As a follow-up to my post about the 1771 farmhouse I grew up in, I now present to you the outbuildings.
This was “the big barn,” with its saltbox style roof. An old man in the neighborhood remembered that this barn used to house a cider press that everyone would bring their apples to by wagon. Once the apples had been pressed into cider, he would deliver it back to the customers.
This was “the little barn.” (That’s me collecting Easter eggs in front of it, many years ago!) The closest door led to a storage area where we kept shovels, rakes, gardening tools and such. There was also a giant wood pile inside. The second door led to a former blacksmith shop. Inside, there was still a work table, shelving, and a blacksmith’s forge with an old bicycle wheel that turned the fan.
I couldn’t find any closeups of our outhouse (… except for one where it was in use at the time… ) so you’ll have to look for it in the far right of this photo of my Dad, a snowman that he and my Mom built, and our dog. The outhouse was a 4-seater, with two adult sized seats and two child sized seats.
Coming up in my next post in this series: pictures of the interior of our house.
Those outbuildings look amazingly rural Stephanie, which they were of course. They must bring back some lovely memories of your childhood. I remember when I was a child in Derbyshire, England, we had an outside loo. You hardly ever find such things now. My dad and mum used to have the two seater version when they were children. My mum used to be scared because they lived in the countryside and it was very dark in the evenings when she sometimes needed to go and the outhouse was quite a distance from the house. Ah those were the days.
Our outhouse was quite a distance from the house too! I wouldn’t have enjoyed middle-of-the-night trips out there either. The area where these photos were taken is a small suburban neighborhood today – the barns were some of the last holdouts of how the area used to be, but sadly they are gone now too.