Jeremiah Tolbert

My step­fa­ther Mike dri­ves me out into the coun­try  to show off some dis­cov­er­ies he made while walk­ing through the woods look­ing for cast-​​off deer antlers.    He and an older man by the name of Chester often go look­ing for such things.

We drive nearly up to the Missouri bor­der and park in an area under con­trol for the Corps of Engineers.   Hills sur­round  a low field that has yet to be plowed under.  Corn stalks still stand here and there like sol­diers on the bat­tle­field at the end of the war, while oth­ers blow across the ground in the breeze.  Purple clover car­pets the soil beneath the stalks, good nitro­gen for when the farmer even­tu­ally does plow and plant for another season.

The sky is strung with low-​​hanging gray cot­ton clouds, thor­oughly obscur­ing the sun. It’s a wel­come change from the sunny bright weather of Colorado, actu­ally.  Overcast days are rare where I live now.  A sharp, cold wind blows, mak­ing me pull my coat around me tighter.  We walk down a muddy road.  Water is every­where, but it hasn’t been rain­ing much, so it seems to come out of nowhere, and I won­der aloud about it. Mike nods and leads me up the side of a hill.  Water trick­les slowly down the slope  through the grass which has become mat­ted down in places with the wet.  We fol­low the water up into a tree­line, step­ping among fallen logs until we come to a stone ridge at the top of the hill.  We move around along the ridge until we spot the source;  an old spring.

A half-​​circle of lime­stone pieces, fit together with no mor­tar, pre­ci­sion work that I become very famil­iar with through the rest of our explo­ration, has been set into the hill­side three feet deep.  the water half-​​fills the hole.  Someone, per­haps as much as a hun­dred years ago, found this tiny upwelling of fresh water, dug it out and rein­forced the walls with stone from the hill­side.  No one lives around here for miles, but that wasn’t always the case.  (More below the photo)

I take pho­tos, trim­ming away brush and debris, clean­ing up the scene as best I can.  The water is green with thick algae, and lichens and moss coat every­thing.  The grass and weeds have yet to grow back, although sky-​​blue wild­flow­ers have sprung up here and there beneath the trees.

Mike gives me a grin as if to say “you haven’t seen any­thing yet” and we set off back down the hill and along the muddy road, around a pond fed by yet another spring.  We walk below the earthen dam that holds back the water, and along­side a  field, fol­low­ing muddy tracks of a doe white-​​tailed deer that passed not more than a cou­ple of hours before us.  We find an old horse-​​drawn plow, rust-​​red in tall grass, the plow­share still bit­ing into the soil. The gears and levers still func­tion.  I pull them and mar­vel at how a 50+ year old plow can be still rel­a­tively intact.  All that it misses is the seat and chains to har­ness to the work horse.

From the plow, we fol­low the base of the large hill until Mike points out a dis­used wagon trail whichs cuts back and angles against the slope, climb­ing to the sum­mit a hun­dred feet or so above the pond and field.  The trail is steep on either side as if heavy wagon loads were carted up and down here until .  When we reach the top, it’s not hard to imag­ine what loads were brought up.

Among the thicket of young trees, maybe 30, 40 years old in places, some older, Mike has found a com­plex of 3 foot high lime­stone walls that fences in more than a football-field’s worth of space.  The walls show the same details and crafts­man­ship of the walls of the hid­den spring.  The stones are not cut of quar­ried.  They are field stones that have been gath­ered and care­fully fit together, tens of thou­sands of them.

First we exam­ine  a cut into the hill­side, a cel­lar almost, walled off with lime­stone as well, with some pale stones show­ing signs of hav­ing been exposed to intense heat.  Here, Mike thinks, was the smoke­house where the pork was hung and cured.   This was a hog farm once.  The walls seem­ingly hap­haz­ard were added to over time as the steadily wealth­ier owner added pens.  I dig around in the rub­ble around the smoke­house and find bits and pieces of old bot­tles and some porcelin.  Mike leans down to me and exclaims “Will you look at that!”  I look up and he’s found an old horse­hoe, rusted bent nails and all.

“It’s a lucky horse­shoe,” I say.

“Well, it is now,” Mike says.

Mike points out a small alcove of walls with a nar­row entry­way, not more than four feet by six feet, and explains that this is where they would have kept the boar away from the sows, let­ting him out only a few times a year to sire young.  It seems like a frus­trat­ing life for an ani­mal, to hear and smell beau­ti­ful women just on the other side of a wall, but only able to get to them so very rarely. We move on.

