The Tattered Dress

By Beth Yarbrough

This 1881 farmhouse in Rutherford County, NC has been a homeplace for nearly 140 years. By my count, it could have sheltered at least five generations. That is enough to make any girl hold her head high, even one who is wearing a tattered dress.

These places survive today only because they were built to last by men who trusted that their children and grandchildren and beyond would one day take up residence. Today I ride by the old ones and there is often a newer, smaller house built just off to one side, evidence that a later generation couldn’t afford the upkeep on the old place or simply didn’t want to fool with it.

It touches me that even in those cases, the homesteads remain. You can hear the pride in the voices of those who grew up there but now live across the road, or on a parcel just next door. They will tell you how many generations of their family lived there, who built it originally, and will very often throw in an anecdote about the time the chimney caught fire or a strong storm came through and took down a big oak, pointing to where it once stood.

For as long as they can, the people who called these places home want to keep them alive, if only in the telling of their stories. I stopped for this one just long enough to get the photo, looking up the year built after I returned home. There were no storytellers that day, only the house itself.

There is no historic designation that I could find, no marker by the side of the road, but there should be, even if George Washington never came calling. Chimney fires and fallen oaks and tattered dresses and the lives that were sheltered and shaped would be reason enough.