In February of 1974, my wife and I bought a hundred-year-old farmhouse in northern Pennsylvania for $22,900. Working with my hands was not something I was accustomed to doing. By the time we left, four years later, I had built almost everything in it.
The house sat on Ranch Road, on Hanlon Hill, in the vicinity of Bentley Creek in Bradford County — house and twenty-five acres, two meadows, a small cow pond a dairy farmer had dug for his herd, and a manual well in the front yard that someone had sensibly replaced with an electric one in the basement at some earlier point. Three bedrooms, one bath, perhaps a thousand square feet, a dirt basement, and everything working in a manner of speaking.
The house had accumulated names over the years — the old Daniels place, then the old Randolph place, after a Jamaican schoolteacher who had owned it before us. After we left, it became the old beekeeper place.
The mailing address was Wellsburg, New York, though the house was in Pennsylvania. Stores in the area would look at my honey label, see the New York address, and decline to stock it — they weren’t buying New York honey, never mind that the bees were Pennsylvania bees tended by a man standing in Pennsylvania mud. When the roads were bad enough the postman simply didn’t finish his route. We were at the end of the line in more ways than one.
My wife Jeanne and I were both thirty-two. We had quit well-paying government jobs in Washington because we wanted something different and this was available and cheap. The soil was poor and bereft of lime, the winters were long and hard, and the people were poor in the particular way of rural Pennsylvania — working the trades through the warmer months and drawing unemployment through the cold ones, which made a certain economic sense even if it didn’t recommend itself as a model for our son, who was born there and whose schooling prospects we thought about more than we admitted.
I began renovating almost immediately, which is to say I began making mistakes almost immediately. My qualifications were modest. I had helped my father build a mouse maze for a science fair project when I was fourteen and could operate a handsaw, barely. My father hated manual work — he even dreaded changing license plates. It was all learning from the ground up. In our previous house, brand new, there had been nothing to fix. Now there was everything.
The first discovery came when I was gutting the upstairs bedroom to the studs. Inside the wall I found newspaper, the old insulation of choice. One clipping was dated 1874. It reported that local farmers were having difficulty reaching the grange hall on account of the snow. Reading it, I thought: they were on horseback then, or walking. The house was a hundred years old and had been cold every winter of its life, and here I was pulling its walls apart in the same cold, and a hundred years from now someone else would be doing the same, and finding my newspaper.
The floor was the project I am proudest of. The ground floor was a combination of plywood and very old pine, uneven and past saving. I bought enough tongue-and-groove oak flooring to cover it entirely. I also had, from my beekeeping operation, a set of air staplers I used for assembling hive woodenware — equipment that let me drive fasteners quickly and at the correct angle, which in 1974 was still ahead of common practice for flooring work.
I decided to lay it on the diagonal. This was either an artistic decision or an act of mild insanity, depending on how you look at it. Every cut at every wall had to be precise — a diagonal floor meets the baseboard at forty-five degrees on all four sides, which means no cut is ever square and there is no margin for error. The subfloor wasn’t entirely level, which added to the pleasure. It took five weeks.
Somewhere in the middle of the project, I loaded one of the bedrooms as a temporary storage room. When I cleared it out some months later I found a shed snakeskin on the floor — five feet of it, clean and complete. A snake had come in, made itself at home, shed its skin, and departed, all without our noticing. The house had its own tenants regardless of what I was doing to it.
Forty years later I drove back up to Bradford County and knocked on the door. The people who lived there graciously let us in. I had expected to find wall-to-wall carpet over my floor — it would have made sense in those winters. Instead, the oak was still there, aged now and dark, the diagonal pattern still running clean to every baseboard. I got down on my hands and knees and put my palms flat on it.
“This is my floor,” I said. I meant it with everything I had.
