History in this House!

When I was a little girl, I used to dream about living in a log cabin.  I read those Little House on the Prairie books and wanted to be Laura so bad!!!  Well, the main part of this house was built in the 1880s, and I am living a small part of my dream.  It is so incredibly cool to tear back the layers of this house and dream about all of the people who must have lived here.  We have torn back layers and layers of wallpaper and flooring and have found several artifacts that are just too cool!  I love taking pictures of this stuff and preserving little pieces of history.  Here are a few pictures of the things we have found so far.

I decided to take pictures of all of the types of wallpaper we found as we were tearing down walls.  This isn't even all of them!  Justin worked too fast for me to catch them all.  My favorite is the Mexican border at the top.  Makes you wonder who lived here!?!

This is a collage of the flooring.  There were way more than this, they just were not as easy to get to as  the wallpaper samples.  The kitchen had so many layers of flooring that it was more than an inch thicker than the wood floor in the dining room!  There were several new sub-layers and countless layers of sticky tiles layered on top of each other.  We're wondering if the top middle tiles were from the same era as the Mexican border. :)

These fell out from behind one of the kitchen walls when we were ripping them out.  They are pretty funny if you can actually read them. 

This is the back of those postcards.  They have one cent stamps and the date on them is in 1951.  Pretty cool!!

A teapot we found in the crawl space.  

A very old pot...the bottom is completely rusted out.

Notice that it says "Made to date Jan'y 1897!"  This was from an old stove.

Homemade nails found in most of the old section of the house.

This is my little display of some of our finds.  

This says Dr W B Caldwell's Syrup Pepsin.  This bottle still has the original cork in  it!

The interesting part of this picture is the greenish section.  That is very old wood siding.

This is my log cabin!  The main part of the house was built with tongue and groove wood planks.  The original house had no plumbing and consisted of what is now the kitchen, dining room, and the two rooms upstairs!

This is the back room of the house stripped of dry wall.  This was added on to the original house, but the wood looks way different.  Justin and his dad guess that this part was made with reused wood....possibly during the depression?  We don't really know, but it's fun to speculate.  There still would not have been any plumbing when this was added on!  Also, I don't know if you can really tell, but these old windows have weights on them.  They are super old!

I love finding these things.  Sadly, I don't think that we have found any Antique Road Show worthy items, but I am making a collection anyway.  I think I'll have to make a display of some kind once the house is finished!