The Old Homeplace

When I was a young lad, we lived on 100 acre little farm in western NY. My dad managed a farm for some cattle dealers. They bought and sold cows and heifers and also had a 30 cow dairy. Dad ran the day to day operations for the dairy and the satalite heifer farms. This farm we lived on came with the job. They grew some corn and hay there, but the barn, house, and pastures were ours to do what we pleased with. This is where our present herd was built. The house was an old jeffersonian farm house. The barn was a gable roof barn with a 9 cow stable and lots of box stalls and such. It was kind of a 3 story set up. It had one poured concrete silo that we pitched out by hand. When we got there the farmstead was all over grown and the house and barn were in very poor shape. We fixed it up over the years and it eventually was quite a place. This is where we bred and devoloped our French Alpine goat herd, which is now just a memory. We milked about 40 goats there and fed the milk to veal calves. Those were the days when veal was a good money maker. We latter sold off most the goats and milked cows there, again putting the milk through veal and hogs. The soil in that area was great and we grew huge gardens there that feed us most of the year. Dad also built and devoloped huge perrenail flower gardens on that farm. The farm was divided off with stone walls. They were crumbbling from time and neglect but I always marveled at those walls. Someday I will build some of my own. What I rember most about those walls were the fossils I'd find in the rocks. That and spending a deal of time, at one point in my childhood, crouched behing the walls with a stick that resembled a rifle. I was fighting back the advancing northern agressors from destroying my beloved home. Yup, even as a boy I had a love for the Confederacy and there agrarian vurtues! I once, in the 4th grade I think, wrote an essay; that was not reqiured, defending the south and there culture. I rember sitting on that stone wall , at 11 or 12 years of age, already noticing that evrything I loved had been under assualt for many years before I was even born. Those surrounding woods were also my playground. I killed my first coon, squirrell, possom, woodchuck and fox there. My old friend Dave came out last weekend for a visit. The converstaion soon turned to the good ole days we had on that farm. "Best woodchuck huntin' ever" Dave remebered. Us kids could spend a whole afternoon shooting chucks back there. Run out of shells before we ran out of chucks! At one time we even resorted using a shotgun, to make it more challenging. We ran our first traps there on that farm as well. Sold my first $50 coon from that line. I was young enouph to catch the end of the last great fur boom. When I look back, that land....the soil, the buildings, the trees....all had a tremendous amount of influence on my life, for good and bad. The sad thing is, its all gone. The farm was rented from an old lady who eventually went to be with the Lord. Her kids sold it to the highest bidder. The highest bidder built $500,000 cookie cutter houses. The old hay field, the one with the woodchucks, was the first to fall. Some yuppie parks his car were us kids used to pitch our tent when camping. It slowly moved throught the farm like cancer. Dave told me they finally struck the final blow. The bulldozed the farmhouse down, its gone forever. They can't destroy the memories though.