the life and homes of Jane Love
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I called it "Windy Hill Farm".
Earl thought we should get a place in the country, to raise our own food and get ready for the Great Catastrophe. So we started reading want ads on farms for sale. I loved our Ellettsville home, but I was willing to do anything to get him to quit drinking. | ||
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I saw an ad for a farm with 5 acres for $9000 dollars. [Woah! Remember Hometown?]
We could afford that but I thought the house couldn't be very good. It looked small,
with no water, bathrooms, or central heat. I called and made an appointment to look at it.
It was 15 miles from Ellettsville. It was spring. | |||
| The old owner had died and left his wife the farm. They only lived there in the summer, and in a trailer in Worthington in the winter. Their son showed us the house. We got there before he showed up, so we walked around outside and looked at the layout There was a peach orchard in bloom on the east side of the house and a large garden plot an old pear tree at one corner in bloom. |
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 at the bottom across Indiana Route 66. |
It was right on Highway 66. The barn was downhill by the highway and driveway.
The driveway was gravel to the house. We looked in the windows. it looked good.
We had driven by this house many times on our way to Southern Illinois.
I had often thought it looked interesting
We walked to the north side. There were 2 cherry trees and a lawn. The hill fell off at this side into a large meadow with a brook at the bottom. At this time it was all flooded, and I thought it was a lake. It had rained an awful lot that spring. | |
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When the son came and let us in we went into the kitchen.
I was surprised to see a stove and sink.
There was electricity, a bathroom at the left, and water from the cistern.
All of that was filthy. We saw a small bedroom off of the kitchen.
We turned right and went into the living room. There was an empty fireplace.
I stood there and a feeling of quiet peace flooded my entire body.
Beyond that was a large bedroom and a small room to the left.
Every room had an outside door except the room off of the kitchen.
A porch wrapped around the house from the front to the kitchen side.
Then he showed us the room that was added on to the kitchen. It was large and in utter ruin. The open cistern was under that room, where former owners had kept chickens. What a mess! |
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| This part of the house had been a church. It had 3 doors leading outside, and 5 windows. It was divided into 2 rooms. There was a chimney in the center. Every room had a chimney except the small room off of the bedroom. | ||
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[Later we found out the history of the house. A Bondsman from England named Williams had served his 7 years, and being White, was set free and given 40 acres. He built a house, married, and started having kids. He didn't know where they were coming from! So he kept adding rooms onto rooms. Finally, one day he went down to the town of Farmers Station and put the old church building up on logs, and rolled it up to add onto his house on a sandstone block foundation. The neighbors saw him, and noted that he was the only person in the community that didn't go to church, and had a beard, so they said, "There goes the Devil stealing the church!" Farmers Station had several stores and a tannery, but is all gone today.] Later we found the graffiti in the attic of the church. The pastor left his kids there, and they passed their time gambling! [No wonder the church failed!] | |
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I felt the place needed to be in loving hands. I wanted this farm. I felt at peace there.
So we bought it. I knew it would take a lot of work to make it liveable, but I was strong
and healthy, and I knew we could fix it up.
[We had abundant self planting cherry tomatoes in the garden every summer, but it was hard to grow squash, as the squash bugs always got to them first. Beyond the garden was a hillside where snakes would hatch in the spring, and down the hill was a watercress spring. Half way down the hill towards the barn where a trailer had been became our potato bed.] |
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The 5 acres was on a north facing slope, not very good for farming, but just right
for keeping sheep. But we never got any sheep, as Earl thought they would become pets.
One time, our neighbor Sonny Thompson brought over some newborn kittens and asked us
to care for them until they could fend for themselves, as their mother had been killed
on the highway. Earl tried to teach them to be attack cats, but they were just cute
little kittens. Sonny raised and showed Egyptian horses and Jack Russell Terriers,
and taught school. Doug once asked if the 4 matched colts in the barn across the
highway were quarter horses, and got told about fine Egyptian show horses.
Sonny always had a dog named "Vicious". Every one of these "Vicious" dogs was
friendly and playful.
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 Bo came from the Bloomfield pound to keep Louise company. I painted a gilded tray with their likenesses after I had to give them away, as Earl didn't want them around. Doug even tolerated Bo, calling him "puppy cat". Later, Tammy just showed up one day, and stayed, and moved to Worth- ington with me. But my next door neighbor there didn't like cats. I think he poisoned her! So I stopped having cats. [Dogs other than Sonny's came by occasionally. Once a short-legged bloodhound showed up once, but after a few days a contractor recognized his "Homer" and took him home. |
Sonny brought Louise over as he had no place for her.
Earl chased her away, as he didn't want a cat, but she came back,
and he didn't chase her off any more.
showed up one day. | |
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At first we went there weekends to clean and fix things, but it went slow.
