SOME HISTORY

 

INITIAL WORK IS UNDERWAY

 

Some tree clearing has begun for our house project.  The biggest bit is for the leachbed.  Unfortunately work has been delayed slightly because we received some much needed rain.  Looks like another dry spell is coming, so work should resume this week – some more clearing and digging, including the removal of some major sized boulders.  A few additional pictures are on Flickr at the New House1 set.

 

 http://www.flickr.com/photos/9151458@N07/sets/72157600418511906/

 

(Note on Flickr:  You may have already discovered that if you move your mouse over the pictures in a slideshow an "I" appears like a watermark.  If you click on the I, the description of the pictures will show.)

 

The picture of the giant mantis is from Inniswoods Gardens in Westerville.  Those of you in the area should visit there.  http://www.metroparks.net/  Perhaps we will install some large sculptures in the future.

 

And now a bit of history.  Rebecca has written this short account about our land.

 

 

My grandfather was John William Sellers.  He came from England when he was a boy.  But already he had been a miner. In the mine they started as pit boys when boys were only seven.  The lads were small enough to crawl through low tunnels where men could not, and drag out coal.  Of course John Willie's father was a miner, and his uncles.  There was no hope for them in the dark mines of England.  The tunnels flooded, the tunnels collapsed.  And men died, for very little pay.  The Sellers family was among the organizers.  They tried to start a union in the mines.  But someone gave the owners names.  The family was blacklisted and there was no work at all if your name was Sellers.   How they found the price of passage I do not know.  The men came first and when they had saved sent back for the wives and children.  They came to a land of hope for a better life, America.

 

But here again they did what they knew how.  They worked in mines.  The mines of Southern Ohio were not much better than the mines of England.  But the country was different.  Here it was possible if you saved to buy your own land.  John Willie did.  In Brush Creek Township in Muskingum County, Ohio, he bought land.  There was a little good land that was river bottoms by the Muskingum River.  On the edge of Brush Creek there was about ten acres of flat land good enough for farming, the rest about a hundred acres was hilly rocky land.  You could pasture cattle on it and they did.

 

John Willie married Fanny Peach who also came from England.  They had three children and the farm could not support them.  Still John Willie worked the mines.  In bad times after strikes or when mines closed there was no work.  The good river land was sold.  And later he sold to a coal company the coal that lay under the hill land.

 

The coal was near the surface.  This was not deep mining.  They dug and blasted until they got down to the seam.  They carried the coal away until the seam played out. And then they left.  No reclamation in those days.

 

The hills were barren piles of discarded stone.  Strip sinks were pools of acid water leached from the remains.  The steams bled red from iron in rock dug up and pushed aside.  Time passed.

 

My grandfather died and my grandmother died.  My father owned the land.  He sold the land on Brush Creek and the house but kept the hill land.  No one wanted that.  Slowly the land recovered.  The plants came first sown by the wind from nearby fields and forests.  Animals followed them.  The water year by year washed away the minerals.  The streams do not run red any longer.

 

There are still scars on the land.  Walls of stone (highwalls) cross the hills where the coal seams ended and the strip mines stopped.  But the years and the growth of the forests have renewed the land.  My father had timber cut on the land once.  Not a clearcut but a careful selective harvest.  Then when my mother was quite old they came to her to ask to cut it again.  This was not a careful harvest.  They raped the land a forester told me.  They took more than they should and left invasives free to grow.  After we bought the land someone came in and cut the trees again without our knowledge.  Stealing timber is like rustling cattle, hard to prove unless you are caught in the act.

 

So now we own this land.  We have cleared a little space to build a house.  The timber man who lives next door is clearing out the forests.  He cuts down the invasive Tree of Heaven (good only for pulpwood) to allow the oaks and maples room to grow.  The timber paths he leaves we will spread with wood chips (plenty of them around, God knows).  I have found lots of wild flowers: spring beauty, corydalis, wild geraniums, violets blue and white, bluets, wintergreen, club moss, and mayapples.  The sawyer showed me one ginseng plant.  I hope to plant more native plants.  In time I want a waterfall over the highwall that will be behind our house.  Here we will live and tend the forest, as best we know how.

 

http://casa-de-terrible.blogspot.com/

 

dan and rebecca

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