Old Home Place

Old home place after a snow.  These are NOT my pictures. My sister-in-law, who is a wonderful person, took these for me.

Old home place

 Of course while in TN I had to walk up to my old home place where I lived until I was 12.  The picture above was along the railroad as I walked.

 Of course you've probably seen this barn before because both Rose and I have shown it before. It gets in worse shape all the time....what a pity.  It is located on the place just before you get to the old home place.

 Both the picture above and all the pictures below were taken at our old home place.  I am always amazed how much all the stuff has grown and filled it.  What used to be a field in now a forest.

Grandpa's place

 If I am not mistaken this is the house that my oldest sister was born in.  Rose use to live in the house that would have been in the foreground if it hadn't burned down a few years ago.  This was just down the holler from our old home place.  My grandfather(on my dad's side) owned this place and  our old home place.  I don't know how long my mom and dad lived in this house but if I have the story correctly four days after my oldest sister was born my grandfather on my mothers side died (1933). As a result, mom, dad, and baby picked up and moved back to where my mom had grown up to help with the family.  There were 8 in my mom's family....all girls.

 This is the same barn that is in Rose's Time Stands Still blog.  As you can see it is really grown up around it and the barn is not in very good shape any more.

 The "road" up the holler to our old home place.

 The fields just in front of our old house.  You can't quite see the old chimney standing.

Here's the old chimney.  I am going to guess and say that chimney was built in the mid to late 30's. Our well was probably 25 feet to the right of the chimney.  It was hand dug and if I remember correctly it was 26 feet deep.  I would love to have some water out of that well....it was cold and good. It's never been filled in but has a slab of concrete over it.  I would love to know if it still has water in it.

Old home

 The house at the old home place that I mentioned in the previous posts was very small.  If I recall correctly I believe may parents told me that it was 28 feet long by 24 feet wide.  It had 4 rooms, a living room, a kitchen, and two bedrooms.  It also had a front porch and a back porch.  It had a tin roof and no insulation in the attic so it was very noisy when it rained but I loved it and still love rain on a tin roof even today. Figuring from our ages I have come to the conclusion that at one time there were seven of us kids and mom and dad living in that house. We never got electricity until around 1953-1954 time frame so that means that I lived several years in that house when we didn't have any electricity. When we finally did get electricity we got a refrigerator. The kitchen was so small that we cut a hole the size of the refrigerator in one of the kitchen walls and shoved the refrigerator into that hole so just the face of it was showing in the kitchen.  Therefore, the bulk of the refrigerator stuck back into one of the bedrooms.  My mom cooked everything on an old fashion wood burning cook stove. We had a Warm Morning coal burning stove in the living room to keep it warm in the winter.  In the summer we would take it down and move it to the porch so we had more room in the living room.  However, that stove would not keep the house warm all night so it got really cold in the bedrooms at night. I could go on and on but I don't want to bore you too much.:)  As a side note: I have never been able to find a picture of the old house....:(.


Below are some OLD pictures but they are not very good.

 This looks like it was taken down the hill from our front porch.  The National Park Services owns those woods.

 This is a picture of my dad holding Rose. The part of the building that you see is the front porch of our house.

 I believe (not 100% sure) that this is Rose.

 This was taken from our front yard looking down the holler.  You can see the road that leads out of the holler.  You can also see the top of a building in the distance.  That is our neighbor's barn and the one Rose is showing as a header on her Time Stands Still blog and just recently used the entire picture in a blog on that site.  If you look at her blog on the barn when you look at the barn you would be looking up the holler towards where we lived. As you can see we had electricity when this picture was taken.

This is my dad standing in the front yard (1954). If you look real closely you can see someone standing on the porch.  I am sure it was one of us kids but I have no idea which one. The very last tree on the left in the picture is a walnut tree.  It is still standing today and is still about the same size.

Home

To give you an indication of where our old home place was I have captured a couple maps.

The map above show the relationship between our old home place and the place where we moved.  It's probably about  one mile between the homes. You have to walk down the holler (green area) from the old home place and cross a creek to get out.  When I was a kid there was a little foot-log across the creek that we had to walk. Once across the creek you got on the railroad and walked down to the new house. My older brother still owns the old home place so I go visit it any time I am in TN.  As you can see it is nestled back in a holler and if I was to drop you off up there you might think you were a hundred miles from civilization yet you would be only 7 or 8 miles from the little town of Middlesboro, KY.

