I’ve been watching golden autumn leaves tumble to the ground this morning. A few drift, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth until they glide softly still on the still green grass below.
I’m sitting in the warmth of my kitchen listening to the crackle of the logs and pops of embers in the fireplace and just watching out the window at the back garden to see what I can see. We had a late spring this year, an odd summer, and thankfully, a long autumn. It is now late October, and I am waiting for our first frost. It’s the time of year when I am eager to do things outside in the garden, but the weather likes to play tricks. Perhaps that’s really where Halloween comes from — the mischief making weather. One day it’s sunny and pleasant, a real treat. The next is a trick, cold and damp. Sometimes we enjoy both extremes in the same day.
The tree I’m watching is a butternut tree (Juglans cinerea), a type of walnut. It stands in the middle of our back yard, a central stem with three trunks reaching skyward, its branches appearing in fits and starts, mostly jagged and broken on the ends. It loses large limbs in each significant storm or snowfall. This dear tree is nearing the end of its life. Each spring, I wonder if it will leaf out again. So far, it hangs on and even manages to produce a few nuts. The squirrels love it, but I notice they love it less and less each year.
Across its native range, the butternut tree is included on various watch, threatened, at risk, or endangered lists. It seems to be safe in the valley where we live, but we don’t have many of them on our land.
The butternut rarely lives longer than seventy-five years, and I’m guessing that’s just about how long ours has been standing in our back yard.
If we consider seventy-five years, the tree was planted in 1948. Our house was already sixty-six years old. I don’t know who lived here at the time or who planted the tree, but I do wonder sometimes what life would have been like here — in our house and on our land.
In its early days, our land was a working farm. The hill behind our house was cleared pasture. The house itself was built in 1882. It was lit with gas lamps and would have smelled of fresh cut lumber. Most likely, the cook stove would have been wood burning. I don’t think there was indoor plumbing, but I don’t have any idea where the outhouse would have been. Three families lived together under one roof — the father and mother with their two adult sons, their sons’ wives, and their children.
In the world in 1882, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky debuted his 1812 Overture. Richard Wagner, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Johannes Brahms also debuted new works.
Henrik Ibsen’s play, Ghosts, was first staged in Chicago. Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe premiered at the Savoy Theatre in London and on the same day in New York. A month later, Iolanthe became the very first show performed at the Bijou Theatre in Boston, the first theater in the United States lit entirely by electricity. The Savoy, by the way, was the first theater in the UK to be lit entirely by electricity. They beat us by a year.
Edward H. Johnson, the vice president of Thomas Edison’s electric company, created the first string of Christmas tree lights. Henry W. Seely patented the first electric clothes iron, and P.T. Barnum purchased Jumbo the elephant.
Morgan Earp was assassinated by outlaws while playing billiards in Tombstone, Arizona, four months after the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. The Hatfields and McCoys were feuding in West Virginia, and the outlaw Jesse James was killed by Robert Ford in Missouri.
John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil was organized as a trust which led to the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890 authored by Senator John Sherman of Ohio, the younger brother of Union general William Tecumseh Sherman.
The United States signed the Geneva Convention which was first adopted in 1864, legitimizing the International Red Cross. Roderick Maclean attempted to assassinate Queen Victoria as she boarded a train in Windsor, and the first Labor Day parade was held in New York City.
German scientist Heinrich Hermann Robert Koch discovered the bacteria that causes tuberculosis, and the first stone was laid for the Sagrada Familia basilica in Barcelona, Spain, the construction of which has yet to be completed as I write this today.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Darwin, and Mary Todd Lincoln died.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, A.A. Milne, Bela Lugosi, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf were born.
And in the midst of all those happenings, our house was built.
I would suspect, for most people in our community today, the way our house and farm looked when we bought it in 2021 was the way it had always been.
But, of course, it hasn’t always been this way.
At some point, the last horse was sold or passed on and replaced with an automobile, the fields stopped producing. Electricity and indoor plumbing were added to the house.
In the 1960s, the preceding owners purchased the farm and planted the very trendy-for-the-time rhododendrons and pine trees in the front and side yards. They allowed the pasture land to grow in. Only one small meadow, just a couple of acres, was kept in production by a local farmer who cut the field for hay a few times a year.
So many things have happened in the world and in this community since the house was brand new in 1882. Styles change. People innovate. Society adapts. Children grow up and move away. Old folks pass on. A new family moves in.
Things change. It hasn’t always been this way, and it won’t always be this way.
Now, it’s time for my family to live here, to plant and grow here, to leave our mark.
The history of this place is important to us. We want to remember it and learn by it, to preserve the best and offer respect to what came before us as we move forward, and that is what we intend to do.
We love music and history, so we’ve created a playlist of songs from the year our house was built. We call it 1882. To listen, visit the Mædunbroc profile on Spotify. You will be able to “like” the playlist and “follow” our profile, so you can come back to it again and again. 1882 is our first playlist. We are working on playlists for each decade of our house’s life, and we’ll add a few more as our house and farm continue to grow. Access the 1882 playlist here.
We also love food and history, so we are recreating dishes from years past starting with a dish popular in 1882 — Apple Butter Custard Pie. If you like pumpkin pie, you will love this one. We hope you will give it a try.
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