How much can an empty house hold?

Homestead on County Road N

Established circa 1870.

Samuel Hicks, occupation farmer, from Ireland, traveled with his wife Mary (English), and their two children, Helen and George, from Illinois to Wisconsin and built this house around 1870.

Samuel and Mary had four more children, Jane, Francis, Alice, and Scott, as listed on the 1880 census.

There aren't many of these houses left. I no longer see one every quarter mile along the county roads. I get glimpses of some, still occupied, hidden in thick copses of trees on old farmsteads. On some farms this house stands empty while another newer, modern farmhouse- split level or ranch- has been built next to or behind it. I lived in a house like this that had been used for grain storage. You could see the imprint to corn kernels on the wooden floors. A farmhouse like this one, on the farm opposite our driveway, was torn down, and replaced with a mobile home. Occasionally the local fire department burns down one of these houses during a volunteer firefighter training session.

The house sits in a wide valley between two glacial ridges. Over the hill to the east is the Chippewa River and flowage. To the west and south, less than fifteen miles, is Lake Pepin, a widening in the Mississippi River. The house is built on the slope of the eastern hill. Just north of the house is a spring that feeds the creek that meanders along the edge of the valley, flowing south and emptying in to the Mississippi River. To the west there are flat fields and wooded hillsides.

1877 Pepin County Plat Map, 16 sections of

Pepin Township. Samuel Hicks property is

the central blue section.

1880 Property Assessment: 200 Acres valued at $2,000. Improvements valued at $100.

2010 Property Assessment: 18 Acres valued at $7,100. Improvements valued at $0.

2010 Legal Description: 18 Acres, PRT OF NW 1/4 OF SW 1/4 LYG W OF HWY N, Section 8,

Pepin Township, Pepin County, Wisconsin.

I have never been inside this house, but I know its floor plan. There are three square rooms downstairs. A narrow, dark stairwell leads to the second floor hallway and three bedrooms with a window in each dormer. The ceilings slant in the bedrooms. Old worn linoleum covers the floors. Equally old wall paper of faded bouquets of flowers or blue tinged bowers cover crumbly plaster walls. The floors will creak, the stairs will groan, the window panes, still intact, will rattle in their casings.

In the kitchen will be an old wood burning stove. A more modern, though vintage, gas or electric stove may be in the corner. What had been a pantry or mudroom will have become a basic bathroom. There will be electric ceiling light fixtures- mostly single bulb with clip on glass shades. Another wood or oil burning stove will be attached to the chimney in the parlor. Everywhere will be the left over furniture, left behind remnants of previous dwellers, now the nesting sites for small rodents. On the porch, in the corner, there will be a wooden chair, an old pair of rubber boots beside it.

I know this house because I have known so many houses like it. This house is the house of my grandmother, the first house I lived in after college, and the house I moved in and out of three times in three different locations. In another place it is the house I now call home.

I drive by this house and see the lamp in the window. I know this house. I know that lamp, left in the window to guide the wanderer home.