VIEW STOP 15A SCRIPT
Hello, this is Hal – Emilie and Halsey’s only son. I was born in the Homestead in 1869 and lived there my entire 88 years. Never married. My real name is Halsey Winfield Hallock. We Hallocks reused everything, even names. Halsey was my great-grandmother’s maiden name, then my father’s middle name and now my first name. I also have a little nephew named Halsey Corwin, who came hee-aa to live for a while. You will meet him later. To keep things straight, they always called me Hal – Hal Hallock.
The oldest part of this structure, the left half, was originally the wash house for my grandmother Arminda. I think you met her already? Do you see that cistern partly visible un-dah the building a little to your left? It provided soft water that worked best with her homemade soap. Speaking of soap, did she tell you how she made her own soap? She saved ashes from the stove, leached the lye out of them and then cooked that up with fat saved from butchering our cattle. Nothing wasted, nothing wanted hee-aa.
Of course she dried everything in fresh air on a clothesline. No energy needed there either.
After Pa added the washroom shed to the rear of the Homestead in 1894 to make a more convenient place for Ma to do her laundry, we men took over this space as our workshop. On the farm, if something broke, we always repaired it instead of throwing it away.
For example, when a leg broke on this old chair, Pa and I spliced in a leg from a different chair with a different profile and then painted it to match the varnish on the rest of the chair. Can you tell which leg was replaced?
Why Pa even took a bunch of old salvaged boards up into the attic one winter and then came down with this beautiful desk. Not a new piece of wood in it! It still has pride of place in our sitting room.