Old Farm and Ranch Homesteads

[Cowpuncher]

As you travel in our neck of the woods, there are a lot of old abandoned homesteads. Some and been burned or torn down and only a few trees and maybe a foundation remaining. Others have the house, outbuildings, old machinery, cars and whatever left just as if someone had gone off for a visit.

When we acquire a place with old buildings, we remove anything useful and dig a hole. We push the old buildings in and burn them. Cover up the hole and leave the place like civilization never happened.

If there are serviceable corrals, and they are of use to us, we fix them up to a usable state.

We have one neighbor with an old house, totally unusable, setting in the middle of a group of new steel building. Even has to drive around it to access the other buildings.

Some folks are here and let oldtimers live in the houses for free if they keep the place up.

Wonder what others do and why.

 

[TXTibbs]

I hate to see old history torn down!! Back home we tore down our old shed cause the roof started caving in, and it was weird not seeing that shed there.....it had been there since i was a baby...it was replaced with a fancier nicer metal one...and yeah there are homesteads but mostly all that is left is a cellar hole or a few pieces of tin, or maybe an old car frame. Like my great-grandparents log house....I would love to beable to go back and see it when it was functioning and being lived in. But after they left it, it started going down and then it was torn down...Grrrr....I hate that...to bad someone back then couldn't of took a little time to preserve it, but i guess those things don't cross many peoples minds. All that is left now is a few logs and other junk. I love that old history, especially up where i grew up just cause thats home to me......all the stories of the people who lived there back in the early early 1900's. Alot of the old timers have kicked off now and took a lot of their stories with them. Others are being passed down, but makes one wonder after a couple generations how accurate some of them are! haha. If you are a book of stories you should sit down and write them out....i wish my granpa's would of done that....but to a "grandpa" that seems foolish...and i guess it would...but still would be neat for future generations to read about the area and such. I like to dig around old homesteads and see what sort of oldies i can find. I like antiques and such. ok, Im rambling now and can't even remember why I decided to post a comment......so yeah....laters

 

[the_jersey_lilly_2000]

Tibbs, just a thought, if the logs from your grandparents home are still any good at all, gather em up. stick em in a barn somewhere on yer folks place, when the time comes and you wanna build a house of your own, use em on one wall or something. Here in the house we built, I gathered brick from Mr. Lilly's great grandparents house (their chimney, they had a wood heater) and used them only on the inside fire place mantle and hearth. Should I post a pic? or will photo bucket send me another email? lol

 

[sw]

I love history more than most, but I cannot stand people that build new and never get rid of the old, just add on to the broke down and the worn out but never do anything about it. FOR EXAMPLE, when we came on this place, my first thing to do is get rid of junk. First thing to go is an old house that had no doors, just a piece of junk. The former owners son came driving in as the whole thing was in flames, had a major fit, quote,,"how could you do such a terrible thing, you no good jacka$$ son of a witch, when my mom sees this see is going to have a heart attack and you are to blame!!!!!" Well, his mom came up to get some of her last things a couple of weeks later, she said, "I am so glad that someone thinks so much of this place that they are cleaning up this mess of junk that had been here for so many years, thanks for doing what my husband and sons would never do." I have also had many people, Bob Ross and his brothers to name a few, who homesteaded this place in the early 1900's thank me for taking such good care of this place and getting rid of the garbage. I will take a picture of the original Ross homestead next time I am over there with the initials they carved in the rocks when they were kids.

 

[ranchwife]

the verrry wealthy owners of our place ( we have a 10 year lease) are from back east (pennsylvania) and paid my 18 year old son to "tear down verrrrrrry carefully) the old barns and corrals that were taking up alot of good river bottom pasture land.....the reason is because the old barn wood is quite valuable and goes for a bundle to folks wanting to make their fancy homes look "rustic" :roll: :roll:

 

[nr]

I hate to see old history torn down!! Back home we tore down our old shed cause the roof started caving in, and it was weird not seeing that shed there.....it had been there since i was a baby...it was replaced with a fancier nicer metal one...and yeah there are homesteads but mostly all that is left is a cellar hole or a few pieces of tin, or maybe an old car frame. Like my great-grandparents log house....I would love to beable to go back and see it when it was functioning and being lived in. But after they left it, it started going down and then it was torn down...Grrrr....I hate that...to bad someone back then couldn't of took a little time to preserve it, but i guess those things don't cross many peoples minds. All that is left now is a few logs and other junk. I love that old history, especially up where i grew up just cause thats home to me......all the stories of the people who lived there back in the early early 1900's. Alot of the old timers have kicked off now and took a lot of their stories with them. Others are being passed down, but makes one wonder after a couple generations how accurate some of them are! haha. If you are a book of stories you should sit down and write them out....i wish my granpa's would of done that....but to a "grandpa" that seems foolish...and i guess it would...but still would be neat for future generations to read about the area and such. I like to dig around old homesteads and see what sort of oldies i can find. I like antiques and such. ok, Im rambling now and can't even remember why I decided to post a comment......so yeah....laters

It is a good thing you didn't marry me TX Tibbs. We'd have saved so many boxes of the parts of history we can't stand to part with there'd have been no place to walk through the house! :roll:

 

[Heifer]

We have a few old buildings sites near some grain land - we've cleaned up the old sites on all our pastures. But, when we graze the grainland in the fall after harvest, we sure make certain we nail shut doors to buildings and gates to corrals.

This we learned after three of my dads cows pushed open an old gate into an old corral, and got stuck in there with no water for four or five days. Luckily, it was in the fall and cool out, and we were also lucky because it snowed a little. When we found the poor girls, they looked an awful site, and their hair was all curly from them licking the snow off each others backs. The pen they walked into was just before a loading chute, and was really small - they couldn't lick snow off the ground, 'cause they'd tramped it in. One of the cows was 10 years old at the time, and she's fifteen now; Dad still has her (picture below).

Here's an old barn built between 1910-1915. The front boards just fell out this summer. It's sure standing straight, and the family that lived here still comes back to visit it at family reunions, etc.

Here's the house and a tool shed, located just south of the barn. My mom remembers staying in this house in the 1940's with a close friend of hers. She said she came home with bed-bugs, and her Mom wasn't too pleased with her!

The RWF cow that was stuck in the corral, with my girls and their Grandpa, taken this summer (she's 15yrs).

I guess we figure we're better off tearing down and burning the old buildings once they're falling to pieces, but this set has some sentimental importance to the family that still returns to visit, and they're still in decent shape.

 

[Saddletramp]

Neat pictures Heifer, I like to dig around old buildings and barns. Just to look at them is history first hand.
One time a buddy and I were going to be caught in a rainstorm while we were ahorseback. I told him of an old log cabin we could hole up in. It was in pretty good shape and kept us dry while the storm passed. It was just two rooms and a hole in the floor for a celler. He was pretty fasinated and said," Can you believe people used to live here and had Christmas and birthdays and were thankful of a home." I said "Yeah they were happy back then just to have something no matter how small."

Probably raised twelve kids in that cabin.

 

[Nicky]

Oops