Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Treasure Seekers

Our farm holds many mysteries. One is an old abandoned cabin we never knew about until Kevin discovered it while hunting just this past winter. He only saw it beacuse the leaves were off the trees. Deeeeeep in the hardwoods, I cannot even find it without Kevin there to guide me. On the back side of our 170 acres, in some dense trees down the ridge from an old barn, Kevin and I discovered an old - very old - "trash pile". Most likely from the late 1940's - 1950s when the "back house" was built, it is buried in leaves and dirt. (There are two houses on the farm, the older farm house, which we live in is at the road frontage side of the property, the "back house" is on the "back 40", extremely far off the road. We would prefer to live there, but it is really disheveled and needs way too much work to live in it.)
This past Saturday, my brothers Eli and Noah were paying their usual visit to our farm, and helped Kevin with a tractor in need of repairs.....

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(My husband is the taller of the three.... :))

I gladly entertained the kids. Abi and Lexy had spent the night with me, and for breakfast, I fed them Kevin's "griddle" cakes with chocolate syrup, in my still-being-remodeled kitchen. They would need a good breakfast for the things I had in store for them to do for the afternoon.

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After dress-up and lunch, I told them we were going digging for treasure! You never saw such an excited bunch of kids. We loaded up digging tools, buckets, and a trusty can of hornet killer, and after a search for the missing truck keys, we headed off to the "back 40". We drove as far as we could, then hiked the rest of the way down a winding trail Kevin is building in the woods there. We located the pile, and started digging for buried "treasure" underneath the dirt and leaves.

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We found all kinds of bottles, jars, saucers, broken china, canning jars, a silver salt shaker;milk bottles, zinc and porcelain jar lids, even a coveted blue canning jar, intact. It is very old, as it doesn't even have a screw top on it. We are guessing that it required a cork. We cleaned them all up and took a photo of some of our "loot" on an old table we found in the old barn that day.

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What fun it was! I love sharing my love of old things and history with my nieces and nephews. Plus, it kept them very well entertained for the afternoon.next time, we'll go in search of the hidden cabin, and see what we find hanging around there. I am simply itching to go "treasure" hunting again.

4 comments:

lislynn said...

I am unspeakable jealous. You have nooo idea how jealous.

Mary said...

What a fun day, a great memory. Good job Aunt Hossana.

Catherine said...

What fun! We used to go metal detecting around the old cabin ruins on our farm too. We didn't find as much cool stuff as you did though!

lislynn said...

Thanks appreciating my bargains :) It's such a bummer to go shopping alone and not have you and Omi and Sue around to gloat with... :(