ARRIVAL

I decided to leave Arkansas after almost thirty years because I hate the heat there more and more every summer. Also the rednecks are multiplying. It used to be a bastion of progressive thinking in the South, but except for Little Rock and Eureka Springs, both which I've called home, it's as backwards as the lack of education could make it. I’ve had enough and seen enough. The state has served its purpose in my life. Besides, I already restored everything I wanted to there.

                                        Estevan Hall, Helena Arkansas; my last major restoration in Arkansas

I sold everything, got some help from some great friends and relatives, and after two years' worth of research, trips, and plans, bought this little three-acre farm with a scattering of broken-down outbuildings, a few old foundations, a pond, and a house originally built by the nephew of Myles Standish in 1690. The house has more changes than original fabric about it, but the central structure is true to its turn-of-the-seventeenth-century lines. It was built as a two-room house in 1690 but was soon lifted from the ground and a cellar dug beneath. A permanent chimney stack was installed with two fireplaces, one in the kitchen and one in the living room, and it was expanded into three rooms.

                                                     My first picture of the Standish House, September 2012

Most of this is tentatively dated to the early 1700s.

An addition to the south (left in the picture) was added in the (?) 1920s and another to the north in 1954 or thereabouts. A bathroom was cut from the back room sometime long after 1938 when the place became the home of the Izbickis, Polish market gardeners that had several greenhouses and tilled fields of much more than fifty acres. They grew tomatoes, cantaloupes, and other crops unknown to me.

Bertha Izbicki, the Matriarch, died many years ago, and her kids, all raised in the house and living within a few stones' throw, put the old homestead up for sale. Fixing it would be expensive and the sibs are all over sixty, so they waited for some fool from Arkansas to buy the place, which, after a year of starts and stops, I did.

These are pics I took while examining the property before the sale back in September of 2012.

                          The Garden Shed, complete with Poison Ivy and filled with Garbage

                                 The Swayback Barn. probably early-mid 18th Century

      Tons O' Junk, Garden Shed (but the lump under the tied-up tarp was a cast-iron wood cookstove)

                                                         Garage and Greenhouse

                                                                Greenhouse south wall

                                                     Timber-framed barn interior (with cheap repairs)

                                                 Mosquito-Breeding Operation (Pond)

                                                            Pencil-thin Road to The Farm

                                         Second floor. Note the wide chestnut floor planks

   Kitchen fireplace with old chestnut surround. Other wood is less than fifty years old, but looks good

                                This is the working part of the kitchen. Lots of counterspace!

 

Living room fireplace. Heart pine floor overlays a chestnut floor below. Kerosene tank on the hearth feeds the heater in the corner. Fireplace has an iron surround , probably late 19th century.

 

Schist cobble base for fireplace with hand-hewn timbers. Old well pump and expansion tank in the background, both abandoned for a more modern system.