We have a friend who lives out of town… she wanted some help with an automotive thing, and we drove to her house. It is an authentic Prairie House… the original house is the portion on the left below, built in 1868. In 1883, the part with the dormers was added. The very front, with the horizontal roofline and small peak was added much later, maybe in the 1920’s. The home was one of the original Homestead act parcels, and sat on 160 acres. Very cool!
She has done an awesome job of furnishing the house, to make it homey and pay homage to its heritage.
The kitchen is highlighted by a gas stove, made to look like an old wood burning stove.
The oldest part of the house features a very narrow staircase, leading to this room above.
It opens onto the “Peach Room.”
It also connects with the “New” wing (1883, remember?)
And then into another beautiful period bedroom.
The property is full of antique farm equipment.
I was interested in the stack of old bottles. There must be 20 or 30. My Dad collected antique medical bottles, and I enjoyed learning about them from him. So I perk up around old bottles! These are not medical bottles! They are whiskey bottles, and it says right on most of the bottles that “Federal law prohibits the sale or reuse of this bottle.” I thought this was to prevent moonshiners from using the bottles during prohibition, but how would you have a whisky bottle then anyway? Turns out the labels are more about preventing tax evasion and counterfeiting. Whisky bottles were tax stamped by the government to track legal booze. The warning was also to prevent moonshiners or shady distillers from reloading bottles with cheap, untaxed, often home-made moonshine and passing it off as the “Good stuff.”
Who knows… maybe an old bottle like this could hide a Genie!
There are many outbuildings…
This gadget seems to be what we called a “Smudge Pot” when I was a kid in southern California. On cold nights, they’d light them up, full of kerosene or diesel oil, and they would smoke all night, protecting the oranges on the trees from frost. They were outlawed by 1970 or so… for obvious reasons. Southern California has enough smog without them!
The most fun thing in these barns is an old Ford Model A. It hasn’t been run for many a year, and needs a tremendous amount of loving care and maybe magic to return to its original glory. Still, makes one wonder if it could be done!
We also enjoyed watching Dayna and friends in the YMCA volleyball games. Great fun, even if the won less this time!
Sabbath morning the Lincoln Adventist Men’s Chorus sang for an outdoor meeting, first thing in the morning. It was chilly! We had fun, however, and we were told we sounded good even in the frosty outdoors!
P.S. No, there really was no genie, and I didn’t rebuild the Model A that quickly. But I’ll admit to playing with an incredible AI agent named Grok. You can do some amazing things! Give it a try! Show me what you create!