Shannons save family farm home from bulldozer

Contributed photo

Elias Preston "Press" Shannon had worked hard to keep his family farm together, but shortly before his death, he expressed fear that the home he had spent most of his life in would be gone within 10 years.

Although many contractors thought that Randy and Vicki Shannon should bulldoze down this house that once belonged to his great-grandparents and grandparents, they decided to keep it. After many renovations since 1979, it is now the core of a modern home, complete with an attached garage. The home sits on the John Shannon Century Farm located southeast of Marshall near Napton. (Contributed photo) [Click to enlarge]

His prophecy almost came true, because when his grandson John Randall "Randy" Shannon and new wife, Vicki, began looking into remodeling the home, which sits on the family's newly named Century Farm, many contractors told him just to bulldoze it in and start over. After all, the home didn't even have an indoor bathroom.

His father and uncle also thought that would be the best decision.

"Randy and I were the ones that really wanted to rebuild the old house. Earl and Carter didn't want anything to do with it," said Randy's aunt, Mabel Harvey, talking about her brothers.

Randy even agreed it made sense to start over, but fond memories of his grandfather made him want to keep the old house.

"It probably made a lot of sense to push it in and start over, but I had a lot of good memories of going over to grandpa's house," said Randy. "I would just walk in the house and he would be asleep in the chair underneath the stairway there. He had any easy chair with a little lamp next to it and a TV tray with his newspapers on it. He'd be asleep and I'd just sit on the couch there and look at him. Pretty soon he would open his eyes and start talking to me like he knew I was there all along."

He also remembers the riddles his grandfather liked to tell.

"His favorite one was 'Have you ever kissed a pig all you wanted?' There is no correct answer to that question, because if you say no, he'd say 'Why'd you stop?' and if you said yes, then you'd kissed a pig," laughed Randy.

The home, which consisted of two rooms upstairs and two rooms downstairs, was already on the farm when John Shannon and his wife, Margaret Lawler Shannon, moved there in October 1888, with their eight children, when Press was just 6 months old.

"When I was younger, Aunt Mabel always said it was built sometime around the Civil War," said Randy.

At the time, it apparently didn't have an attached kitchen, as Mabel said her grandmother said John moved a summer kitchen, attaching it onto the house.

"Grandpa moved that room onto the house and attached it before he died," said Mabel.

Underneath, the original house is made out of logs and in the crawl space the logs are still there. The floor joists are all logs and all the outside perimeter of the original house and added kitchen are logs.

Instead of 2 x 4s as modern houses have, the studs are more like 3 x 5s made from native oak timber.

Despite the advice to tear it down, they finally found someone to help them remodel the house: 96-year-old Logan Buntin.

"Logan Buntin was a person who was a good friend of my grandpa's and had worked on it in the 1950s when they put the new roof on, so he appreciated what we were doing," said Randy. "His work made it possible for us then to get it in good enough shape that we could later hire other people to do other work."

One of the first projects was to repair a rotten spot in the log underneath the front door, so Randy and Buntin had to jack the house up and cut it out and put in a splice.

"He was amazed. He put a house-jack on one corner of the house, and it is 30 feet wide across the front of the old house there and when he jacked it up, it raised the whole house up on that one corner," said Randy. "Mr. Buntin said he guessed the house was settled into its ways."

After fixing the splice, they had more work in order to build a solid foundation for future projects.

"To put our foundation around in 1979, he used a broad axe and layed on his back and chopped the bottom of the logs because they were round, of course, and had to be flat so we could put concrete blocks up to them," he said, explaining you couldn't put a square surface up next to a round surface.

"I was supposedly helping him, but I think he probably did the lion's share of the work even though I was young. He was very slow but very steady, and he just kept on chop, chop, chopping away. I would get under there and go fast all in a hurry then I'd lay there panting on the ground and I'd go back and try again," he said.

Because of that foundation, they have through the years, added on to the house several times. Although now grown, their children Jonathan and Bethany were raised there.

"Since that time we've built about in every direction you can go. We put a basement under, we built back, we built to the south, we built to the north with a porch, we built to the west with a garage, we built to the east with another room," said Randy.

Although he had made a room for it, the house never had indoor plumbing until they added it in 1979.

"Dad said if I didn't get a bathroom in for mother, you're not putting one in for me," said Mabel, who said her father had built the room, but hadn't added the bathroom when her mother, Lillie, died in 1955.

"He did have a pump connected to a cistern, so he did have running water at the sink. But he never put in a bathroom."

At the barn, the farm has always had a "living well, which was good-flavored water and dad always had an electric pump on it," said Mabel. In the summer time many people would come there to get five gallons of water, so they would have good drinking water. "We never did have to drink cistern water," she said.

The hand-dug well, which is still there, is 18 feet deep.

When they moved into their "new" home, Randy and Vicki hooked up to the well, hoping to use it for their indoor water needs.

"It was the drought of 1980 when we moved in, and the very first day we ran the well dry. So we got on city water, right after that."

After they moved in, there was still an old pear tree left in the yard.

"There was a pear tree and Grandma Shannon loved that pear tree and she picked up those pears and she helped can pears. Randy still had that pear tree after he got the farm," said Mabel.

Although he may have originally been skeptical about keeping the house, Carter seems proud of his son's efforts.

"He's made an awful nice home," he said.

Contact Marcia Gorrell at marshallag@socket.net