Saving Grandma's Cabin
Candy's hair-brained idea to keep her family history intact.
Categories: Westward Home
By: Candy Moulton 02/01/2008
Before he had a chance to sidle away from me, I went for the close, "I'd move it to my house." Now he realized this was his golden opportunity to get an old building out of his way and do so without effort on his part. "Sure, you can have it," he said, as he turned from me and saw Steve, "Whoops, maybe I just said the wrong thing."
That dinner was almost exactly 100 years from the day my Grandma first saw that homestead cabin in southern Wyoming, 10 miles from the then-booming copper mining town of Grand Encampment.
Home, Sweet Home
Wild onions took root on the sod roof of Grandma's homestead cabin and became snacks for my sister and me when we'd climb up the fence and onto the top where we had a view of the horse pasture, barns and corrals, plus our own house across Antelope Creek to the east.
We lived in the big house that had been built circa 1914 by my Grandpa Vyvey to replace the homestead cabin where Grandma spent her first years in America. But the cabin was taken care of well. It was the place where the first of my Grandma's children were born, where she'd made Belgian donuts and rocked her baby girl who died as an infant, where boys rough-housed and where she learned to speak English after her children started attending the one-room Beaver Creek School.
After the new house was built, more children came into the family, including my dad Fox. The older boys still slept in the homestead cabin as it became the first ranch bunkhouse. Eventually it had other uses: tack shed, granary, storage area.
Through the years, other log buildings at the ranch sagged with age, were moved or dismantled, but Grandma's cabin was carefully maintained for more than 90 years. Let me tell you some of the story.
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