well as a covered metal chimney for ventilation. The doors were lost to weather and time, and scrappers stole the chimney, so water and time has done their job on the mortar between the bricks. I don't think there s anyone left locally with the knowledge to fix it without digging it all out and just starting over. Maybe twenty years ago there would have been someone with the knowledge, but not now.
I have lots of childhood memories of playing down there in the hot summer days...it was always cool and damp. It wasn't unusual for there to be three or four local families crammed in there every time the tornado sirens went off either. This end of town has lots of mobile homes, and very few basements. I will miss it, but I still have the memories!
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Do you have any quilter's square rulers? I don't have time to quilt right now, but I watch a LOT of quilting programs. I Understand that squaring off with a rotary cutter makes everything fit well. I also have heard that many quilters will save their small/tiny scraps and make dog beds for shelters by making big pillows and stuffing them with the scraps. Regardless, your quilt represents a great deal of time and love. Thanks for sharing.
