Making a House a Home

Excitement grew as I contemplated having my very own house instead of the small, furnished apartment we lived in. My Dad was a carpenter and Uncle John hired him to repair the old windows and he installed a doorframe from the living room into the south room that would be our bedroom so that we could have a door to shut. The framework was boxed in to create shelves on both sides of the doors into the bedroom and from the living room into the kitchen also.

With the room measurements we picked out wallpaper for each room. We met with the local Baptist preacher who was also a paperhanger and he gave us a price for doing it all. However when the time came to settle up, his price was more than what we had calculated, however we settled on a compromise and paid him for the job.

We accepted donated furniture from all the family. We had Grandmother Johnston’s old round oak table

 and a set of four  chairs.

 Some were held together with bailing wire but we didn’t mind.

Our son Ken, age 16 months, was given the old family high chair that had been used by all the old Johnston children. Uncle John, Judson (Big), Isabel, Bill, Tom and Jake! I’m sure Morris and his brothers Bill and Richard had all used it when visiting Grandma and Grandpa Johnston too.

 We managed to scrimp together $25.00 and bought a bedroom suite from Duncan’s Furniture at Arcadia, Ks. It was a Walnut veneer set with a high backed bed, a chest of drawers and a dressing table with mirror.

Morris put in a pitcher pump over an old sink just inside the east door into the kitchen. It had no drain, just a bucket under the sink to catch the water you might dump down it. Of course someone had to carry the water OUT that ran down the drain into that bucket, so that kept us from using too much water. After all, we only had a cistern that caught rainwater from off the roof of the house. This water ran down through a filter that was made of sand, charcoal and rock, then into the old well just east of the porch.

I don’t know how we could have made it without all the help we got from our families. Both my Mom and Morris’s Mom gave us a kitchen cabinet.

 

 Morris’s Mom gave us a small apartment sized electric cook store. The wallpaper we had picked out for the kitchen was a red plaid and I made bright red curtains with black rickrack for the windows. We bought a black and red squared linoleum for the floor. How bright and clean it looked.

Our baby was due the last of April and I had a cold the last of March and my doctor, Dr. Gregory from Webb City, thought I best not travel back to our home in Kansas City, so I stayed with my folks at Nashville, Missouri  while Morris went back to Kansas City to finish working and packing our belongings up for the move to the ranch.

Anticipation grew as I knew we could not move into our little home on the prairie house until this baby arrive and our family had prepared it for us!

My first view of our Prairie Home

My first view of the house.

It was a cold, dreary day in December 1953. We had been visiting family over the Christmas holidays when Morris had been offered the job of working for Uncle John on his Prairie land, and we decided to drive the seven miles from the old Johnston home place where Uncle John still lived with his Mother and his younger brother, to look at this house on the prairie ranch where we would live.

There were still patches of snow along the dirt road as we drove west from the paved highway. No other house for miles. No fences along this road either. As we cross the railroad tracks that ran through the Johnston prairie ranch, Morris pointed out a ranch house that was nestled up against a large mound of dirt. This area had been mined for coal many years ago and A J. Cripe, owner of  Town Talk Bakery in Pittsburg Kansas, had bought this land and built this retreat for him and his cronies.

Farther down the road was a two-story house. This would be my nearest neighbors. Davis’s lived there. Morris and I had gone to High School with Boy Lee Davis and  his younger sister Bonnie. Mrs. Davis still lived there with her youngest son Gary who was about 8 years old at the time.

Just past the Davis house we turned north. The road was straight and narrow. It would be hard for two cars to pass on this road back then. Prairie on both sides of the road, with no fences, and you could see for miles. Even at this time of the year the distant trees looked very close, except they were at least a mile, maybe two miles away.

I could see the small house ahead. It had been a miner’s house in Mindenmines, about three miles away, before they moved it out here. It was what they call a story and a half. The upstairs had two dormer windows. One on the east, and one on the west.

There was a long drive up to the house from the road, for the house sat right on top of the hill. There was a cellar just to the north of the house and a well with a concrete top and a pump on the east side of the house. About 50 feet east of the back door was a shed.

I stepped out of the car and into the cold wind. I would have to get use to this wind, for it blew, summer and winter. I looked out over the prairie at the barn that was north and east of the house and contemplated what our life would be like out in this quiet world.

We opened the door to see a big mess that was left from the folks who had lived here a short time and worked for Uncle John. I could see why he didn’t want them as renters anymore.

Stepping gingerly over this bundle of papers and old clothes, I walked through what was the kitchen and into the living room. There were 12 foot ceiling and two long windows in each of four rooms on the ground floor. The front room faced the west and had one window on the north, and one on the west, as well as the door out onto the front porch that crossed the front of the house. There was a large opening into the south room that had two windows in it. One on the west and one on the south and a door that went into the east room where the open stairway on the side of this room lead up to the half story room.

Climbing up the stairs I thought to my self that we would have to put some railing and a gate at the bottom on this to keep the kids from climbing the steps and falling. There was only one big room upstairs. Luckily, there was a door at the top to close it off so we wouldn’t have to heat it in the winter time.

By this time I began to feel the cold and we went back out to the car. There would have to be a lot of work done on this house before we could move in.

to be continued......

A Look Back In Time

I was a town girl…it was really just a little village, but the thoughts of living way out in the country with two babies, and being all by my self during the daytime while my husband  Morris worked on the ranch, was kind of frightening.

We had been living in a third story apartment in Kansas City where Morris worked nights, loading trucks for Santa Fe Truck line.

It was no place to raise children. The building was right on the street with no yard, three bars, and an all night theater on the block. And the streetcar came clang; clang, clanging down the street every fifteen minutes. With a new baby to be born in April, Morris decided to take his Uncle John up on his offer.

We would live in the old house on this 600 acre ranch, rent free and have all the meat milk and eggs we wanted, plus $100. a month and ½ the profits at the end of the year. Little did we know  at the time, but there was never any profit at the end of the year.

Starting a new book about my life on the Ranch

With the New Year started, I've decided it's time to finish that book about that Last Little House On The Prairie I started so long ago.

I'm planning on adding a chapter from "The Last Little House On The Prairie" each month to this blog, and I hope those who read it will give me feedback about their thoughts as you relive those day I want to share with you.

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