Saving Grandma's Cabin
Candy's hair-brained idea to keep her family history intact.
Categories: Westward Home
By: Candy Moulton 02/01/2008
One by one, the older children moved on to other ranches, to jobs in the woods (cutting ties and timber) and some claimed homesteads, but they eventually sold the land to their parents. My dad and his brother Bert stayed on the ranch with their families. My grandmother died when I was only five, and by the time I was a teenager, the ranch was a 3,200-acre cattle ranch that my Grandpa had sold to Dad and Uncle Bert.
Then, in 1990, my parents and my Aunt Phyllis sold the ranch; Uncle Bert had died three years earlier. Even after the first sale, we had close ties to the owner and both Steve and my brother worked for him. Then he sold out, severing all our connections for several years.
It was hard for my family to leave the VX Ranch; my dad had been born and lived in the same house for 70 years. Once when I was about 10, he tore up some floorboards in the front room of Grandma's cabin, looking for a 50-cent piece he had lost between the cracks in the floorboard when he was just a child. At the time he lost it, his mother wouldn't let him take up the boards to retrieve the money and he just knew it was still there in the dirt beneath the floor. We dug and sifted dirt all one afternoon but never found the precious coin.
Although it was fully intact when my family sold the ranch, by 2003, the cabin was just a falling down skeleton. A flood had come one year, and the rushing water slammed into the cabin. The then-rotting logs that formed the base for the sod roof broke and crashed inward, dumping several inches of dirt onto the cabin floor. Later, to get their equipment though the gate, ranch workers had pushed in one front corner so the cabin was no longer a solid structure.
The ranch changed hands twice more before that fateful day at the fertilizer dinner, but the new manager is a young guy I'd known since he was a toddler, which is probably what gave me the courage to ask if I could have the cabin.
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