Home Again: A Brief History

This is a log cabin from the 1850’s. It just looks like a regular farmhouse from the outside, but inside–wow, it’s a stripy masterpiece of massive logs and chinking.

In 2011, the previous owners of the cabin, Ruth and Timothy Jost, stripped it down to it logs, squared it up, and completely remodeled it. The bearing logs are chestnut, the others pine. Max Troyer, who did the renovation, found a scrap of newspaper behind the old chinking (the grey mortar between the bricks, for any readers who aren’t familiar with log cabin construction) that dated the cabin to the 1850’s. Alas, he did not keep the paper! We were told that the logs, full of random holes and square nails, were marked with Roman numerals–probably because the cabin was moved and reassembled in its present location. Bruce and I were speculating on the age of the trees harvested to make such logs, easily 16″ square. The trees themselves must have been 100 years old.

So if the cabin was in its current location for 170 years old, and had been built even 30 years before it was moved, and if the trees were 100 when they were harvested, the wood in that house has been around for over 300 years!

Bruce and I named the farm HomeAgain and registered for a license to sell our farm products in 2021.

HomeAgain–What’s in a Name?

Our family’s history in this place began with the purchase of an eight acre parcel I made with my previous husband, Reuben Stoltzfus, in 2002. After Reuben died and I remarried, Bruce and I were able to add some additional acreage in 2011. We bought some goats and raised Thanksgiving turkeys before deciding to put the farm on hold. We moved with our four sons, ages 9-15, to Kenya in 2013 and spent the next eight years in Kenya and in Ethiopia working for MCC.

So when we came back to start up the farm again, in a sense we were coming HomeAgain, back to the farm and back to the Shenandoah Valley.

But there is another sense in which this place is HomeAgain, particularly for the boys. When Reuben and I bought the original acreage, it was part of an extended family purchase of farmland that had once been in Reuben’s family as far back as the Civil War.

People Who Lived Here First

I have some ambivalence about historical connections to land. On one hand, family history can give you a sense of geographical rootedness (nice image where farmland and conservation are concerned!) but on the other hand, our history in this place is recent and superficial, and any discussion of land ownership in the US should keep clearly in mind the indigenous people who lived here first and remember that we are all just caretakers of land that will outlast us all.

People Who Lived Here After That

That being said, ancestors of my first husband had paper claim in the 1800’s to the land where we now farm and live. Northerners and pacifists, Jacob and Hannah Wenger, who lived in the red brick farmhouse next door, experienced the trauma of the Civil War first hand. Their stories are documented and have been retold by historian and descendant Ruth Stoltzfus Jost, an aunt to my late husband.

If you remember, Ruth and her husband Timothy were the ones who bought and restored the cabin and sold it to us. It was her great-grandmother who lived in the original brick homestead on the farm, and her great-aunt who lived in our cabin.

OK, if that is starting to sound a bit like one of the geneologies in the Bible, I’ll stop there. But I’ll leave you with some of the vivid stories that took place on this farmland during the Civil War, as told by Ruth Stoltzfus Jost.