In July of 2013, I stood in the middle of the old homestead house and marveled at how it had changed. The doors were wide open, many of the windows were broken out, the ceiling sagged, and there were giant holes in the floor. The concrete basement walls were buckling. It was the first time I had spent any time looking around since Fall of 1967 when our family moved out of the house forever.
Memories of my childhood flooded back. I remembered how the old house, buried in the deep forest, kept us warm during the long, cold, Alaska winters. The metal roof boomed and banged during the winter storms to remind us that we were lucky to be inside where the blizzards wouldn’t carry us away. The back porch housed Dad’s meat cutting business; the business that kept us just a few dollars away from hunger and sometimes provided a pair of shoes. We played family games during the winter with light provided by a Coleman gas lantern, until electricity came, or when the electricity went off for extended periods during the winter storms.
The family felt snug and secure from the outside. When the wolves in the forest howled and the moose wandered the yard, we always knew the log house would protect us. In the short summer we came inside only to sleep and eat. Now the house was falling in, being reclaimed by the earth from where the building materials originated.
Dad filed on the homestead in 1954. As part of the proving up process he built the house. He used local spruce trees to make the log walls and studs for the inside walls. The logs were cut on three sides by Dad and Jim Kennedy, who had a sawmill. The sawmill had a big circular blade, unlike the band saws used today. The floor was made of rough cottonwood planks. The circular saw marks still show. I was kept busy gathering loads of sphagnum moss to put between the logs to fill in any holes. Dad also gave me a draw knife to use to help take the bark off the uncut side of the logs (although I am sure that most of the draw knife work was done by Mom.) The mosquitoes were fierce there in the woods, so finally Dad gave me a lit cigarette to wave around in hopes of using the smoke to keep the mosquitoes at bay. (The success of the cigarette smoke was questionable.) By modern standards the house was small, a mere 24 x 36 feet. However, it was larger than many other houses in the area. Remarkably, electricity, although very unreliable, became available just after our family moved into the house in late 1954.
The house was built with no modern tools. There was no electricity at the time, so Dad used a level, hammer, carpenter's square and draw knife. He drove 10-inch spikes with a sledge hammer and staggered them along the log to prevent splitting. He drilled through the top log and halfway through the bottom log to countersink the spike and used a crosscut saw to square off the ends. He used an axe to cut notches in the logs so the log would fit securely together. (Spikes cost $30 a keg.)
The house was incomplete when winter threatened. Only the floor and a few courses of logs were finished by that time, so Dad built a small 12 x 18 shack where the future kitchen would be, as a temporary shelter until the house could be completed. A group of friends donated two days' labor to get the house closed in and get the roof on.
We moved into the shack in September 1954. Roger and Barbara slept in a small travel trailer borrowed from Jim Kennedy which we placed close to the foundation of the house. In the shack were a crib, a double bed, a table, four chairs, and a combination electric/coal/wood stove. We nailed wooden boxes to the walls to serve as cupboards. Toys, food, and clothes were stored under the beds. Other household goods and tools we kept in boxes in other parts of the unfinished house.
Once the bigger house was completed about December, and electricity was connected, Dad dismantled the shack, board by board. Then he removed a window from its frame and we threw the boards out that window into a heap outside. When he put the window back in, we could live in the whole house. It was one of the easiest moves ever made.
Mom says she chinked the logs on the inside of the house with oakum, a hemp rope soaked in oil, because the green logs tended to twist as they dried, leaving gaps.
The living room of the house contained our barrel stove. It was made from an empty 50-gallon gasoline drum laid on its side, set on metal legs, with a hole cut into one end with a specially made door attached. A hole cut in the top of the other end was for the smoke stack. That stove was temperamental! Sometimes it would roar and turn red from the heat of a good fire, and sometimes, no matter what we did, it refused to hold fire.
The house was originally built on skids with future plan to move it onto a basement, giving our small family still more space. The upstairs had two bedrooms, living room, and kitchen. There was no bathroom as there was no running water. We used an outhouse until water was added in the summer of 1958. Mom was happy to get running water in the kitchen then, as well. (Before that time, Dad and I provided the running water by running down to Cottonwood Creek to fill milk cans and hauling them back to the house.) The same year Mom planted a lilac tree outside the house.
In the summer of 1958 Dad built a basement behind the house. He used the gravel from the basement hole to make the concrete for the walls. A house moving company winched the house onto the basement. The house mover told Mom to put a glass of water on the kitchen table while the house was being moved and insisted that not a drop would be spilled, so I went and put the glass of water on the table to test him. He was right! Dad added a porch and a stairway downstairs to the two bedrooms for us kids. The upstairs bedroom was converted into a bathroom.
About 1960 the outside of the house was stuccoed. This cut down on the cold drafts from the winter winds and the house became quite warm and comfortable. Heat was variously provided by a wood stove, coal furnace, and finally an oil furnace.
Eventually we built a fence around the front yard and planted flowers along it. One night when Mom and Dad were at a political meeting, one of the speakers said he thought that things in the legislature were 'utter confusion'. That is when Mom came up with the idea of the name "Udder Confusion" for our homestead, which was to become a dairy farm. A family friend painted the sign which stood in front of our place for many years.
I gazed around the house and remembered so much of my childhood homesteading years with Dad, Mom and my sisters, Barbara and Linda. Barbara moved into the house as a four year old and Linda moved in as a baby. I was in the second grade.
Homestead kids in 1955 and 2013
I returned the next day with Barbara and Linda as well as Nancy. I showed Nancy around the old place and told her stories of how the house came to be what it is today. We all decided that we deserved a souvenir. Barbara supplied a wrecking bar and we used it to pry up some of the cottonwood flooring. The planks were well aged after 60 years and will be used to make everyone a box to store keepsakes. We also took pieces of Mom’s lilac bush that had grown into a giant lilac tree. I hope to fashion them into some kind of souvenir as well. We expect the house to be demolished in the near future. We hope our fond memories of the house will live on in the keepsakes made from the wood we salvaged. (August 2013)
The lilac tree in 2013 almost completely obscures the side of the old homestead house!
Adding the back porch after moving the house onto the basement
Homestead house in winter
Building the roof of the homestead house
Homestead house as it appeared before the front porch was added
