EAST RESERVE
I don’t know what made me do it. Insatiable pent-up curiosity? A confidence that waterways are okay to walk along?
Whatever it was, this past spring, I found myself revisiting Eigenhof.
There is my old friend, the lone headstone of Helena Wieler.
But this time I went beyond the cemetery, following the creek a bit, to a junk pile.
I have been interested in junk piles since I was a small girl. There was one in the cow pasture on the farm where I grew up and I was forever exploring the rusty bedsprings and strange-looking 50s-era washing machine and refrigerator, salvaging random cups and plates.
Now here I am at age 43 tromping around a junk pile yet again.
I have no idea what I’m looking at, but I wonder if this is all that remains of the “magnificent old timber frame house” that once stood here.
Pretty amazing how what was once a prominent village in the 1870s is now a field with a junk pile and lone headstone.
I’m starting to be interested in fieldstone foundations. I found some in this junk pile, and have also come across them elsewhere in my curious explorations. I don’t think people use fieldstones for their foundations anymore, and I know there is a fieldstone foundation on the Reimer General Store at the Mennonite Heritage Village (which was from the turn of the century I think?) so perhaps this is also a remainder of the grand house that once stood here at Eigenhof.
But I don’t really know.
I wonder what else is hidden in this pile.
Very sure I will never know the answer to that.
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