The map above is a little wider angle because I wanted to show where the school was that I know you've heard Rose and I talk about. I measured it with Google earth and it was 2.25 miles from our old home place to school and we (older kids...Rose was too young) walked that every school day...rain or shine. I can remember there were a few times when there would be a lot of rain that the creek we had to cross would be so high that we couldn't get across so we would have to walk through the woods to get to school (didn't have to cross creek if we went that way). Needless to say that we were pretty wet when we got to school because none of us had raincoats. Throughout all my school years  I never had a school bus stop in front of my house to pick me up.  I always had to walk at least a mile to get to school/bus.  You can see a picture of our old 4 room school here. They recently converted the old school to a church which you can see below.

Home sweet home

This is the actual home place where I lived until I was 12 years old. I have many fond memories from that place. If you look at this map you can see where the old home was located.  The picture in the center of the map in a actual picture from there.  Notice how it was really overgrown when I took that pictures.  We killed a rattlesnake or two about every year up there. For some reason they really like that holler.

If you enlarge the picture above you can see the old chimney from the house standing.  When we moved my brother and I (ages 12 and 15) tore down the old house and used the lumber in it to help build a barn at the new place.

This little stream run real close to our barn.  As a kid I loved to play in it, especially when there had been a lot of rain and it was overflowing. The road out of the holler was on the left side of this picture.

Here's a better look at the old chimney.  Notice the vines coming out of the top of the chimney.

This is the fireplace that was in our living room.  I can remember baking potatoes in the fireplace....yummy.

If you were sitting on our front porch this would have been to the left.  The woods is part of Cumberland Gap National Historical Park.  It was our playground when we got a chance to play.  There was a hickory tree that squirrels really liked that we could see from the porch.  I can remember sitting on the porch and seeing a limb shake in that tree(which mean there was a squirrel) and my older brother would grab his shotgun and head out there. Normally, he would bring a squirrel back with him.

Looking straight ahead on our front porch this is what you would have seen.

Looking to the right this would have been the view.  It was beautiful in the fall when all the leaves were changing.  You can see the road right along the tree line on the left of the picture.

Old home place

The chimney is all that is left standing of our old house. I lived up in this hollow until I was around 12 and then we moved down the road about a mile. I still love this old home place because you can go up there and you would think you're a hundred miles from civilization when, in fact, you're only 4-5 miles to town. You can't tell from the pictures but the old home place joined a national park so there was never a chance that anyone could build close to us.

When we lived there we had to walk about 2 miles to get to school. We just about always walked down the railroad. To get to the railroad we had to cross a creek and to do that there was a little narrow bridge that we walked across. Once in a while it would rain a lot and we couldn't get across. I can remember going another way where we didn't have to cross the bridge. However, to go that way we had to walk through the woods and grassy areas so we were normally soaked when we got to school.

We got electricity up to the house when I was 5 or 6. Of course we had to use the outhouse since we didn't have indoor plumbing. If I recall correctly, the house was 24 feet by 28 feet and contained 4 rooms. My oldest sister and I have figured our from our ages that at one time there were 7 of us kids and my mom and dad lived in that little house. Needless to say there was no privacy but I don't remember being concerned about it.

Mom did all the cooking on a wood burning stove. Of course we didn't have a chain saw so the wood was cut either with an axe, crosscut saw, or buck saw. We raised a lot of what we ate. Of course when I was a kid I thought the garden was huge but it doesn't look so big when I go back now. :) My mom would can stuff like crazy and we always had a milk cow and raised a couple hogs to slaughter. I loved it when we slaughtered the hogs because I knew my mom would make sausage and I loved sausage (still do).

My parents really had to be struggling a lot of times when we lived up there. Of course, being dumb kids we didn't know it back then. There was always something to eat and we always had something to wear even if it had been patched or handed down from an older sibling. Us boys normally went barefooted for most of the summer .. 1) We liked to and 2) To save our shoes.

Rose and I laugh about going back up there and taking pictures. I walk back up there just about every time I'm down to visit my brothers and just about every time I take some pictures. Needless to say I have a lot of pictures of the place that are almost identical.