The Dairy

Not only are we restoring our home, but the property also has three outbuildings which need attention too. The oldest of the three is the dairy building. We believe that it dates back to the mid-eighteenth century or so and was built around the same time as the original house (our current den and kitchen). It is the oldest "original" structure anyway, having had relatively few modifications over time. The roof is a mishmash of cedar shingles in the front and early 20th century metal in the back, with daylight streaming through in several places. When we moved in, it was in pretty rough shape and was severely overgrown. It certainly wasn't safe to enter, since the flooring and joists were all rotten and failing.

We began the hard work of clearing the overgrowth to see what we had to work with. It seems that many of the vines clinging to it had become integral to the structure.

While people generally recognize the need to rescue homes, many small outbuildings that were so important to the running of farms and plantations are sadly neglected. It's rarer to find intact examples of dairies, smokehouses, corn cribs, and even slave quarters, simply because these types of buildings were incidental to the main house. Their primary purpose may have disappeared long ago, along with the way of life that sustained the need for them in the first place. This type of architecture is just as important in hoping to understand historical land usage and rural economies as the larger plantation homes which are more abundant (but also sadly disappearing with each passing year).

Since our property is on the National Register of Historic Places, we have a responsibility to rehabilitate and maintain all of the buildings on our land and not just our house.

So we got our hands dirty!

First things first: we had to clean up all of the vines and bushes. Much of it we could do ourselves, but we thankfully have a friend with a digger and some free time. He came over and spent a few hours digging up all of the weed trees that had sprung up around the building over the last few decades. It's amazing what a little hard work can do! Once we got all of that stuff out of the way, we could take a look at the interior.

It was a mess, to say the least. It looked like generations of people had piled up a bunch of stuff in there and shut the door. Thanks to an extremely holey roof, rain had gotten in and saturated all of the debris, the floor and the joists, so we had to be extremely careful about where we tried to step. The flooring had completely collapsed in one section, and the joists were lying in the dirt below the building. We swept it all out and found some pretty cool stuff, including the bone-handle fork and an early cut-glass serving plate that miraculously didn't have a scratch on it and now has a home in our kitchen. Once it was cleared, Garreth worked on removing the flooring, so that it could be dried out and salvaged.

We found that the floor joists are nothing more than roughly-hewn half logs, and that many of the timbers still bear the original carpenter's marks. Unfortunately, the joists were in too rough a condition to be structural, but we saved them, perhaps for a decorative use down the road.

At least the flooring itself was largely still usable, so we stored it in the biggest outbuilding so that it could have plenty of time to dry before reinstalling it in the future.

Floor joists after removal of flooring

Carpenter's mark

Finally, we found an interesting little detail under the floor and on one of the walls. Under the floor is a mysterious concrete pad, which Garreth naturally thought was a capped well that is definitely haunted. However, we found a paper label in the wall from Delco power. It seems that coupled with the remnants of knob-and-tube wiring we find in the main house, these are both indicators that there was a generator in this building and that Greenwreath had electricity fairly early in the 20th century. In digging in the crawlspace of the main house, we also found a telephone arrestor, a kind of early surge protector for your phone line. This tells us that by the early 1900s, the Foreman family was still doing well enough to afford such modern amenities.

Stay tuned to find out more about the rehabilitation of the dairy building!