So I started going during the week, and I realized that we needed to spend more time there.
I couldn't do it alone.
We went to junk stores in neighboring towns and bought beds and chairs and moved a couch, table and cooking pots and dishes. (Yes, it had cabinets in the kitchen.) Earl was great. He really pitched in and helped, and when our son Douglas finished his degree in geology, he came and helped too. I wanted to keep the antique look. It took a year to attain that. The first thing I tackled was the kitchen and bathroom. There was linoleum on the floor in the kitchen and living room. Of course I cleaned everything first. The bathroom was a mess, but usable. | |
| I started ripping up the linoleum in the kitchen on my hands and knees. There was tons of newspaper under the linoleum. In those days, people used newspaper for insulation. I found an 1834 date or near that year on one. The linoleum in the living room had glue under it. That was really hard to get up. I mopped the kitchen and bathroom. So at least that was liveable. | ||
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I rented an electric sander and sanded the bedroom and living room floor.
The floors in the rest of the house weren't too bad. I just cleaned them.
I varnished the big bedroom and living room floor. We had to stay in Ellettsville
for a week so the varnish smell could get out.
Then we started on the church. I tore out the partitions. They were poorly put together so it wasn't hard to do. I carted the wood out the back side door. The next thing to do was to rip out the old plaster walls. They were so rotten it wasn't hard to do. We ripped out the plaster from the ceiling, and Earl and Doug put up new plasterboard after we applied insulation all around and overhead. [I took out the better floorboards and made wainscoting out of them. I had some boards left over that I used for the fronts of drawers for my map cabinet.] |
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| We painted all the walls antique white,
except in the bedroom where I hung wallpaper with roses.
The tiny room off the bedroom became our den. I papered it with wallpaper that was all books.
We put up shelves and put our books in there.We still had the house in Elletts- ville.
We didn't want to move until we had made the farm house liveable.
Winter came. Doug went back to [grad] school at Indiana University[, and couldn't help as much as I used to]. He rode into Bloomington with his father. One morning in winter we heard no traffic on our busy high- way. It had snowed all night. We had to shovel out to the highway, so they decided to leave early. Then the heavy snow came down! It snowed all day. By nightfall all the roads were closed. They had to stay at the house in Ellettsville. |
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Earl and neighbors phoned to see if I was O.K. Sonny had to walk a mile from his house to check on his horses in the barn across the road, so he stopped in to check on me. Spring finally came! I found 2 young men who were handy with building. We had the wrap around porch enclosed with storm and screened windows. About that time we wanted to finish the kitchen. We had 3 wood burning stoves, one in the large bedroom (no heat went in there.) and a lovely little red stove in the living room. Both had doors to open for a fireplace look. We had a great wood stove in the kitchen. It had an oven in the stovepipe. Doug said that the best batch of cookies he ever baked came from that oven. |
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We put down wall to wall carpeting to cover the particle boards in the church. It was grass green. The two young men put in a new sink with cabinets, and a base cabinet under the window between the stove and refrigerator, and installed a stained glass window over the base. They also added wall cabinets and another work counter out from the stove. Everything was working. It was time to move from Ellettsville. We sold the house to a neighbor there. Earl wanted the living room carpeted before we moved in. We dragged out the old gas cookstove, refrigerator, sink and wall cabinets. We put up a for sale sign, and it worked! We sold the old beds the same way. Then we carpeted the dining room and remodeled bathroom. It was blue to match the blue tub, sink and toilet. What a joy to get everything moved! Then we decided we needed a carport to keep our woodpile and cars in. Earl bought me a little red Toyota truck to haul stuff in. I loved it. | ||
| [For awhile, Earl ran a junk shop in the Barn. He hid his liquor there. Then we had a sale and got rid of almost everything, including some of my stuff that I didn't want sold. The sale was run as an estate sale, and we were all heartbroken.] I started doing Tole Painting again. Some of my friends begged me to teach them how to do it. So I started teaching. By 1991 was doing quite well at it. |
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Earl once again resented my achievements. He decided again that he didn't want to live with me any more. He said that he didn't love me and never had loved me. I was shocked. I said, "You always said you loved me, and I thought you did." He said, "I am a good actor". He wanted to move out but he couldn't afford to pay the mortgage and rent an apartment in Bloomington, so we would have to sell the farm. |
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| I was heartbroken. I thought the farm was forever for us. I went back out to the garden where I worked until sundown, crying all the time. He had passed out in the small bedroom. I didn't get up the next day until he left for work, and never got up when he did. I never wanted to see him again. This was the third time he did this. So we sold the farm for $35,000, and I started looking for a house for me. | ||
| ← Ellettsville, Indiana |
↑ The Dream of Windy Hill Farm ↑ |
Worthington, Indiana → |
