Early one August morning and three miles from the nearest paved road, my wife Eleanor and I found ourselves standing for the first time in front of a decayed two-story house with boarded windows and shut doors.

Though no marker indicated it, we knew this was no typical abandoned house but the almost-forgotten ancestral home of Eleanor’s Alabama forebears.  Standing alone in the flat bottomlands of the Alabama River for nearly two centuries, nestled by fields and hardwood forests grown plump on rich Blackland Prairie soils, this house is the almost-mystical place spoken of in hushed tones over the years but never actually seen by us.  From hand-planed floors to fluted mantels to nine-over-nine windows, the house is crafted from materials whose very names—heart pine, wavy glass, pegged timbers, seem a call to preserve, to renovate, to bring back to life. 

Who could imagine the simple life once lived here -- rising with the sun, giving an honest day’s work, feasting on supper and then retiring to the porch to watch the sunset over the nestling turkey, quail, and deer—and not feel the pull of a simpler time? Who has not felt the desire, as Thoreau put it, to go to the woods “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived?”