One of the #wovember prompts is the word history, which the farm is rich with.  We are still piecing together its history, which is like assembling the many pieces of a complicated puzzle.  Many pieces are missing, and likely to remain so, which means we are left to intuit or simply guess at those missing years.

As far as we know, it was built in 1860 for the son of another farmer, James Patterson, whose house is further up our hill.  Its farming life has seen dairy cows, evidence of which I came across as I was painting the milk house so that it could be a winter coop for our chickens:

Every once in a while, when the pastures are bush hogged for instance, an old piece of farm equipment comes to the surface: bits of rust encrusted iron tongs, levers, hooks, barbed wire.  They are poignant reminders of all those hardy souls who had to find a way to till this rocky soil and survive.

My favorite piece of the farm’s past is the indoor silo.  The stone outlines of the original silo still sit outside the big barn, and it is thought that sometime during the 1880’s this was torn down so that another one could be built within the barn itself – the fashion of the times, perhaps? some new innovation that the farmer who lived here found irresistible?

Anyway, this silo is a joy to behold whenever I pass by it, which is about a hundred times every day:

Luckily, the previous owner of our farm had the vision and the foresight to add glass windows and a spotlight so that it is visible at night, too:

I’ve lived in old houses all my life, and opted for them each time we’ve had to move homes, even though old houses come with all sorts of issues we would never have had to face had we chosen a brand new, just-built one.  I love knowing the legacies of these homes, for they were homes to many families before us who left their imprints behind in a type of flooring here, a bannister there, or even a silo that serves no purpose other than as the particular fingerprint of the past.

The long history of a house makes it a home, after all.