Tracing My Roots

I had the opportunity this weekend to go someplace I've wanted to go for a long time.  Even though it's just a stone's throw from my home, it's taken me almost 40 years to get there. 

I'm fortunate to live in an area where parts of my family have lived since pre-Civil War times, and I am also fortunate to have had a granny who loved to tell me about all those folks.  She'd tell me the stories of their lives, lived so long ago, with such color and salt that I became completely infatuated.  I wanted so badly to see them myself, and the places where they lived out those tales.  Yesterday I decided to try.

It was a beautiful late summer evening when Will and I began our hike back in the woods to the homestead of my great-great-grandparents, George Orwan and Margaret Sanders Orwan.  She was the daughter of a plantation-owning Southern sympathizer, and he was a Northern soldier. 

These two were star-crossed lovers, meeting during the almost forgotten Battle of Brushy Hill that was fought near our town during the War Between the States. 

The battle was fought in the field surrounding this spring, supposedly over the very rights to the spring. The battle may have even involved a band of gypsies who were squatting nearby, and the local Native Americans, who had dug out and cleaned up the spring, and were camping around it. 

On this peaceful evening it was almost impossible to comprehend the agonizing battle that raged around that very spot, especially when it was so easy for us to walk right up and get a drink.

With our bottles of fresh spring water in hand, we continued on up the path beside the creek.  Just a bit further along, we came into a clearing accented by a massive clump of yucca plants, and I knew we had reached our destination:  The Orwan Homestead. 

This is where Mr. Orwan returned to after the war.  He settled on the very land where he fought that terrible battle, then he married his true love, Miss Sanders (despite her father's objections) and built their homestead just up from the spring.

He raised his family there, and even allowed the gypsies and Indians to use the land and spring just as they had before the war.  We believe this is a photo of the Orwan family, after the kids were grown. 

I was lost in my thoughts of this family as I approached the yuccas, and I realized as I drew nearer that I was actually in a garden.  Albeit, a long abandoned and very overgrown one.  I was overwhelmed as I gazed at a huge lilac surrounded by massive clusters of daylilies and flag iris.  There were sweet pea vines climbing shamelessly through it all, and a border of baby's breath and asters that stretched as far into the brush as I could see.  

I knew exactly who's garden it was, too--Aint Lib's. 

Lizzie (or Aint Lib, as Granny called her) was one of the Orwan daughters.  Lib loved to garden and always grew a yard full of beautiful flowers.  Her first love had been killed in Europe during World War I, and so she never married.  She remained on her parent's homestead with her other two unmarried sisters until her death in the 1940's.   

This is Lib in her garden, with her niece, a few years before Lib passed away.

And this is me in Aint Lib's garden, seventy years after it was abandoned. 
I wanted to stay forever.  But, night was falling and my time was running out. 

After tearing myself away from the place where Lizzie "Lib" Orwan found her solace,
I searched the area for signs of any structural remains while Will explored the field.

I came up empty-handed; he found a wild turkey feather.

Will stuck the feather in his hair and took off whooping and hollering through the field, and I gave up and sat down in the lily patch.  I closed my eyes and tried to visualize the place full of life and activity.  After a few moments, I was startled out of my trance by the sound of children's voices.  I looked around in amazement, wondering if I had accidentally conjured up some voices from the past.  And then around the bend came my friends Andrew and Lindsay and their kids. 

Whew!  Since Andrew's family now owns the property I was sitting on, his appearance certainly made more sense than that of ghosts from the past! 

I hadn't lost my mind after all. 
Keep your comments to yourself, please. 

I was grateful for Andrew's arrival, because he was able to lead me to the last remaining structural remnant of the Orwan Homestead:  the root cellar.  Now hidden deep in a grove of cedars and brush, the cellar had eluded my earlier search.  It's certainly not in great shape, especially after a tree fell on it a few years back and the roof caved in.  But I was thrilled to find it.  

We stood quietly, murmuring in hushed tones about all that had occurred there, and then, with the sun setting over the horizon, we slowly made our way out of the woods of the previous century, and back to civilization and the modern world. 

And as it always goes, the kids made it back quicker than we did!