More looking backward in time...
In 1966, our parents purchased a landlocked five acre lot, in a stream valley, with steep hills on all sides. It was densely wooded with tulip poplars and locusts and oaks, very tall trees. The stream ran down along one side of the lot, heading for Difficult Run. There were lots of salamanders and frogs, poke berry bushes on the edges of the woods, and poison ivy vines crawling up the trees. In some ways, I can't understand why they chose that piece of ground. Almost no sun, no utilities, no view, no easy way to get there. What it did have was a shared border with some good friends, and you could walk uphill through the woods, across the neighbor's orchard and get to our grandparents' house in about ten minutes. We immediately created a footpath that connected us to civilization -- a swimming pool, hot baths, dinner around a table, lots of electric lights, Grandma.
The Laughlin family who sold the five acres owned three more five acre lots, plus a little triangle of land that had about 200 feet of frontage on Leesburg Pike, a two-lane highway. From the highway, the Laughlin's driveway went past the flat triangle of land, then climbed a hill -- on the right side of the driveway was a fifty acre field owned by the Thompson family and on the other side was a ten acre horse farm owned by Bobby Groves. At the top of the hill the woods began, and there was a large level area with a ranch house and a small cabin in a clearing. The rest of the 15 acres was all trees on slopes -- our place was past the house, down the hill. No one would think of that as potential crop land, but when our parents eventually purchased all 20 acres of woods plus the road frontage plus the Groves Field, they had a home base with open fields and a spot for a roadside stand.
Today, almost 60 years later, all of that stream valley property is valued at almost nothing, for tax purposes. It is too wet and steep to build on and it has been re-zoned so that the taxes on those acres are a few hundred dollars a year, in one of the most expensive counties in the state.
The first thing our pioneer parents did was clear a little space in the woods for a Picnic Shed -- an outdoor pole barn kitchen with a roof, a dirt floor and a wall to install some electrical outlets and a telephone. I can't quite imagine how the electricity got down to the Picnic Shed, or where the telephone wire started. Did they talk the Laughlins into letting them run a long wire down the hill? Probably. Those two amenities were quickly installed. You could hear the telephone ringing from a long way away, and we would have to run from wherever we were to answer it. We never wore shoes during the summer, so the soles of our feet were like leather and we could sprint across rocks and sticks to try to get to the phone before it stopped ringing.
We lived in DC during the weeks back then. Dad went to work, riding his bike down 17th Street to the Old Executive Office Building and on the weekends we all came out to the farm so our parents could continue their adventure. There were four of us kids by then -- I was 6 1/2, Lani was 5, Anna was 2 1/2 and Charles was about 1. Charles was the only one who needed steady attention, but he did have three older sisters to help to watch over him when our parents were busy. I do remember cloth diapers and diaper pins and plastic pants. But I also remember that Charles stopped wearing pants altogether when he learned to walk. He wore a T-shirt and nothing else during the summer.
By the second summer, a motley crew of high school kids and friends of our parents had started the next big project: building a two story structure in the woods, on the other side of the stream. But in order to cross the stream with machinery and lumber, they had to build a dam first. Again, it is so hard for me to imagine how they got all this done. They didn't have the equipment we have now. How did they create a dam that would stay in place? Maybe they rented a bulldozer. Dad always wanted a bulldozer and he always had projects waiting for the next bulldozer opportunity. A nice little pond filled up, and they built a road for tractors and trucks to get to the clearing. They cut down trees, saving nine straight locust posts. They leveled the construction area, but left a dirt floor. They made a big pile of brush after chopping the branches off those posts, and they dug nine deep holes. They maneuvered those long logs into those holes, tamping them in thoroughly. That was the beginning of the Tractor Shed. The wood was green and the trees had not had time to dry out -- little green branches grew out of the locust posts long after the building was finished. The area all around the Tractor Shed was chewed up and disturbed by this project -- vines and branches and little scraps of wood were scattered all over the dusty, uneven ground. It took years for the forest to cover up that wound.
That second summer, Charles was 2 years old, and he often ran around unsupervised, but within hearing distance of people. No one saw him do it, but he ran through the area where they had burned the brush pile a week before. They had raked it smooth and it looked like the fire had burned everything, but Charles started to cry really hard, and no one could figure out what was wrong until that night big white blisters appeared on the soles of his feet where he had run over some hot coals. Our wise pediatrician and our grandparents shook their heads. Our mother held Charles' feet in an ice bath. Our grandparents worried, the pediatrician was calm. We all survived our childhoods somehow, and she had great faith in our parents and in the resilience of farm children (she had been our father's pediatrician too..).
The Tractor Shed had a big bay on the left for parking tractors and a smaller bay on the right for a tool shop. There was a steep ladder in the middle that led up to the three rooms on the second floor. One big room over the tractor bay and two smaller rooms over the shop. Our family lived in the Tractor Shed for about two summer seasons before buyng the house and property at the top of the hill. We moved out of the woods and into a house with plaster walls and glass-paned windows and real wood floors. But the house had small rooms, the walls were painted a terrible putty color, it had low ceilings and it was dark and airless, compared to the Tractor Shed with its huge, open windows and floors that you could see through between the planks. It did have an indoor bathroom and a furnace, though, and we moved out of DC to the farm for good in 1970.
For the next 10 or 15 years, the Tractor Shed was summer housing for a long series of workers, all of whom probably have memories of snakes dropping from the ceiling and roommates peeing out of the windows. There was a time when we were reported by a remote neighbor (Barbara Wilson, wife of Edwin P. Wilson... he is worth a glance in Wikipedia) for having people living in the woods and the inspector came to inspect, finding only a building with stacks of wooden baskets showing through the upstairs windows (if he had thought for just a few minutes, he would have wondered why a farm would stack its baskets so far from the sorting and packing areas behind the stand).
When we stopped housing workers on the Vienna farm when the mansions started to be built on the Thompson Field, that space was abandoned except for the occasional neighborhood trespasser teens who could not resist exploring a rickety building. After the orchard next door was sold and even bigger mansions were built just a few yards uphill from the Tractor Shed, one of the closest neighbors requested -- through an intermediary -- that we tear down that attractive nuisance. I responded, through the intermediary, that we had not requested that they tear down their eyesore buildings, and that was the end of that brief interaction.
But, in the end, a big tree fell on the Tractor Shed and smashed it flat, saving all the local children from danger. There it lies, crumpled under a big tree, a mysterious pile of tin and rotting lumber. The dam washed out long ago, and the stream valley is dotted with archaeological mystery, with no hints about the purpose of those collapsed buildings (there was a bath house and a tent platform with stories of their own, and they have long ago melted into the forest floor).
Sometimes I think about the civilizations that lived here before us, and how their stories have melted into the woods, or been scraped off with the topsoil and replaced by gigantic mansions. At least this particular stream valley is of no use to anyone, and will probably stay just as it is, way beyond our lifetimes.
