Autographs of Ainsworth, Part 2: Barn

It's a stroke of luck that I, my mania for the past, should end up in a house where the previous inhabitants had a mania for signing and dating parts of the house and outbuildings. I noticed these things after I bought the house, not before.

The kitchen drawer autographs are out of sight most of the time, but there are other autographs around here that I see on almost a daily basis. I like seeing them; they remind me that my small, unremarkable house has seen many years, many people and many events, big and small.

Even lives filled entirely with the mundane take on a different light when you look at them in retrospect: they are suffused with the sunset colors of decades gone by; they are sweetened with nostalgia; they are entwined with the passage of time, that great mystery of our existence; they are triumphant because they still stand, in memory or in physical evidence, after the flood of years has washed over the people and the landscape, sweeping away so many and so much. Whatever is left has survived a disaster; it has a story to tell; and you, the listener, feel — however fragmentary and incoherent the story may be — that you are hearing an epic.

… It's the side of a barn that I'm waxing poetic about here, folks.

I think my barn was built in 1923. Why do I think that? Because of things like this:


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Difficult to photograph clearly because it's shallow carving on a weathered plank, but it says, "G.C. 1923." In 1939 my land belonged to a J. Chester; George Chester owned an even larger tract of land down Grand Boulevard; whether this "G.C." is even remotely connected to either of them, I have no way of knowing.

Even stronger evidence of the building date is here:


(Click on image to enlarge)

I rotated the image for your viewing convenience, but as you stand on the ground and look at the barn, these carvings are upside down, meaning that the plank was probably lying on the ground when W.S., H.L. and W.E. carved their initials and "1923" into it.

I bought the house from Hubert Lines, Jr. The H.L.s on the barn might be him, or his father — or some random person with the same initials.

On an interior wall, someone took a piece of charcoal, maybe, or a stick dipped in ink, or a soft pencil, and wrote on the wall: "June 1923." I think it's 1923; the digits are almost illegible:


(Click on image to enlarge)

The paperwork I got while I was house-hunting said that my house was built in 1937. The barn was built in 1923, the house 14 years later? Was there another house that stood on the land before? Is the 1937 figure just wrong? It's a mystery.

Anyway, in 1940, along come "H.L." and "C.S." and carve their initials — to mark what event, I don't know.


(Click on image to enlarge)

Hubert Lines' wife was named Carlene (maiden name unknown to me). It's just possible, I suppose, although they'd be awfully young. Childhood sweethearts?

As I've mentioned before, that little old barn is in bad shape. The roof leaks, the walls are almost as much daylight as wood, the dirt floor is overgrown with elm roots. But I will never knock it down; it will stand for as long as it pleases.