Campaign: The Meyer Homestead

The cart track rises over a small spur, a mere thirty foot climb, from where you can look down into a small meadow a hundred yards across, on both sides of the stream you’ve crossed twice. From where you are, the varying structures are on the opposite bank…but the stream is quite shallow and filled with stones, fashioning a wide ford.

At one point a channel has been cut into the stream, and above the channel a well-placed dam across the stream creates a substantial pool, thirty yards across—this feeds into the channel, creating a rushing flow before the water is restored to the natural stream bed. The rushing water powers a waterwheel, built by all appearances by a master craftsman, connected to a cylindrical structure twenty feet in height and twenty feet in diameter. The shingles on the roof of the cylinder have been replaced in the last three years, and the building appears to have been painted the previous fall—it is a bright, forest green in color.

Near this structure, to the right, is a low, flat stone and plaster house, crystal-white in color, with glazed glass windows set into expertly fitted frames, quite symmetrical to the eye. A stoop, with a wooden awning to protect the main door from the weather, extends in a cobbled stone half-circle ten feet from the house, to a graciously tailored yard where chickens and three piglets are at the moment feasting. A woman is assiduously cleaning the house’s windows. Further to the right is a barn, smallish but much in the same condition as the mill, also painted recently and in the same forest green. Between the barn and the river is planted an extensive vegetable garden, showing a smudge of green to suggest the first shoots rising. Squinting your eyes, you can see four children, on their knees, appearing to weed the garden.