The electrical upgrade was less graceful. The house ran on sixty-amp service, which was inadequate for what we needed. I decided to rewire it myself to two hundred amps, running new lines throughout and making the final connection at a junction trough where my new wiring would meet the utility lines coming off the pole. This would not be permitted today — a licensed electrician and a significant bill — but in rural Pennsylvania in 1974 a homeowner could make his own connection and the power company would come out and switch him over.
The trough gave me special trouble. The wires were very thick and the one I had bought was not quite large enough for the job, and my taping of the connection was, I knew, my weakest point. When the utility crew arrived to make the switchover — they sent several men, a lineman up on the pole well insulated, the others on the ground — I positioned myself where I could watch the trough directly. I wanted to see what happened.
What happened was that when the lineman touched my wire to the system, the trough exploded. It blew a hole in its own cover. The crew moved without hesitation — they knew exactly what they were looking at and exactly what to do about it. In ten minutes they had repaired my connection and I had two hundred amps. I had the impression it had made their day. It gave them an opportunity to demonstrate, in front of a homeowner who had been slightly too confident, exactly what they were for.
The drywall I attempted myself and eventually could not finish myself. I labored over the joints for longer than I care to admit. Taping and mudding drywall looks straightforward and is not. The compound goes on wrong, or dries wrong, or shrinks, and you sand it back and do it again, and it is still not right. I finally brought in a tradesman. He came in and moved through the joints with the fluid efficiency of someone who has done ten thousand of them, and when he was finished, he turned to me with a look of mild amusement.
“Isn’t this the way you were doing it?” he asked.
It was not. We both knew it was not. I thanked him and paid him and did not answer the question.
The wood furnace was my most ambitious failure. Oil had reached seventy cents a gallon and was consuming us. I installed a wood-burning furnace in the basement alongside the oil unit, fabricated a plenum from sheet steel to distribute the heat through the house, and built a twenty-foot chimney for it. The fabrication alone took weeks.
It worked, in the sense that it produced heat. What it could not do was hold that heat through a northern Pennsylvania night. Every morning the house temperature was in the low forties. Getting it back up to livable was a major undertaking before coffee, before breakfast, before anything else. The chimney drew well and the wood burned clean and the plenum distributed whatever heat there was, and none of it was enough. I had built a technically sound system that did not solve the problem it was built to solve. This is a category of failure that takes longer to accept than outright collapse.
There were other projects, a new roof, a stone wall to face the front of the house, a skylight, storm windows, an oak staircase I built from scratch. The dirt basement I lowered by several inches entirely by hand — pick and shovel, one square yard each morning before anything else, until it was done. Each project taught me something the previous one didn’t. The plumbing I came to hate above all else. Working with copper pipe, the trick was draining the lines completely before any solder joint, because a single drop of water would cool the solder before it set. I always missed a pocket somewhere. I always had to do it twice.
We left in December of 1977. Levi had been born there, a surprise and a joy, and we had begun to think about what his schooling would look like in a place where the midday meal was called dinner and a stream was a crick and the local economy ran on seasonal work and winter unemployment. Our last winter the temperature fell below freezing and never once, not for a single day, climbed back above thirty-two degrees. Mostly it held in the low teens. The land was poor — the soil thin and acid, short on lime — and we had paid $22,900 for twenty-five acres for a reason. The house sat vacant for eighteen months before a buyer was found. Break-even, roughly, if you counted my labor as free.
Which I did not, entirely. Labor that teaches you something is worth more than its market rate.
Years later, a good friend named David Washburn came to visit our condo. He moved through the rooms looking at what I had done to the place — the custom shelving, the tile work, the carpentry details — and eventually he stopped and asked me where I had learned to do all of it.
“I learned it on my farm, David,” I said. “On my farm.”
The floor is still there. I know because I put my hands on it.
Curtis C. Morgan spent four years operating a commercial beekeeping farm in Bradford County, Pennsylvania, before a forty-year career in IT contracting took him across four continents. His work has appeared in Mother Earth News, Responsible Statecraft, Drift and Dribble Miscellany, and American Bee Journal. He lives in Falls Church, Virginia.