Peeking out from just behind the bare trees, I can see a soli­tary brick chim­ney stand­ing twenty feet into the air.  We explore the con­crete foun­da­tion which has heavy iron bolts set in to fas­ten the walls joists which have long since rot­ted away.  I kick away at the fallen leaves and find old roof shin­gles, cor­ru­gated alu­minum sid­ing, and rot­ting wooden floor­boards.    It’s impos­si­ble to look at all of this and not start ot pic­ture the peo­ple who lived here, to imag­ine their ani­mals.  I begin to won­der if they had a barn.  They clearly had a wagon drawn by horses.  I wan­der the grounds and sure enough, I find the buried foun­da­tions of another build­ing, small, but not far from the open­ing in the walls where the wagon trail led into the ruins.  This, I believe was the barn, where the horses were kept, and the walled area around it their yard.

How old is this place?  When did they leave?  How much money must they have had to have raised hun­dreds of hogs here?  The ques­tions the stones illicit are end­less.  We wan­der, trac­ing the out­lines of the farm, and I try to pic­ture it, try to travel back in time with my mind’s eye.  I imag­ine that the farm was first built in the late 1800s, per­haps by a civil war sol­dier home from the war, weary from the killing.   Weary of peo­ple, he buys a par­cel of land far away from the embry­onic towns of Northeast kansas.  It’s not ideal, but some instinct left over from the war instructs him to build his home and farm atop a large rise where he can see for miles around, see the river cut­ting through the hills and carv­ing steep banks below.  there’s not much hard­wood for build­ing, so he begins to fence in his prop­erty with piece of yel­low­stone that lit­ter the ground.  Perhaps he hires a cou­ple of hands to help errect his home, and he takes a young wife from one of the nearby rail­road towns, maybe even Osawatomie.   He pur­chases his first hogs and begins to raise ani­mals.  He plows a field below the hill and plants corn and wheat.  It’s hard work, but not as hard as killing men, there’s that much.

His wife gives birth to three sons and a daugh­ter, and it’s not long before they are put to work expand­ing the fences, build­ing more pens for the hogs.   They strip the hill bare of stones to make their fences, but they don’t sim­ply pile the rocks together loosely.  The hogs could push over poorly built walls–no, they fit the pieces together care­fully.  Sometimes they take a sledge to a piece to break it into smaller pieces, but mostly they use the pieces exactly as they are when they find them, sim­ply fit­ting them together with thought and patience.

The years go by in hard, ful­fill­ing work.  The farm pros­pers.  His daugh­ter and two sons move away to the nearby towns, marry, and raise fam­i­lies.  He is made a wid­ower when his wife suc­cumbs to a fever in the sum­mer, some tick­borne dis­ease.  The sec­ond son, the one for whom farm­ing had always seemed to be his fate, takes over on the farm after his father dies from pneu­mo­nia after a hard win­ter.  The son buries his father in a grave on the hill­side and sets a lime­stone into the ground to mark the spot. He is illiterate–his old man had never placed much stock in edu­ca­tion and did just fine with­out it–and so no words are etched into the marker.  The grave over­looks the acres that the old man has bought up with the growth of his farm and the lucra­tive sale of hogs and pork.

The son spends some of his inher­i­tance and builds a new house, this time with a con­crete foun­da­tion.   It’s small, enough room for a cou­ple of peo­ple to live com­fort­ably.  He mar­ries a woman, but they never have chil­dren.  The depres­sion comes, and things get harder.  Few can afford to buy his pork and hogs.  Eventually, they sell the land to a nearby rancher and move to the city to try their for­tunes there.

And my crys­tal ball goes hazy.  I won­der if there are descen­dants some­where who were raised on sto­ries of life on the old hog farm, but who have never seen what I have seen, never vis­ited their ancestor’s lands.    My fam­ily were farm­ers, not so many gen­er­a­tions ago, but I don’t know the lands they worked.  Arkansas some­where, I am told.

With the ruins explored, Mike and I walk back to the truck in the driz­zling rain.   I feel today as if I have some­how reached back into time and touched the life of some face­less stranger.  History is a funny thing, and I feel closer to it here than I do any­where else.  I don’t know why.