WE HOMESTEADED WITHOUT CAPITAL

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

I chopped all our firewood that summer with an axe and Jan and I kept our campsite clean and neat. This industry and our ambition soon impressed other campers who used our grounds every weekend and we became friends with some of these "regulars". Before long some of them were even offering me good jobs back in the towns they'd come from . . . but I turned them down because of the distance I would have had to travel each day.

By the end of the summer we had come to know the owners of the little park in which we'd spent the season so well that we ended up buying our homestead from them. It's five and a half acres overlooking the Shenandoah River in the Blue Ridge Mountains. We paid $350 down and the owners financed the balance at $65.00 a month.

The deal on our land was closed in October . . . too late for us to put up a house for the winter. So Jan and I found a 11 0-acre farm we could rent for $60.00 a month. Heat wasn't included at that price, but the old farmhouse kitchen that we'd be using was equipped with a beautiful wood-burning stove. We bought an additional wood-burning heater of our own, moved in, and stayed snug and warm all winter.

Our comfort, however, only whetted our appetite even more for a home of our own. But how would we get it? We had nowhere near enough money to buy a house.

"Maybe we could build a home," we thought. "Maybe we could build a log cabin." So, even though we'd had no previous building experience, we read two books on log cabin construction and went to work.

As soon as the building site was marked off, we paid a 'dozer operator $20.00 to push off the few trees that stood where we wanted our new house to be. As we watched those trees fall, one of our new neighbors came over to get acquainted.

"Whatcha gonna build?" he asked during the course of our conversation.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print