This is my brother's house in Mapleton, which was my grandmother's house when we were kids. I climbed to the top of that barn and did somersaults into the haypile, picked strawberries, raspberries, cranberries in the meadows and hedgerows with my mother, and picked fiddleheads in the swamps out back with my father. I launched Estes rockets from the lawn with my older brother, picked apples from the trees out front, watched Dad milk the cows, and spent hours with Grammy hearing stories of her family. We put targets on the haybales on one side of the barn and shot arrows from the opposite loft. We chased each other everywhere and played hide & seek in the stalls and haylofts. One cousin and I surprised a HUGE racoon in the loft once. I fell off another cousin's pony in that driveway. I cut through the cow pasture and got chased by a bull. I started to build a cabin in the tiny strip of trees behind the barn but never got the walls up, so we used the floor as a deck. We build bridges across the small creek, and that tiny strip of trees became Sherwood Forest. Dad took Grampy's old pung (a small sleigh) out of the barn and welded wide runners on it so we could haul it behind the double-track Skidoo. We played on the rock pile and shot 22s at tin cans. When I stayed overnight with Grammy, I learned about hot water bottles and chamber pots. I still have one of Grammy's armchairs - she used to push two of them together to make a bed for me when I was little. I also have a cabinet full of miniature creamers that her relatives and friends would bring her from their travels, many with slips of paper inside with the name of each person in her handwriting. The barn hasn't housed animals since I was a child, and is now collapsing in on itself, but when I look at it, I still see it like this.

Something went wrong. This is NOT my family's house. Ours is the next one - how do I delete this?

This was the farm of Travis and Eunice Turner on the Hughes Road in Mapleton--my Grandparents. Their two children, Marilyn McPherson and Paul Turner. Eunice is currently 99 years young and lives in retirement in Presque Isle. My grandfather farmed and wrote a memoir on farming in the "County".

Thank you Michael for your correction. Now Terri & John Lockhart live here. I have wanted a photo that still had the barn that stood here. We have always refereed to our home as the "Old Turner Farm". I bought this home in 1997 from Alan and Dana Fields who bought it from the Turners. I LOVE this old home and have found news papers dated as far back as 1895 in the walls while insulating. Any history you can give on this would thrill me. My dream would be to put up another barn where the old one use to stand. There are still old Readers Digest books tucked in the floor rafters of the cellar in the old house that Travis and Eunice use to read. I have left them there and always will. Thank you again Michael.