The life of this farm began in the 1800’s as a homestead belonging to Cassandra Whittle, and the house was finally built by one of her sons, William Whittle in about 1908, with an addition that doubled the size of the house in 1916, when the family posed for a picture with the new look of their home in the picture below.
The Whittle’s now rest in the cemetery just over a mile down the road from here. It came into our possession from my grandparents in 2013. It was their summer home only, and it did not get the care it should have, so it has been a part of our stewardship to give it life again, and repair what’s been neglected. With that said, three buildings appear in the 1968 photo, and all three still remain, as does a granary out of view behind the house.
A search through the internet archives of the local newspapers shows that the Whittle family was very socially active in the local area, with weddings, events, and parties hosted here. When electricity was brought into the neighborhood, Mrs. Whittle hosted some fourteen of the workers here so they’d have a place to stay. It is such a small house by modern standards, and it is hard to imagine how she pulled it off.
It is quieter here now, and we tend to keep to ourselves more. It’s just the way we are as a family; close knit. My grandparents kept a couple of horses here and left the place in grass and the fencing that was here when they arrived. We wanted to farm it and found it ready for us to design and make how we wanted, including fencing off space for our llamas and pigs and even goats. Like any small farm started in the past decade or two, we got our start with chickens, the gateway drug of livestock. For us, it has been about putting down roots. We have been lucky to end up in a place suited to it, and to making a home.
