Part 2 of The Macbeth Farm: 52 Ancestors 2024 Prompt “Homestead”

 

My Childhood Memories of My Grandparents’ Farm

Ivan Alfred Macbeth: 1904-1972 (Maternal Grandfather)
Nora Elsie Hoffman: 1899-1994 (Maternal Grandmother)

 

Here is a beautiful aerial shot of my grandparents’ farm, taken in the early 1960s when I was a little girl. This is the farm that lives in my memories.

Whenever I think of my grandparents’ farm, I think of the following old children’s song:

Oh playmate, come out and play with me

And bring your dollies three.

Climb up my apple tree,

Look down my rain barrel

Slide down my cellar door

And we’ll be jolly friends forever more.

My grandparents’ house had the song’s essentials: the apple tree, the rain barrel and the cellar door. The large garden on the far side of the house had a few ancient apple trees. The barrel was used to catch rainwater from the house’s downspout. My grandmother liked to wash her hair in the rainwater from the barrel—it was softer than the well water pumped by their windmill. She also used it to water plants. The cellar had double doors set in concrete on a slant, perfect for a little girl like me to slide down (and run down, although that wasn’t good for the structure of the doors). In my young mind, the song must have been written about the Macbeth farm place—it all fit.

I’ve been looking, unsuccessfully so far, for a photo of that cellar door. I can remember the steps that it covered, leading down into “the root cellar”—the original basement under the oldest section of the house, with cemented fieldstone walls and shelving for canned goods and containers for storage of root vegetables-- and the “basement”, the concrete-walled section under the newer part of the house where the plumbing was laid in. That space contained a toilet, metal washing/soaking sink, and the washing machine.

My mom, Ione, and her little brother Rex play in the snow in 1937. Living room windows visible, along with roof of barn at bottom of the hill.

The old house underwent several changes over the years. When it was originally built, indoor plumbing and electricity weren’t available. My mother, born in 1928, remembered still using the outhouse as a young child, and having to pump water from the windmill to carry into the house for washing and cooking. During her early childhood, her parents had indoor plumbing installed. They converted the smallest upstairs bedroom into a bathroom with tub, toilet, sink and a closet (one of only three closets in the house). In the late 1930s, thanks to FDR’s Rural Electrification Act and Administration, electricity finally reached rural Le Ray Township. My mother told me how magical the moment was when they first turned on the electric lights in the house—the oil lamps were no longer needed. They also added an oil-burning forced air furnace to replace the fireplace.

1934 photo of Ione Macbeth's 6th birthday. Windmill behind her, and old porch on front of house.

The house originally had two open-air porches. There was a small one on the “front” of the house that faced the road. It is visible in the attached photo of my mother in 1934, with a wood floor atop a crawlspace, posts supporting the porch roof, and a low white rail at the right side. In addition, there was a long one that stretched the length of rear of the house where it faced the farmyard. At some point during the 1940s, my grandparents modified both porches. The long rear one was rebuilt with a concrete foundation, the sides covered with windows from waist height upwards, windows which had screens only—no glass. They called this porch, appropriately enough, the screen porch. It was used as a sort of mud room and storage area for garden tools and snow and work boots, as well as a play area for us grandkids in warm weather. The play space contained a wooden toy stove and oven painted in a muted pale green, and a doll buggy and old metal toy tractors and bakelite farm animals.

The front porch received an even bigger makeover, including a new foundation and concrete floor, walls and real windows with glass as well as screens. The new porch is visible in the photo of my mother and her cousins below, circa 1949. My grandparents referred to this as the “sun porch”. By the 1960s, the trees in the front yard were huge, making the porch a shady, comfortable spot in summer, and a warm spot in spring and fall when the leaves were small or fallen. Only in winter was the space too cold to use. My grandfather had a bentwood rocker out there, and he loved to sit there, read a book or the newspaper, do the crossword puzzle, and smoke his pipe or a cigarette. There was a floral couch where the rest of us sat to chat and listen to the birdsong.

