This small family farm began as a log cabin sometime in the mid to late 1800’s and has been altered and added onto from those early days all the way into the mid to late 1990’s when it was properly abandoned and it’s former residents built a new house and moved away.
The long, previously well kept driveway is now brambles and brush and completely invisible from the paved road it once ran into and only appears as a darker green path on aerial photos.
Fighting through the thorns at the edge of the tree line was a chore, but once under the canopy, there’s a generous ditch/shoulder I was able to follow that parallels the road all the way to the main part of the property. The drive comes right into the middle of the buildings, with a tractor/car shed on the left, the house on the right with some smaller buildings behind it, and a barn farther back behind the car shed away from the driveway.
In order to give you, the reader, an idea how the property is laid out, I’m including something I have never tried before. A small video of the area and a crude map showing layout.
The driveway continues about 300 yards before reaching the road to the southwest. If you continue at least as far east from the house, you eventually come out of the woods onto an isolated farm field.
Based on my crude map, let’s take a tour. First, (2) the car/tractor shed.
Directly across from the shed is the house (1). It’s in very poor shape, with holes in the floor and walls. At one time it had power, but the poles and drop lines are no longer present, only the old dial electrical meter. For water, the pump house supplied well water, but the outhouse was in use for quite a while.
When I entered the main room with the fireplace just off the front concrete porch, I spooked a mother Turkey Vulture who was nesting on an egg. I was not aware, but Turkey Vultures don’t build nests in trees and mostly keep their eggs in thickets or on the ground. Or in this case, in someone’s former living room corner.
No furniture or artifacts remain inside the house.
The well/pump house (4). I don’t know what the box in front of the pump is. Perhaps for chickens?
The side of the pump house has a concrete trough that extends from the inside to the outside, allowing water to be pumped for animals. Maybe the aforementioned chickens?
The barn (3) is in shambles now, but it must have been very nice in it’s day, with several doors and some interesting old style construction using grooved beams and floor joists. According to the property owner it was still standing a couple years ago but a heavy snow finally collapsed the roof.
The outhouse (6) is in good shape for it’s age, but is currently in danger of falling into the hole beneath it.
Because of thorns, the other shed (5) was impossible to get close to, but it had collapsed and there didn’t seem to be anything in it. Unfortunately I didn’t even get an exterior shot of that building.
These last pictures represent various trash and bottle dumps scattered about the property. The largest collection of bottles was just behind the outhouse but there were numerous piles, as well as a pile of old tires (not pictured) and the remains of some sort of rock wall.
Of note, I had permission and I attempted metal detecting where the ground was clear enough, but the only non-iron hits I found were bits and pieces of melted aluminum from what I think was a burn pile just off from the front of the house.
