Tape 6: Building the log cabin
The little cabin in the woods that came down
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That is the end.
After a cloudburst the neighbor's husband went out to dam the water to save the strawberries and had a stroke. They moved to town, and later to Milwaukee, where he died. One son got the cabin, but later took it apart for lumber, and the deer ruined the apple trees. Agnes visited a couple of years ago and remembers the chicken coop and plum trees.
This story is part of Tape 6. You can hear it there at 28:56, along with everything around it.
What Agnes says
Words in light grey italics were hard to hear, so they may not be exact.
So she lived there a good many years until one year. We had a terrible cloudburst and he, she being his little house on the hillside and on this here bank, he wanted to save some of the strawberry plants and stuff.
So he went out with a shovel and a hole to make a kind of a little dam so the water that was so rain and so terrible regular cloudburst so to stop the water to take away the good earth from his garden into the creek and while doing that he got a stroke he got too excited to to a perplexed about the whole thing see this was about the fourth year that they were there in the woods so then he stayed there with Mrs.
Yet, and she tried to teach him how to use his hand and all that. But just the same, he, after a year or so in the woods, handicapped like he was, they bought a little house in town close to one of their daughters, and there they stayed for another couple of years.
And then he was getting kind of worse, so they took him to Milwaukee, the original place where they come from and there he died. So Mrs. Let one of the sons have the cabin and then the son needed the lumber or something so they took the cabin apart.
And of course the three, four beautiful apple trees that they had when there was nobody living there, that deer come and they slash the branches off trying to get at the apples so the apple trees are ruined. And the two plum trees are still growing but I don't, not being taken care of it.
and stuff and minored the hindoon very good. I was there a couple years ago. Oh, and I should tell you, when I, they had a chicken coop for their little chickens. In daytime, they let them loose in the woods.
And for the night, they shot them, see. And they had a woven wire around, everything. Then they had a kind of like a corn crib, but it was solid boards instead of having the little spaces like for crabs of corn, you know, they did.