Another American Adventure: The Hagan Home

Sunday, August 11, 2013

The Hagan Home

This is the house that I grew up in.

Every time I am back in Bardstown I drive by to take a look. We lived here from about 1955 until my father sold the house to the Hamilton's in 1980.

My mother added that little room over to the right not long before she died in 1973. Other than some big trees that are gone, the house, from the front, looks basically the same as it did when we lived in it.

But the Hamilton's have really kept the place nice. I couldn't help but notice that they had built something new in the back, and I actually trespassed so that I could get a better look! I used to fantasize about a pool in our backyard, and where I would put it. Wow! Good job!

I drove down the back ally just to see how it all looks from the back. Again, wow!

3 comments:

BarbaraAugust 11, 2013 at 12:45 PM
What a lovely home! When my parents sold the house I grew up in, it was bulldozed to the ground and replaced with a White Castle. Appropriate, really, but the yard was lovely.
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beth cioffolettiAugust 11, 2013 at 1:33 PM
:-). I didn't know that they had White Castles in New York!
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BarbaraAugust 11, 2013 at 4:32 PM
Not many. This one did not last so long. The lot is a truck parking lot, I believe, now.
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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.