toxawaytellit

Built 1939

I am going to share with you some pictures of my ancestral home, a place where as a child I was privileged to come many times. I loved it with a passion, as did my brothers and some of my cousins. It was home to us, fixed, unmovable, unlike the rental houses we hopped into and out of like little frogs.

Replacement porch posts of painted locust poles

I lived there most of the time from 1984 to 1999 when I married Jack and moved to Toxaway. It was truly a lovely place, and a big place, as you will see.

After 1999 I was unable to maintain it. Soon the house  burned, and the fields grew up in weeds and saplings. For a long time a friend kept horses and a mule in the far field, but after that it became a very  expensive proposition to keep the mowing done, so every other year or so it was not done, unless someone wanted the hay, which by then was barely hay and mostly weeds. You get the picture.

Now we are working toward a division of the property. It is my hope that sooner or later my beautiful home will look better than it does today.

These pictures were taken from time to time during the years I lived there.

I will never forget the time I looked down to this field near the barn and there stood the grandest white stallion I ever saw. I said to myself, “I know my prince has come, for I see his horse.” I don’t have a picture of the white horse. He was a beauty, though.

The barn and a feed shed are the only structures remaining on the property now. The feed shed is recent, from the time of the horses. The barn was built when I was a child, and replaced an earlier barn.

There was a woodshed behind the house which grandpa built too close to the bank and which threatened to drop off into the spring branch for many years. You can see from the picture how it is leaning backwards. Finally I got my cousin to cut some stout poles and prop up the woodshed from behind. It worked.  The woodshed stayed until it was torn away after the house burned. The sweet dog in this picture was my daughter’s. I kept it for several months. At first I did not want it and tried to give it away (with her permission) but nobody wanted it. I was surprised that my heart broke when she finally took my dog back!

There is a lovely creek running through my old home place, the North Fork of Flat Creek. Flat Creek runs through some flat places, but there are at least three waterfalls on it. When we were little, Grandpa had a bridge over it. High water washed it away and it never was replaced. Today there are several trees along the creek, but back when we were growing up Grandpa kept the edges clear.

Back in those days a haircut was meant to last a long time, as you can see. My younger brothers are on the bridge fishing. The milk cow is beyond them, cooling her heels in the water.

The charming interior of the house was never modernized; this photo shows the little wood cookstove Grandma ordered from Sears and Roebuck. There was, however, an electric stove not showing in the photo. There had been an oil heater in the living room, but I thought it was unsafe and replaced it with a wood stove, which was more like I remembered, and a lot warmer than the oil heater. Nothing can beat a wood stove for coziness!

How dear to my heart was this place, in the Quebec community, a few miles from Lake Toxaway. It is on the North Carolina registry of Century Farms, under the name: The Henry McCall Family Farm.