If everything could go exactly as I wanted it we would be a center for the preservation of nearly extinct colonial livestock and a center for education. I do not mean this so much in the class room sense, but more a matter of experiential learning, where participants are exposed to history, natural horse care, natural horsemanship, experimental archeology, stone age technology, animal husbandry agriculture, and the host of other topics that should come to mind to my riders and even to visitors making their first trip to the see the horses.
I have had white relatives living within a 20 mile circle of the Little House (shown above)since 1674. My Indian ancestors may have moved into the Tidewater region around 500 A.D.
A small colonial dwelling with a few meager out buildings, a food garden patch, a tobacco patch, and a host of authentic colonial livestock appropriate to the late 1600's exists in a small 4 or 5 acre patch close by. Too close, in fact. At the moment it lives only in my mind. I wish that I could take you all there to see it because it is a fascinating place. It isn't a Colonial mansion or a southern plantation. It is just a little patch of land where an indentured servant, just freed from his bondage on the Peninsula, has moved, hoping to make a better life each year and waiting for Sarah Jane to end her indenture so that they can be married and she can join him on the thing that he holds dear--his home, his land. No one in his family in England had ever owned land, but here he was 22 years old, owning land and having more freedom than life across the Ocean could ever have afforded him.
To move the farm out of my mind and into my pasture will be a difficult process. I will have to take things one step at a time, never biting off more than I can chew. I am starting to think about my first steps. Baby steps.
I am working on obtaining Spanish goats and some very unusual looking pigs now. I do not want to rush things but I do not want to put it off too long. Such things can never be calculated with precision, but if one multiplies my very low triglyceride levels with my very low cholesterol levels and divides that by how poorly I pay attention while driving, I probably have more than a dozen years to get this all done.
My Family did much the same, but came from Germany and settled in Pendleton County Virgina long before the Revolutionary War. Jesse and Phoebe Harper, my great great grandparents owned a small farm in that county, My Great grandfather migrated to southern Ohio and married my great grand mother. They never owned property, my great Grandfather was a hired hand all of his life.
ReplyDeleteI hope your dream comes to fruition. I love Living History, would love to do it some day.
I think it is a fantastic idea. Have you been in touch with the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy? They could probably advise you.
ReplyDeleteWill you be getting sheep? I would think woolen clothing would have been worn in the winter and woolen blankets used.
You will certainly need chickens. I love the colorful old breeds of chickens.