Old Homestead Above the Vermilion River

By Grace Goulder

GRAY smoke curled up from the old brick chimney and the good smell of a wood fire greeted me. Sheep, placidly enjoying the winter sunshine, moved up to the driveway fence with mild interest in my arrival. Inside I found her whom I sought, Mary Ransom, sitting beside her fireplace. It was the biggest and most inviting one I’ve ever seen.

But it’s no mere show thing. Miss Ransom uses it to heat her house-as her father used it since that day back in 1848 when he brought in the first big oak log and dropped it with a clatter on the andirons the blacksmith across the road had fashioned for him.

"Aunt Mary," as the country-side knows her, has lived here all her 80-odd years. The big white house sits, confident and serene, behind trees that are older than itself, overlooking its 600 acres of farmland. The road in front is called the West River Road, named for the Vermilion River whose twists and turns it follows. This is in Hartland Township, Huron County, not far from New London.

There was an oak log burning there now, with apple logs that occasionally spat sparks over the wide-bricked hearth. Miss Ransom was fringing a rag carpet, and toasting her toes. The fireplace opening reached shoulder high to the mantel of black walnut, the wood that makes all the interior trim. A back lining of hand-pounded iron intensifies the heat and throws it into the room, the dining room, until it catches up with the heat from the Franklin-type stove in the living room beyond.

In the kitchen range wood also is burned, wood cut on the place. But it’s difficult now to get the logs, not because wood is becoming scarce on the farm, but because modern farm workers have lost the art of the ax-or don’t want to learn it.

But to Miss Ransom there’s no heat like a wood fire, none so clean or hot. Her father felt the same way. Her grandfather, too. He had come from Lyme, Conn., with some others from his state, to settle in the Sufferers’ Tract, or the Firelands, that section of Ohio parceled out to indemnify Connecticut citizens whose homes were fired in British Revolutionary raids. Judah Ransom was his name, Capt. Judah, the first navigator of sailing cargo vessels on the upper lakes.

Like many of the early lake captains, Judah bought up land in Ohio, with an eye to his retirement from the water, this farm where his granddaughter lives being the heart of his holdings. But he never because a land man. Caught in a storm off Buffalo, he went down with his ship, and all hands. The cargo was 5,000 bushels of wheat from Milan, in those days a great grain-shipping port, on the old canal.

Judah’s son, John, built a blockhouse on the land and wooed Gitty Ann Johnson, whose father had come into the "New-Connecticut" wilderness even before the Ransoms. Gitty Ann’s name, and a good bit of her personality, too, survives in the furnishings of the big white house that John moved her into, after the blockhouse.

The last of their children, "Aunt Mary,’’ has kept her mother’s possessions, even the blue and white hand-woven bedspread, with her named worked boldly into it, the date, 1844, the name of the weaver, Adam Wolf, Bloomingrove, Richland County. It was the first thing in her hope chest, the wool cut from her father’s sheep, spun and carded with her own hands, she herself paying for the weaving by husking corn for 4 cents a bushel.

It was a long trip to the weaver, the spread’s creation a real undertaking, and it as been treasured always, as bright and sturdy under her daughter’s care as when it first was thrown over that bed in the upstairs room where it reposes this moment. It assumed proportions beyond those of a bedspread, that day when I handled it, for it is symbol of a bit of Ohio’s past, an era as hardy as the spread, a vigorous pioneering epoch that made Ohio what it is today.

Miss Ransom has made a good many bedspreads herself, and "piece quilts". She showed me a stack of them. One she is working on, a very complicated pattern of gingham and calico pieces, called "The Drunkard’s Path" or "The Old Maid’s Puzzle." Quilting has a lore and a technique of its own. Miss Ransom and her cousin, Mrs. Ona Porter Wood, now visiting her quilt in the evenings, the radio tuned to a favorite program, the fireplace glowing. They sit until the last two logs burn in half, then Miss Ransom pulls them parallel with each other, covers them with ashes, draws up the screen and goes to bed. In the morning the new fire is kindled from the embers that "live" through the night. This proceeding has the importance of a rite. It is the way her father did it.

Miss Ransom’s sewing is that of an expert, the product of a lifetime’s attention. Her stitches are microscopic. No old-age eye trouble here. She learned her needlecraft as a child, sewing bags of cheesecloth for the great wheels of cheese her father manufactured. From the Civil War period through the ‘80s he was one of the important cheese maker in this section, where, with Wellington as a center, more cheese was made than in any other part of the country. He managed several cheese warehouses and operated two factories on his farm, which covered 1,200 acres, in those days.

The house was a busy place. Gitty Ann fed 16 to 20 people three times a day, setting two tables, the first for "help," the second for the family. The pantry beyond the kitchen was built big to hold provisions, wide shelves for the pies, bins for the corn meal and wheat flour. The wood is all black walnut, even the old-time icebox made of it, the finish satiny to the touch from years of handling and good housekeeping.

The workers lived in the house, had their own stairway, steep and winding, to large rooms on the second floor. Four-poster beds they slept in are there still, one of maple, the others of black walnut, "pineapple" posts, pegs for the rope springs. The chairs they sat in are Windsor rockers and rush-seated ladder-backs.

The family’s chambers, up another stairway just as steep and perilous, are filled with the same collection of "antiques," only they are not antiques to Aunt Mary. They are the vases her mother cherished; tall cherry chests in which her mother’s linens are folded away; her father’s "Sleepy Hollow" rocker; more four-poster beds; maple bedside tables; colored glass lamps; a painting by a Wellington artist, hired for the job, of a favorite shepherd dog; music; wedding-day daguerreotypes of waist-coated gentlemen, bustled and basqued women, who, though young when the likenesses were made, look somehow forever old.

The attics were the nicest parts of the house. There are two, one above the other, stairs to them as straight as ladders. Heat from the great chimney warmed them that winter day. Here was a spinning wheel and carder; pickle jugs of lovely shape; blown glass preserve jars; hand-made rush baskets used in cheese-making; round-topped trunks of deerhide, the hair glistening and thick; cradles crudely made, with strong rockers that really rocked the babies; homemade high chairs; powder horns and flintlock guns, and long-handled iron toaster, broad enough for the generous slices of old-time bread loaves. The floors were wide puncheon boards. Everything spick-and-boards. Not a bit of dust or dirt-the kind of attic a house can have that burns only wood in its fires-and has an old-fashioned mistress like Aunt Mary.

The homestead is quieter now than in those long-gone days, but it is still a farm house, and Miss Ransom continues to be a farmer. With the assistance of one "hand" she manages sheep, cows, pigs-but no chickens any more. They kept escaping from their runs and digging up the vegetables and flowers she grows in the sunny kitchen dooryard by the well.

It’s an oasis of other-day living, this home Miss Ransom maintains, a tranquil spot in the midst of today’s changing tempo, acres spread for the seasons’ coming, as they were before atomic bombs, or price controls, or World Wars.