We bought 160 acres with borrowed money, although it was worn-out land with deep gullies in the pastures and a creek that meandered snake-like through 14 fertile acres, making that field almost unusable. Sprouts and weeds were a tangled mess, and many fence posts were rotten at the ground. There was a falling-down log cabin in the yard and a cistern nearby. On the plus side, the farm was fenced all around, and the electric line crossed the place and brought service to a one-room frame tenant house that replaced the log cabin. A fruit cellar, a pond, a small hay shed and an outdoor toilet comprised the "improvements."

But the price was right!

Our home was near Columbia, and the children and I came to the farm only on evenings and weekends. We had no plans to live on this acreage because the road was often impassable, and telephone service, with nine families on one line, might be available only if we would cut l.6 miles of brush along Vemer’s Ford Road. However, we realized that all of us were in love with this place.

We "camped out" in the tenant house during the second summer, carrying water up the hill from the cistern. The old log home had been built as two square cabins with a roofed "breezeway" called a dogtrot. Log steps in the dogtrot led to a sleeping loft over one lower room. We saw to it that no one went up those steps lest the roof collapse.

The county improved the road, and we could live without a telephone for a while. We began to visualize a home here and wanted the old cabin out of view. When heavy earth-moving equipment was there straightening the meandering creek, Chub asked the driver to push the old cabin into a pile so we could burn it. To our surprise, the big machine could not budge it from any direction! The hand-hewn logs were firmly fastened together by an

unusual, locking notch, and, rotten as those logs were, the joints did not yield.

I painted the interior of the tenant house, divided a little a kitchen from the living/dining area and curtained off one end as a bedroom. A year later, the ugly cabin was still in our front view, but with the help of friends and relatives, we moved into our six-room and bath unfinished home.

In 1956, I wrote this note: "Three generations of Robnetts owned this farm, having petitioned the land from the U.S. Government in 1827. Later owners included Charles," his X mark, "Crews and Phoebe," her X mark, "Crews, Mr. and Mrs. Chris Baumgartners and Mrs. Mildred Wedemeier.

"We finally burned the old cabin last week. Today I dug around through the ashes and found an 1886 nickel, chunks of homemade limestone plaster, part of a man’s blue serge coat in the dirt under the ashes. There were hand-wrought nails and other metal scraps but the real treasure in the ashes was a huge pink granite stone, not indigenous to Mid-Missouri."

More about that next Tuesday.