Walkin' in My Ancestor's Steps

It had been a long time since I had seen the old house, and this would be different.  Today I would be showing it to my wife as we drove around the countryside searching for dead ancestors in church graveyards.

We parked the Toyota at the bottom of the hill and began the walk up the old road. It had once been the main thoroughfare for at least two centuries, but no more.  Progress had abandoned it. If it could have had feelings, I think it would have been happy knowing that it had done its job well. There were brown pine needles between former wagon tracks of red clay. I remembered red clay from the days when I was a boy on a Carolina farm. I remembered how hard it was and how in late August it would sometimes be very dry and hard.  As boys we would throw chunks of it at at the side of a barn, and it would leave a red mark like chalk on a blackboard, but not today. It had rained in the last week or so. On one side of the road was a thicket of small pines, and on the other was a barbed wire fence. The rusty strands of wire were attached to red cedar posts gnarled and weathered with age. In their day they had held my great-grandfather's  cattle  Today what was once pasture land is now a forest of conifers and hardwoods. Cattle have been replaced with white-tailed deer, grey and red foxes, bobcats, raccoons, possums, rabbits, squirrels, and an occasional coyote. We saw no wildlife.  They could sense our presence.

Claudette and I had walked about one hundred and fifty yards when we came to a large clearing. The road made a gentle curve to the right and began downward. The old house was at the top of the hill just as the ground leveled off. It was at sort of at a right angle to the road. There was a huge oak tree at the front. My knowledge of botany had waned; I was unable to identify the variety.  I remembered that my father could identify trees by their bark.

The quietness was almost eerie.  The only sound was the crunching of leaves under my Reeboks. We began our walk around the house.  It was a two room cabin with an addition on the back. Some of the clapboards were missing, and the logs were visible underneath. The marks of the broadaxe were easily distinguished.  Could my ancestor have swung the axe that made those marks? No one in the family knows exactly when the house was built.  Some of the family members once thought it could be designated the oldest house in the county, but without knowing the date of construction, that was not possible. It was an old hand hewn log structure, though. Some believed that it could have been the house of an even earlier ancestor. Perhaps from the early eighteenth century. Maybe the old Scots-Irishman had built the house in what was then a British colony. The Cherokee Indians had dwelled there. Had he fought the Indians for this land, even though he received it as a and grant? We continued our inspection of the house, bushwhacking our way through brambles, small bushes, and tall broom straw. I related to Claudette how my grandmother made brooms from broomstraw. In my preschool years I had been her able helper.

There was an open porch that ran the width of the front of the house. In an old photo taken in the early 1900s, part of the porch was enclosed.  The porch floor was solid and did not give any under our weight. To the the left of the left front door a local historian had removed the clapboard from a two-foot square section of the exterior wall to reveal the logs underneath. We entered the room. There was a door across from us leading to the addition, which was a kitchen. To the right was the fireplace flanked by the door on its left. The floor felt solid.   I could see the earth through the crack between the boards of the floor. That would allow the cold in during the winter. I knew about cold floors.  As a boy I lived in a house with cracks in the floor. Many colonial frontier homes had  dirt floors.  I wasn't  sure how to determine if this house had had one.. The only place I saw floor joists was under the front porch, and that was a lap-jointed hand hewn beam. If the logs reached the ground, and I'm reasonably sure they did, the logs in contact  with the earth would have been cedar or locust wood. Those woods would have been used because of their durability. As I walked into the other room it mirrored the first one.The ceiling was low as well.  The sunlight streamed through an aged window, making the dust particles in the air sparkle like diamond dust. 

The house was very clean. I remembered visiting it with my father some twenty years prior and it was full of debris. Could it have

been the historian who had cleaned it out? There was access to the loft beside the fireplace. I did not investigate there.  At one time there was a two story addition on the right side of the house, but it had been demolished and removed. My great-grandfather had nine children.  He could have been the resident who added that addition. Just before leaving, I spied a small scrap of paper in the corner of the room. I walked over, bent down, and picked it up. When I smoothed the crumbled piece of newsprint out I was surprised to find a picture of me. It was a newspaper clipping with the headline:"Young Teaches Painting at MCI".  I had once given art lessons to some residents of the prison in McCormick county. There was a photograph of me and five inmates. The inmates were displaying their artwork. Why was this clipping here? I could hardly remember the last residents of this house. Was it saved because of who one of the inmates was? It was a mystery left unsolved. As I looked out the front door of the house I remembered that it once had a split rail fence around the front yard.  The lady of the house probably had flowers there once. There was once a big barn about one hundred feet in front of the house that housed livestock. Some of the ruins remained, providing shelter for smaller wildlife.  I felt Claudette behind me and her hand on my shoulder.

"What are you thinking about?" she asked.

"Samuel Oliver Young, my old great-granddad, would have walked beside that barn on his way to fight armies of the United States of America in the 1860s," I answered.

"He kissed his wife and kids 'Goodbye" right here on this porch," she finished my thought as her hand squeezed my shoulder.

"Yep," I said.

We walked from the darkness of the house into the bright November sunlight. The air was cool and fresh and scented with pine needles. It was going to be a great day.