This Ol' House

Perhaps you've heard the old phrase, "Don't change horses in the middle of the stream." My pictures arrived at WalMart today (had to buy disposable cameras since I forgot to pack my handy-dandy digital camera). At any rate, I had hoped to insert a picture of the house my brother and I lived in for nearly six delightful years--as it was back in 1948-1954. Alas, I cannot find the picture album that might contain such a picture.

Consequently, I am including pictures of three old houses--all in the Hannibal, MO area where I attended a country schoolhouse for my first four years of school. One is the house where my family lived, but it has been pared back to much of its "old bones." We got to see all of the houses on our recent trip to MO.

 This is the Garth Robards Mansion in Hannibal, Missouri--a bed and breakfast with most hospitable hosts and excellent food.

Robards was a dignitary in Hannibal in the late 1800s and was, of course, a friend of Mark Twain, who visited the home often.

The house is on the National Registry (of old places).

 The picture to the right is what my family used to call the Big House. It is located on a farm called Andalusia near Hannibal owned by the Kilmer family and may well be even older than the Robards mansion. My little brother loved to visit Mrs. Kilmer because she reminded us of our grandmother but was scared of Mr. Kilmer.

The house to the left has changed drastically in appearance since we lived there. Imagine a porch at the door you see, white paint on the clapboards and an addition to the left of the structure which was our kitchen and dining room.

It turns out this structure was/is a two story log cabin built in the early 1820's. Unfortunately, we didn't get to see the present owner, Jim Kilmer. He halted the demolition of the cabin and probably knows more about who might have first lived there.

Stay tuned next week for more of my trips down Memory Lane.