The Old Home Place, 2020
15 images Created 3 Aug 2022
October, 2022--Claxton, about an hour’s drive west of Savannah, is where my antecedent family has lived since around the time of the Revolutionary War. A couple of years ago I drove there for a cousin’s funeral. Some other cousins also attended the service, taking time to clean up a family plot in the Hagan cemetery. Although I think I was the only one there senior enough to remember attending the old family reunions that happened the first (or second?) Sunday of every June, we got to talking about that long gone event.
We (Mom, Dad, my sister, and I) would drive up there on the Sunday morning, maybe directly from church, to participate in a potluck meal. The location was always “Uncle Herschel’s” to me; the residents at the old house were my father’s uncle and his wife. We’d drive down a dirt road until we came to the house, alongside the road, as the road continued on to agricultural fields. Large planks would be set up on sawhorses in front of the house and the “table” might have been 75 feet long or more, loaded, groaning, with food in wide varieties of fried chicken and potato salad, lots of overcooked vegetables, and every kind of pie and cake you can imagine. (I was young and small then, so my estimates of size may be questionable, but not the sense of abundance.)
A local attendee at the funeral told us Uncle Herschel’s house was still there, and how to find it. Leading a cousin caravan, I drove down the old dirt road and at some point, knew we had gone too far, without seeing the house. Backtracking, we found it mostly hidden by overgrowth. Pushing my way through the brush, I wandered through the forgotten home.
The “Old Home Place” was an unpainted clapboard building with a deep front porch that extended across the entire front of the house. Inside was a central hallway with two rooms off either side, extending out the backdoor with an elevated walkway to a cooking room separated from the main house, to keep the heat and fire away from the living quarters. That walkway almost certainly led to the outhouses as well. Somewhere along the way someone had added indoor plumbing—a kitchen and bathroom. And then somewhere along the way the last residents left, discarding some of the detritus we all accumulate.
I’ve included a copy of an old photograph showing the house in the background, with my dad’s generation massed where the food table was normally laid. Dad is the cool cat seated 6th from the left, with the plaid shirt (in a sea of starched white) and two-toned shoes. His grandparents Thomas Alfred Durrence (1831-1893) and Elizabeth Grice Durrence (1838-1922) owned the farm leading up to the Civil War, owned slaves, went through the war and Reconstruction; my Great Grandmother Elizabeth would have lived through WW I, and my dad would have been 5 years old the year she died; he would have known her.
“Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'
Into the future….” Steve Miller Band
We (Mom, Dad, my sister, and I) would drive up there on the Sunday morning, maybe directly from church, to participate in a potluck meal. The location was always “Uncle Herschel’s” to me; the residents at the old house were my father’s uncle and his wife. We’d drive down a dirt road until we came to the house, alongside the road, as the road continued on to agricultural fields. Large planks would be set up on sawhorses in front of the house and the “table” might have been 75 feet long or more, loaded, groaning, with food in wide varieties of fried chicken and potato salad, lots of overcooked vegetables, and every kind of pie and cake you can imagine. (I was young and small then, so my estimates of size may be questionable, but not the sense of abundance.)
A local attendee at the funeral told us Uncle Herschel’s house was still there, and how to find it. Leading a cousin caravan, I drove down the old dirt road and at some point, knew we had gone too far, without seeing the house. Backtracking, we found it mostly hidden by overgrowth. Pushing my way through the brush, I wandered through the forgotten home.
The “Old Home Place” was an unpainted clapboard building with a deep front porch that extended across the entire front of the house. Inside was a central hallway with two rooms off either side, extending out the backdoor with an elevated walkway to a cooking room separated from the main house, to keep the heat and fire away from the living quarters. That walkway almost certainly led to the outhouses as well. Somewhere along the way someone had added indoor plumbing—a kitchen and bathroom. And then somewhere along the way the last residents left, discarding some of the detritus we all accumulate.
I’ve included a copy of an old photograph showing the house in the background, with my dad’s generation massed where the food table was normally laid. Dad is the cool cat seated 6th from the left, with the plaid shirt (in a sea of starched white) and two-toned shoes. His grandparents Thomas Alfred Durrence (1831-1893) and Elizabeth Grice Durrence (1838-1922) owned the farm leading up to the Civil War, owned slaves, went through the war and Reconstruction; my Great Grandmother Elizabeth would have lived through WW I, and my dad would have been 5 years old the year she died; he would have known her.
“Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'
Into the future….” Steve Miller Band
