Friederich Homestead

This was the old homestead, built about 1835. Harold, David and Al were born in this house. The family that lived in it in 1849 died in the Cholera epidemic that swept the country during that period. Joe bought it from his brother, Charles, in about January of 1923. This picture was taken in 1962 while it was going through some painting and after the front porch had been removed.
The picket fenced garden that almost hid the front of the house from the road. It had permanent paths with flowering plants, rose bushes, Peonies, Lilacs, Gooseberry bushes, Rhubarb, Asparagus and vegetable beds... These were all in the distant past, stripping it of the look and feel of the warn happy homestead it had once been... Several years later it was bulldozed into a rubble that lies in a small thicket of white locust trees on the prairie...the only sounds now are the rustle of the leaves in the prairie breezes, the twitter of the birds and the occasional rustle of a cottontail rabbit.