My Work: Homestead Part 1

Bang! Bang! When we first moved to our farm, the wind sometimes caught the tin roof of an old building, bouncing it up and down and making a terrible racket. The building was about 12 feet square, built of logs, and stood next to the old privy between our house and the barn.

Over the years, the top four courses of logs and the roof had shifted sideways toward the south until they curved out about two feet beyond the base. I was busy building our addition, and didn’t get around to nailing down that tin right away.

We were told the dirt-floored building used to belong to the grandmother of Chester McKeen, the man who homesteaded this place, and was moved here from another location. It looked like it was over 100 years old, could have been 200.

It was around our first Halloween here when I noticed that the tin only banged at night, and it sometimes banged on quiet nights when I couldn’t feel that much wind. Puzzled, I told our neighbour, Ray, about the frosty quiet nights and the tin roof one time when I was down at his place helping him cut wood. He squinted at me, then looked off toward my place, rolled a cigarette, and told me this story:

“The way I heard it, that log house was built around 1835,” Ray began, “Angus and Virginia McIntyre homesteaded that land way before Chester McKeen. For the first few years they lived in a tarpaper shack next to the tamarack tree that still stands right by your driveway, then they put up those logs.

“Your inside bathroom door used to be the back door of their shack. Look at the wide boards and handmade nails.

“In those first years they were childless, but they went ahead and put up the logs anyway, hoping they could use it for their family. They built a room downstairs and a sleeping loft upstairs. After a few more years, they were still there alone, and I’m told that’s when the trouble began.

“It would have been a struggle for a childless couple trying to farm that land. There’s more granite than soil and its best used only for pasture. They must have started to struggle with each other, too, because Virginia disappeared five or so years after they moved into that homestead.That’s where the rest of the story differs, depending on who’s tellin’ it.

“Some say Virginia left to go back to her people in Nova Scotia, while Angus stayed on the farm and tried to make a go of it alone. He didn’t last long, though, because the year after Virginia left, Angus was found hanging from your tamarack tree, dead by his own hand, with the loft of the homestead leaning over just about like you see it now. It was a sad ending to their hopes of making a life out here.

One gone and one dead.

Part 2 soon...