Leeder Homestead

This is where my mother was born, in February of 1917.  Her mother went home to HER mother I guess.  That’s usually the person from whom you can get the most sympathy in these situations.  My Uncle Iden (grandma’s brother) and Aunt Amy (his second wife) lived there with their daughter Betty (an after thought child) when I was growing up, so we were the same age, and encouraged to spend time together.  Thus I went for visits, and even a few sleepovers.  The house design is American Foursquare, popular in the late 1800’s , early 1900’s.  I read somewhere that the total simplicity was a direct reaction to the Victorian love of the ornate, so from one extreme to the other.  It was so square and boxy I could never decide if that made it excrutiatingly boring, or infinitely interesting.  The first and second floors were divided into four.  Four bedrooms  in the four corners upstairs, with a small bathroom at the top of the staircase.  On one side of the main floor was the kitchen/dining area, and on the other side the living room and I think a sort of foyer, or entryway, all divided by arched doorways.  There was also a half storey high square attic area under the hipped roof, which you got to by taking some old creaky stairs, and where it was hard to breathe because of the heat and the dust.  There might also have been a basement, but I don’t remember ever going down there.

This picture was taken before they added a huge cement porch on the front and side.  For some reason or other that was the absolute best place to play.  There was no railing and only one set of steps.  You could send a doll carriage flying off into the bushes in several directions.   I remember that row of trees, and how the gravel driveway made a circle in front of the house. 

 

The place was sold years ago to a developer who made it all into a golf course and then an airport for small planes.  This is it from a different angle and a lot higher up.  So you can still make out the original boxy house with it’s modernizing additions, everything still there but quite transformed.  Sort of like the rest of us who remember it the way it used to be.