A Few Memories of the Old Homestead

I have often made the claim that I stand with one foot in this generation and one in the past. On the Montana prairie we lived a simple life without many of the so-called modern conveniences of the mid 20th century. But do you know something? At the time, I didn't know our lives were lacking. It was life and we loved it--mostly.

In 1951 Mom and Dad moved their little family of five kids to the ranch between Melstone and Musselshell, Montana. (We went to school in Musselshell and went to church in Melstone.) Five more kids were born here. The house was built about 1900 and I think it started as just a little two or three room shack. This part of the house had just a small crawl space under it. There was a low ceilinged porch with warped floor boards that were covered with lineolum that kept wearing out because of the warped boards. From the porch you could step down into a small area that served as a store room. I think the floor was just hard packed dirt that they put lineolum over. The other direction led into a kitchen area and off of the kitchen was a small bedroom that became the girls' bedroom.

Here is the only childhood home I remember. On the left side of the picture(between the two bedroom windows) you can see the trap door that led to the cellar, and to the right of the entrance to the porch was the pump house. When I was at home, we did not have that shelter over the pump, just another trap door.

Sometime before we moved there an addition was made. A cellar was added and three more rooms built over it, making the house L-shaped. The front room connected to the kitchen and then two bedrooms beyond that. Mom and Dad had their bedroom at the end and had to go through the boys' room to get to their bedroom. There were no interior doors on any of the rooms. Mom just hung curtains to provide privacy for the bedrooms. It helped prevent temper tantrums because it was kind of hard to stomp off to our bedroom and slam the curtain.

The plumbing in the house was pretty simple. The water pump from the well was right outside the house by the porch. It was almost a straight shot to run the water line the 10-12 feet from the pump to a small wash basin in the porch and then under the kitchen to the kitchen sink, maybe another 15 feet. In the kitchen on the same wall as the wash basin was where our first electric washing machine was installed. This was the extent of our indoor plumbing for many years. For our bathroom needs we used an "outhouse". I have a vague remembrance of the chamberpots (aka thundermugs)that sat under our beds to save a trip to the outhouse during the night.

I think it was sometime during my gradeschool years when Dad dug a hole in the store room floor and installed a flushing toilet. We still used the outhouse as much as possible during the daytime to avoid overloading our indadequate septic system.

Here is a picture of Sonia and Heidi posing by the outhouse--a two-seater. We were really uptown!

When I was growing up, on Saturday nights we pulled out the old tin tub, which looked much like these, and everyone bathed whether we needed it nor not. Ours was probably between three and four feet long. (I could carry it by myself when I was a teenager if I didn't fill it too full.) We slipped the end of a rubber hose onto the hot water faucet of the wash basin (and then a little cold water) and filled the tub and then carried it into the store room and bathed. Or we filled the tub with a bucket. The first time I took Verlin home for a visit, he inquired about the availability of a real bathtub. Dad took him out to the Savage Ranch and they got a tub out of one of the abandoned houses there and took it home and Verlin helped install it in the store room. To quote from the musical "Oklahoma"--"Everything's up to date...they've gone about as far as they can go".