DADDY: GORDON WILSON EASLEY # 3

Improvements Continue

The house and yard used a corner out of about a seven acre patch.  The patch started north of the house at the fence between us and Miller's.  It came down behind the house to the east in a kind of shallow "L" shape.  Daddy fenced that area, about five acres, using cross ties at all the corners.  That acreage he called the bull pen.  The original old rock house was in there.  The toilet and chicken house were there.  Then he built a barn for the bull.  A pig pen was attached to the north side.  There were two grain bins and the manger for a couple or three animals.  The donkeys were also kept there, when they weren't working.

On our side of the fence nearest the house to the east, Daddy built a pheasant pen.   Our pasture had several coveys of bob white quails.  He had been reading about stocking pheasants, as well.  He learned that pheasants bought or caught and brought in, would not stay.  So the recommendation was to buy the eggs and hatch then on sight.  That's what he did.  He found a plan for a pen that would work well and had it ready by the time the clutch of a dozen pheasant eggs had hatched from under a standard size setting chicken hen in our new pheasant pen.

Our pheasants were ring necks.  Quails and doves were the only game birds in our area.  So the pheasants were considered exotic.  As they grew, we were all so excited to watch their progress.  In their second year the cocks began growing their beautiful feathers...   When the Ryan family came for peach canning that year, we worked under a big shade tree and the pheasant pen was under the other side of the same shade.

Daddy had torn out Grandpa's old cow barn below the house, after moving the two-roomer and making our barn on the rise to the east of the windmill.  I'm don't know when he started planning to build a new, modern milk barn.  By 1946 he had rounded out a beautiful area on the west side of the windmill, with his front end loader on the ford tractor.  As he changed the contour of the hill where the old barn had been, it all opened up to make a beautiful wideness and raised the level of the ground around the water tank, so it's sides were only about eighteen inches high. 

That was the year he poured the foundation for the new barn and stamped "1946" in the cement of the thresh hold of the front door.  He started putting in new fence from the mail box at the road along the south side of our driveway, going east.  It continued around to the barns built onto those two rooms.  And now he began tearing out the fence beside the road going south toward the river.  He used cross ties at all corners and for extra support ever so often along the way.  It was a huge project.