Discovering Brandywine

I grew up in a house from the 1920s and was always captivated by the lives spent there before us. As a kid, I was drawn to the more obvious traces like old shoes, receipts, tennis rackets left in the attic. I’d pore over crumbling, forgotten documents tucked into the back of cabinets, desperate to connect with the women who lived there before.

Now, I marvel at more subtle evidence: Worn floorboards and door hardware. Marked hearthstones. Bore holes from insects that make houses part of nature in a way humans cannot. Quiet reminders that houses, like fields, are part of an ecosystem that lives beyond human ownership.

Positioned on the traditional, ancestral, and contemporary lands of the Quinnipiac, Wangunk, and Wappinger peoples, our current home was built by the Ward family in the early 1830s. Already in his 50s when the house was finished, the patriarch lived here for another 12 years before his death. His wife remained until 1854, when she passed at the age of 59.

Blessed by the bounty of New England probate records, I’ve had the luxury of reading their wills and household inventories—documents that have allowed me to reconstruct a portion of their lives in detail that would otherwise be lost to time.

During their time here, they raised oxen, grew corn, and planted the maples that stand outside our kitchen. He died with livestock, equipment, and feed. She counted three iron kettles to her name. The records are sparse but valuable and illustrate a life structured around necessity and use instead of accumulation.

When the widow Ward deeded the property to her son near the end of her life, it consisted of 70 acres of farmland and the two-story home I’m writing from today. He lived here with his wife until an elderly farmer purchased it in the 1860s. The home sold again a few years later, this time to investors. Ten years later, in 1880, a shoemaker and his sons bought the home and it stayed in their family for more than 70 years.

As someone who is deeply sentimental about real estate, I’m always devastated when an old house passes from the family that built it. Large swaths of land inevitably fragmented into smaller lots.

But the changes this farm has gone through also remind me that houses are living organisms. Porous and changing. It’s tempting to speak of old houses as static artifacts, but they’re closer to ecosystems. Insects burrow, mice build nests, and moisture seeps and migrates. Wood and paint expand, then contract, with the seasons. Even neglect is a form of tacit exchange.

Once constructed, a house can’t be separated from the land it rests on, instead absorbing the rhythms of nature just like soil. And so, living in an old house means entering into a relationship with something that’s already alive, changing, and marked by others. Just as working the land requires acknowledging and respecting the Indigenous people it was taken from centuries ago.

Part of this is making time to acknowledge the remnants of life left behind while leaving space for what we cannot know. For us, these memories show up in hand hewn wood, a cracked hearthstone, ox teeth and porcelain shards found while digging in the garden. While these items are enchanting, they’re also a reminder that ownership is provisional. I don’t possess this house so much as I occupy it alongside the ghosts of the Wards and its generations of other inhabitants.

xx
Kiah