The Old Home Place – 52 Ancestors # 13

Two very different places come to mind when I think about the term “the old homestead” or “the old home place”: the old Salt family homestead in southwest Ohio where my father was born and his family had lived for generations before him, and the small ranch house in Lebanon, Indiana where he and my mother raised me and my 4 siblings for much of my childhood.  I have mentioned the Saltair farm house in other posts and will write more about it at another time, but for me and my siblings the old home place is the house in Lebanon.

One of my first memories of that house in Lebanon is the field across the street: a corn field that had been harvested and pigs wandered around looking for left-overs.  This was soon after we moved in, my father having been transferred from Illinois to Indiana, and I was about 6 and a half years old.  We moved right around Christmas 1953, and I had finished the first half of first grade.  My older sister had finished the first half of second grade, and my three younger brothers were all at home all day.  My youngest brother was just a year old.

Up to this time in my family there had been a number of moves in the Midwest, as my father was transferred from one place to another.  This is how four of the five children were born in different places.  My first brother and I are the only ones born in the same town, and we moved soon after he was born.  When we moved back to Lebanon, Indiana we didn’t know that we would settle in to live there for about 9 years.  However, we did.  The only early pictures I can find of this house are of the front porch – a favorite location for posing pictures, and a few of the side corner which was where some of the early Easter pictures were posed.  On the other hand, the house didn’t change very much over the years we were there, and a picture taken in late 1961 (before we moved East in 1962) looked very much like the house we had moved into.

The house was a three bedroom ranch style house with one bathroom and only an eat-in kitchen.  There was no basement, only a smallish utility room that had enough space for the washer and dryer as well as a chest freezer and a utility cabinet used for storing canned goods, and things my mother put up from the garden, like vegetables and pickles.  My parents had one bedroom, my sister and I shared one bedroom, and the three boys shared the third one.  In these days sharing bedrooms was the rule, and few houses had more than one bathroom.  We ate in the kitchen, which was pretty full with seven people sitting around a table.  Although there wasn’t a lot of room for playing inside, we managed.

In 2005 my brother was in Indiana near Lebanon for work and took the opportunity to visit the town.  He took this picture of the front of our old house which shows the difference now.  The house has been remodeled and now has an enclosed front porch, and in the back has an attached 2-car garage.  Otherwise the floor plan seems to be much the same, although real estate websites describe it as a one-bedroom or two-bedroom variously and say that there are two bathrooms.  Pictures from these sites don’t let me see completely.  It looks like one of the bedrooms has been re-purposed as a dining room.  The utility room looks a lot like the one I remember.

For most of the years we lived in this house, there were only a couple of residential streets that took the place of the cornfield across the street, and there were country dirt roads leading into the farms outside town.  These were great places to explore on your bike, and I spent various hours riding out into the country and looking at all the fields and plants growing along the side of the road.  Our back yard had a number of very large elm trees (before a disease required cutting them all down) and one was a good one for practicing tree-climbing skills.  Lebanon was a smallish town, but the county seat, and because it was surrounded by farms it was the place everyone came to shop and socialize on weekends.  There were parades for Memorial Day and the Fourth of July (along with fireworks) and there was a community pool that we spent a lot of time in over the summers.  School was within walking distance, and got out for the year by Memorial Day.  It was a great place to grow up.