This Is Home?

Gwen’s family were so happy in California, and had a very nice house.  Grandma Millie loved it.   They had a wonderful school close, swimming pool, tennis courts, and the beach.  The children loved life.  When they moved to Idaho they came to this house.  It’s description  will make your heart hurt for all of them.  Can you imagine how they felt when they saw if for the first time?

In Mom’s words:

Thomas Atkinson homesteaded in Lyman about 1864.  The house was located down a dirt road, lined with huge cotton wood trees.  At the end of the lane there was a large half circle of green grass.  In the middle was an enormous, old, unpainted, weather beaten house.  The day we moved in it was raining hard and the roof leaked.  The old house had a history of its own.

    It was originally a 4 bedroom house built on 360 acres of land.  As each of the three sons (Enzley 4th son never married)  would marry, two rooms were added to the original structure and another chimney added.  By the time we moved into the house it had 12 rooms, part of which had a dirt roof, six sagging chimneys, eight bulging outside doors, ten foot ceilings. and the floor all rotted on the back porch,  and so many hodge podge rooms that three rooms in the middle were without windows.  In all its years of giving shelter to four generations of Atkinson's, the old house had never had a coat of paint and never had indoor plumbing.  Wooden stoves were the only source of heat, while coal oil lamps provided the light.

    Mother quickly turned it into a comfortable home.  In 1944 the old house caught fire and burned to the ground, in the  middle of the night, just a few days after electricity was installed

 

 

Millie, Gwen, Marva, Larry

outside the “Old House”