History

House History

Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of early history on the house, itself. We know that it was built in 1905. We know that our neighbor's house (1/2 mile away) was built at almost the exact same time and they had almost the exact same layout. We don't know who built it and we don't know who originally lived here. We have met quite a few of the folks of the family that lived here from the 1970's - early 2000's. Durban and Violet Mitchell lived here with their 3 sons, 3 daughters and 1 farm hand during much of that time. They ran the farm, complete with cows, pigs, chickens and crops. We are fortunate to have met 1 of the sons and all 3 daughters. Dave Mitchell is our neighbor and he has been a big help on some of our home projects. You'll get to meet him in "The Remodel" pages.

One little mysterious piece of history was found when we pulled the original wood siding off. Scrawled in pencil on a pink piece of rosin paper was this: "J.W. Campbell, October 16, 1907." This makes us question the house being built in 1905 and it also has us wondering if J.W. was the house owner or builder.

I hope to obtain more details on the early history of the house, but just haven't made it to the Boone County Courthouse to do it.

Our History

Bill and I met in July 2000. We were engaged 9 1/2 weeks later and were married in September 2001. We lived in Brownsburg, IN in a lovely brick ranch with a finished basement. We loved the house, but we didn't love the neighbor's dog that never stopped barking. After five years (wouldn't you think that the dog's vocal cords would have worn out by then?!) we started driving around in the country looking for some peace and quiet and dreaming of having some of our own!!

Finally, we decided we were ready to seriously start looking. We called our realtor. God love her. I'm pretty sure that we drove over half the state with her. Most of the time, we'd reach our destinaton, get out of the car to look at the house, and I'll be darned if we wouldn't hear a dog barking. I think at one point, we didn't even go in the house - we just got out, heard the dog and got back in the car.

Then, one Saturday in October 2005, we were sipping our morning coffee and sifting through the emails from the realtor and we stumbled across a white farm house in Jamestown, IN on nearly 4 acres. We didn't bother the realtor that day (I think we were starting to feel guilty about dragging her everywhere with no results.) We drove to the house on our own. We fell in love not only with the house and barn, but with the fact that the only sound we heard was birds! The next day, we visited the house with our realtor and fell even more in love. That day, we put an offer on the house. Unfortunately, so did two other individuals. Since the house was bank-owned, we were told to give them our "biggest and best offer." I've always had lots of luck with the number "7", so there were LOTS of "7's" in our offer. And it worked. Two weeks later, Bill called me singing the theme from "Green Acres." We had bought the farm, so to speak.

So, here we are, four years later, and here's the irony to this story...we have fallen in love with our (current) neighbor's dog and have adopted him. I think it was all part of God's plan. But then again, isn't everything?