“Old houses were scaffolding once and workmen whistling.”
– T.E. Hulme

My desire to own a historic home is a deep, throbbing one born of being travel-spoiled and living too many places with too many fascinating houses (at some point I’ll have to take some photos of some of the local estates that were built before founding of the country!), it messes with your sense of proportion. In Germany we lived in an old house with an orchard in the backyard and a ruined castle up the hill. Our village in England was primarily famous for an Anglo Saxon silver hoard being dug up in someone’s garden. History!

I’m an 18th century house lover myself, but a few miles walk from my parents house is a late 19th century farm house that’s been recently restored. And I want it.

It sits on a couple acres with two huge paddocks/lawns fenced in prettily. It has its own stables (no good to me, I haven’t ridden in years, but it adds beautifully to the charm), and the drive is honest to goodness an old carriage and wagon track. It even has its own herb garden, for heck’s sake. The name of this gem:

Blame Britain but I am a firm believer that every proper house should have a name. My family’s land doesn’t have a house on it yet (Dad has ambitions) but it’s named Stonewell.

See? Absolutely charming. As with all local, old farmhouses, at least one extension was built onto the back, though this view hides it. And it isn’t just the house that gets branded:

In case the horses forget to which house they belong. And, in case you forgot I live in Virginia (home of 18th century, democratic ideals and titles to match), the even older across the country road is called…

Equanimity Farm. You can’t even see that house, it’s set far back from the road and surrounded by privacy protecting trees.  The whole spot is just riddled with character!

And really, that’s what I love about old houses – they have character. Mass produced houses built inches apart from and completely identical one another seem just utterly soul-less. But these old houses, they have stories behind them. You can see that lives have been lived in them, you can see that time has left it’s mark on them (some more than others) and you want to know how they went from families living there, people being born and dying for generations, to being reclaimed by the woods. Older houses don’t just have characters, like Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame they are characters in their own right.

Come. On.

Anyone got $350,000 they can spare me?

“Before I die, I want to change my name to “Here,” so that my tombstone could simply read, “Here lies.” And then people who knew me could walk by, shake their head, and say, “Ain’t that the truth.”
― Jarod Kintz

The church with two faces doesn’t have a proper graveyard, there are only five graves total. But the other day (during the daytime, naturally) I wandered over to take a look.

It sounds morbid but birth and death dates interest me. We don’t tend to think of ourselves as living in momentous times but when you think about it for the last couple of centuries at least no lifetime has been devoid of some really amazing breakthrough, technology, interesting world event, etc. I like to take a gander at gravestones and go through what that person must have seen in his or her lifetime. It’s a weird compulsion, I do the same thing with authors, artists, the lyricists in church hymnals – if I get a DOB and TOD I think about it.

In this particularly tiny “cemetery” (word used loosely because there was no rhyme or reason to the gravestones’ placement and they are already being reclaimed by the encroaching woods), there’s a WWI vet and a couple relatives, but the salient point is that every single person buried there was born in the 19th and died in the 20th centuries.

Think about it. Sallie there was born one decade after the American Civil War (which, given the area we live in, I’m willing to be money she had a relative of some kind participate in) and lived to see rock’n’roll. To say nothing of the Spanish American War, two World Wars, the Korean War, both Roosevelts, the invention of the automobile, the rise and fall of the British Empire, the rise and beginning of the fall of the Jim Crow South, the death of the corset and the rise of women’s hemlines, the eruption of Krakatoa, electricity, the Titanic sinking, the Panama Canal, the development of the cinema, the ratification of five amendments to the Constitution and the repealing of one, the Great Depression, the dropping of a nuclear bomb, and goodness knows what else!

What a life! And one she probably thought was pretty small and humble. Perspective.

“Night was a very different matter. It was dense, thicker than the very walls, and it was empty, so black, so immense that within it you could brush against appalling things and feel roaming and prowling around a strange, mysterious horror.”
― Guy de Maupassant

Just up the road is a really great little church. Built in 1923, it has no parish now and it’s locked, but it’s kept in good repair by someone. Frankly it looks just like what you expect a country Prohibition Era southern church to look like.

Cute, huh?

Drive past it at night, though, and you get the distinct impression of something sinister waiting just beyond the treeline to do something nefarious. It’s delightfully creepy!