Left to right: Joanna Macbeth, Renee Macbeth, Ione Macbeth, Wilfred Macbeth and Dwight "Rex" Macbeth. Windows of Ione's bedroom on top floor above living room bay window. New front "sunporch" at right.

My grandparents put in raised flowerbeds around the exterior of the front of the house. They are visible in the photo below, which shows the bow window in the living room.

My mother’s old bedroom was right above the living room. It featured pale pink walls, filmy white curtains framing two large windows with white frames, and a black and white granite-look linoleum floor that made a sort of crackling noise when I walked on it. The room had a white iron double bed with a pink floral chenille spread. Every summer my brother and I would stay at my grandparents’ house for a couple weeks, and I loved sleeping in that room. I felt like a princess. Someone once told me my great-grandmother died in that bed, which had my vivid imagination conjuring ghosts in that airy bedroom. Leona Hoffman had died long before I was born, so to me she was just a sweet-faced old lady with white hair in a photo on my grandma’s dresser. She didn’t seem quite real to me as a young child, so I quickly got past my fear and slept easily in the bed.

My brother stayed in the adjoining room, which used to be my Uncle Rex’s room. The two large windows looked out at the windmill and down the hill to the barn and the fields beyond. It was a marvelous view. That bedroom also contained a bookcase filled with children’s books—mostly chunky Big Little Books from my mom’s 1930s childhood, still marked with their ten-cent price. I loved their squat size (about 4 x 4 inches) that fit nicely in my hands, and the musty smell of the cheap, thick paper they were printed on.

A Big Little Book from the 1930s

The upstairs bedrooms were reached via a narrow wood staircase. The risers were painted in the palest gray with rubber stair treads tacked on them to prevent slips and falls. The steep steps were perfect for sending the old Slinky toy down—I loved the odd little whisk noise the Slinky made as it uncoiled and recoiled down the steps.

At the top of the staircase was my grandmother’s Singer sewing machine—a newer electric machine mounted in the old wooden stand that used to hold her treadle machine. She had an old piano stool tucked beneath it to sit on when she sewed—both the stool and Singer cabinet were painted white, and were bathed in the light from the window just to the right.

My brother and me with our grandparents Ivan and Nora Macbeth--Grandpa's 60th birthday in 1964. Taken in Macbeth kitchen--window to left looked out on sunporch. Door on right was sunporch door.

My grandparents used the bedroom downstairs which was entered from the living room. It had a lovely, dark hardwood bedroom set, and had pale walls (blue I think) and two windows—one facing the garden and the other looking onto the screen porch.

I have wonderful memories of playing on the concrete platform that supported the windmill, the source of the well water on the farm. I also liked to dance on the round concrete top of the water cistern. When we were little and Grandpa Ivan still had cattle and hogs, we’d run down to the pig pen to feed them potato and apple peels, and we would watch the cows being milked in the big barn and would play with the barn cats and kittens. I’d scare myself by sneaking into the old outhouse, home to spiders and wasps, and I’d pick strawberries from my Grandma Nora’s berry patch.

Me with farm cats--age 4. Round cistern to my rear right. Corn crib behind me. Photographer (grandpa) was standing by cellar door and back door entry to screen porch. Clothesline post next to the electric pole. Windmill out of photo on right.

And then there was the marvelous hill from the house down to the barn. In the summer, my brother and I would roll down the hill over and over—the grass stains on our clothes probably drove our mother crazy. All Grandma asked was that we avoid her peony bushes at the bottom of the hill.

Closeup of aerial photo showing windmill, cistern, screen porch all along back of house, sloping cellar door just to left of car's front bumper. Windows to Rex's bedroom facing windmill. Hill leading down to barnyard at front left, with grandma's beloved peony bushes at bottom left. I believe that's Grandpa Ivan getting out of the car.

While the old Macbeth farmhouse still exists, the outbuildings are gone and the house is changed—it no longer looks like my grandparents’ farm place. But the Macbeth farm still lives in my memory, in old family photographs, and a 1960s aerial photograph. Grandma and Grandpa, I love you and miss you.