I was not sure what I would write about for this week's 52 Ancestors 2022 prompt, "Landed". I was thinking of the obvious choices - where my family first landed or settled in America. I took a short trip this past weekend with my husband and parents to meet up with some distant cousins to visit and go cemetery hunting. I came home with so much more than photos of tombstones and warm fuzzy feelings of family reunion.
One of my dad's favorite cousins, Clara, gave us a tour of cemetery locations, the old Lloyd school house, and "the old home-place". If there was a rainbow in the sky, it would have landed at the creek bank of "the old home-place". We pulled onto the property on a dirt/gravel road that stopped us at a double locked Texas-gate. (I have to include that part because my dad was sure to point this out to me and my cousin.) Hopes were internally dashed about getting a closer view and finding the steps that were supposed to be the only remains of the home that once held so many of our ancestors.
Leave it to the Queen of Winnsboro, our cousin, who knew the lady who owned the property now and knew the people leasing it. After a semi-quick phone call, we had the go ahead to climb the Texas-gate and make the hike down the remaining road and look around. I do not claim my age, but we two cousins with adult and college children were so excited to heave over the top rail and make our way down to our ancestral home - we were jogging!
I am so glad we did! There were no steps or posts remaining, but the home must have been somewhere in the center of a clearing that had some pecan trees around and a little behind it with the creek not too far away. It is winter, so the trees were bare, but still so beautiful and huge. I wondered how big they were in 1853.
There is a barn there now near where an old home, that is not the original home, stands now. It is not the original barn, but it does look pretty in the photos.
The creek had a fence around it, and the bridge is long gone, so we were not able to cross to go to the other side and view more of the original 300 acres. I wondered how far away the second one room house was from the original spot. I could only imagine. The creek we were near was the place where the generations of kids played, where homes got water, and where our saints were baptized.
Near the creek, and throughout the soft ground that we trudged through, we found the remains of small melons. Possibly sugar baby watermelons. They were the remains of last summer and early fall and were like balloons that had popped open for the seeds to generate another crop for next season. We wondered if our family had planted them, but likely not. It was a good visual though to imagine the area we were in being a kitchen garden, and then over a ways being a crop growing of something to sell.
We decided not to take the gravel road back, but to go through the property "on the hypotenuse" as my cousin said. She is a smart one. I could not imagine walking that distance plus more to the main road, that may have been a pathway at the time, and then on to civilization. I hope they had a horse and a cart. We made it back, which made the rest of the group happy as they had waited in their cars. We went on to the next stop, and I was sorry to leave.
I really felt so great standing in that spot where my great grandfather was born and grew up. He left home at least by the time he was 20 to help his mother's sister who was a widower, in a nearby town. I am sure he knew how to help her farm growing up on 300 acres of his family farm. I regret that our generation and those after us won't have this legacy to enjoy and maintain it's many memories. I am very thankful that I got to see it and take some pictures of it to enjoy. Maybe one day future generations will look at those and appreciate it, and maybe regret it a little as well.
Photos by Laura Ríchard, 2/19/2022
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