Antique Travel Trunk - a Time Past

 This antique trunk sits near our back door.

This old pine trunk was built in Norway c. 1895, and traveled across the Atlantic with the ancestors of the family who were the ones who built the original house and barn on the farm where we live. That house was built on the hill above the spring, and a new house (the one we live in) was built in 1913. Sometime in the early 1940s, this house was made into a duplex of sorts, with the parents living on the first floor and the newly-married son and daughter-in-law living on the second floor.

 'Knud Amundson

Monroe(?), Wischosin, Amerika'

(you can kinda read it when the light is just right)

We bought the farm from that daughter-in-law in 1986, a year after her husband had died. When we walked out of the lawyer's office after signing the papers, I remember crying because I thought it was incredibly sad that no one in the family wanted to purchase the farm. Their family had owned this land since purchasing it from the Knapp Stout Lumber Company.

We purchased the trunk at the auction held by Amundsons after the sale of the farm. It currently holds newspapers (to use as fire starters when building a fire in the cookstove) and it's where the huge ceramic German Shepherd and 3 pups sit (which my cousin gave me. In fact, except for the live GSD, Bridger, I think that every other Shepherd around here is from Bobby. ♥)

After we moved here, the brother of the previous owner stopped in one day. He told me about digging out the spring and about the schoolhouse, which once stood about a half mile from our house, where he and his brother attended as kids. The stream that runs through our property is where the brothers would set their fishing lines on their way to school, and then would run to check on them during recess.

Do your kids get to do that?

That was back in the day when Type 2 Diabetes in kids was virtually unheard of because kids got enough exercise through work and play, when work was considered a privilege and a part of normal life rather than punishment, when they only ate sugar in an occasional Sunday dessert, when none of them were on anti-depressants or psychostimulants because they ate real food and got lots of exercise, when children weren't exposed to a steady stream of violence because they didn't have television or computers, when the teachers didn't expect kids to sit still for hours at a time and kids weren't segregated by age, where the older kids were enlisted to help teach the younger ones, and where most kids were taken to church on Sundays and taught to respect life and to love and honor God.



What an outdated way of living, huh!

***

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