Farmstead draws history lovers for 150th birthday

"This really was an ugly room," Sandi Heidorn tells her tour group. "It took a lot of Lysol to clean the mildew up." She is referring to the sitting room in Big Hill Farmstead, a home on the list of the National Register of Historic Places which is celebrating its sesquicentennial -- that's 150 years.

"It really was a labor of love," Heidorn explained. "My friends in St. Louis wondered why I, with my big earrings and red nails, would want to spend all of my time at a farm. Well, I think this is a grand old place."

Heidorn's boyfriend, Dan Johnson, is the heir and current resident of the farmstead, which is on Route PP in Jackson. "When we started dating," she said, "he brought me to this house. I was digging around and found a document that said the first owners moved in on July 3, 1855. I told Dan we had to have a party. I mean, how many families stay with a house for so many generations?"

The home indeed has quite a past. Historical documents are scattered for guests to see. On the wall hangs a Spanish land grant given to William Daugherty, who came from West Virginia to settle the territory. Harrison Harvey Minton Williams, a lawyer and active member of the community, married Bernice Daugherty and the two were the first to live in the farm home.

"They had a celebration the day after they moved in," Heidorn said. "The menu of the day was fried chicken, potato salad, and fruit pies, and so that's what we'll be having today!" Guests touring the home can salivate over the 10 apple, peach and cherry pies lining the red, white and blue table in the kitchen -- as well as experience the rich history the objects and furniture in the house display.

Johnson said that the owners of Big Hill owned a small number of slaves, which H.H.M. Williams, a Northern sympathizer, released voluntarily after President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. The only person who suffered, he said, was Bernice, who often complained in letters about how hard it was to cook and clean without the slaves at "Fairy Lawn," as she liked to call the farmstead.

Johnson speculates that the relationship between the slaves and their master was a good one, illustrating his point with an ancient fiddle, on which all of but two strings remain. The fiddle, he said, belonged to a slave named Bartley. After Bartley was freed, he continued to return to the home occasionally to play it, accompanied by a member of the family on the piano. When he died in 1906, the same year as H.H.M. Williams, Bartley's family gave the fiddle to the surviving relatives.

Among these noteworthy objects is an antique-lover's paradise. Much of the furniture is original to the house, like a piano that was shipped by sea and land, and old books, documents, and oblects of art are scattered about.

"We've made no structural changes," said Johnson. "All we've done is some painting, hung some drapes, that sort of thing." He explains that the house didn't have indoor plumbing until the late sixties, but it did have one of the earliest phone lines in Jackson.

Johnson is unsure about the fate of the home. "I figure I'll be here for the rest of my life. This place resonates with me. I feel at home and comfortable here. But I don't know what will happen to this house in a hundred years. I don't really have any relatives here. I'd like to possible open it up like the Oliver House or Bollinger mill but I just don't know."

Heidorn expects the estimated 70 people who will come through the home to celebrate its birthday to leave with a sense of permanence. "People need to see history to appreciate it." She is surrounded by the black and white and sepia photographs of generations. "This home deserves to have life in it."