The Old Farm

Oak Meadow September 2013

Old man Philbin built the place. He started out with a one room shack, which is now our kitchen. He was a young guy back in 1937 with a lot of energy, a wife and a hankering to live off the land and build himself a farm. He managed to acquire around 40 acres. 20 acres was the side of a low hill, that had two seasonal creeks running through it, over grown with scrub and trees with a trickle spring high up and a good spring down low, and another 20 acres was a beautiful meadow with three surface springs watering it. A county road split the meadow from the scrubby part, however that road was little more then a jeep trail then, the farm site was basically "the end of the road" at that time. He called the place "Philbin's Follies".


Even before he finished the house, Ol' Philbin built the pole barn, using tall native Ponderosa Pines he cut from the property. After he felled the trees he hand peeled them and cured them out, also he took some really big pines to a local saw mill, up the mountain a bit, run by a Preacher man friend o' his, and had them sawed up for siding on the barn. He captured water by digging out the uphill trickle spring and laid out a water line and piped it down to his animals and his garden. Old Mr. Philbin was quite the guy, he got a couple of draft horse type, mustangs from somewhere, tamed them and trained them to do harness work, pulling, and plowing and such. That fella used them to clear the brush off his land, pulling out shrubs one by one; he used them to pull a spring harrow, worked up a pasture in the meadow, and planted it. After he established the pasture, he used his horses to hay his meadow and bring it in, storing it loose in the barn. With those horses he moved fence supplies around, on a skid sled, to remote points on his property, that way he got fences built around the farm. He worked his land, put in crops, and built himself a farm. He had some milk cows and some beef cows, he planted fruit trees, mostly apples, dug a couple of shallow wells one in the meadow and another for house water. He added on to the one room shack; a dining room, a bathroom, a bedroom. Eventually when he and his wife had kids, they added on more bed rooms and a big living room. The days are gone now where one could do things outright as he did...

The old barn before we started working on it

The kids grew up, his wife passed away and he got old. One of his kids, a daughter, married and moved away, happy to get off the farm. The other, his oldest, Wayne, got married too, but instead of moving, he took over the farm from his aging father, who could no longer work it. Wayne was a builder by nature, not a farmer, he got a job as a concrete worker building the Bullards bar dam. He became one of the best concrete workers on the dam, ran crews, was a foreman. He did a lot of improvements to the house and property, he put a concrete floored laundry/utility room on the back of the house, poured cement walks all around the house and a big patio area out back. He built a 30' by 40' concrete floored metal building/shop garage between the house and the barn. Wayne was ambitious, living in the prosperous 1950's, he had a job that paid well. He had two new deep wells drilled, all but abandoned the hand dug shallow well of his father's, the trickle spring's steel pipe irrigation system his father struggled to put in also fell into disuse, becoming dysfunctional by the time we came on the scene. Wayne put in a real septic system, with a leach field. When Old Man Philbin got really old, Wayne talked his dad into selling the meadow land, they didn't use it any more, the cows were gone, the old horses had lived out their lives. They used the money to improve the old house and to start another house on the property, one for Wayne and his own growing family. There came a day old man Philbin took a turn for the worse, he died shortly there after around 1979. After his dad died, Wayne subdivided the remaining property into three parcels, sold one, finished the new house for himself and wife, he rented the old farm house to a series of people, for extra income, over a period of 15 years or so. Eventually, due to his wife's health, he sold all and moved away to Arizona in 1996. The old barn and house sold to a Doctor friend of ours, who bought it as an investment property, the Doctor sold it to us in 1999, making a modest profit.

When we finally acquired the farm it had lain fallow for years. The barn was in need of major repair. The house was a run down rental unit in need of remodeling. The fruit trees were dead or dying from lack of care. The parcel that the house and barn was on, amounted to less than five acres, in short, the old farm was only a shadow of it's former self. Not very appealing, except for location. The old farm did have something significant going for it, though, the right to pump irrigation water from the large pond which had been built across the street, in the meadow. Water is gold in California. They say "A wet acre is worth five dry ones".

The meadow pond

I, (Rebecca),  first became familiar with the farm when I was twenty five, now I'm 60. I was working for a mason pointing stone work, who had contracted with Wayne Philbin to put a stone veneer around a Fisher wood stove he had installed in the big fireplace of the old house. It took about a month to finish the job.

stone work around fire place

Old Man Philbin was still alive then, a house bound 84 year old, I was curious about the history of the area, I asked questions, the old fella used to tell me stories of the old days. He had some talking he wanted to do, I learned a lot. That is how I got to know the history of the farm. I remember I had the weirdest feeling then, that I would "live on the farm property someday", call it premonition or what ever, it was an intense sensation to say the least, one that made a lasting impression on me.


When we bought the old farm, we lived on another property, about a mile away. That property had 25 acres of brush and trees with a nice Tudor style brick home and a ramshackle little barn. It wasn't really farm land, or conducive to farming, it had very little water, hardly enough for house hold use. We ran milk goats on the brush and had a few milk cows, but we could barely water our animals, could not grow crops or irrigate any pasture. I had already been making cheese for quite a few years, but had a hard time making money selling them, because that place, however nice, was pretty far off the beaten trail. People didn't want to drive so far back in the woods. After we bought it, we had rented out the old farm house and the barn for 6 or 7 years, to pay the mortgage. In late 2005, we decided we wanted to move to the old farm. It made more sense to farm there, sure we had to give up living at the place we were at, where the house was newer and fancier and the property larger, but we got the benefits of having a better location, the big old barn, improved soils and water for irrigation.

It was quite a project, packing up 20 years accumulation. The old farm house needed repairs, we hoped minor ones. We started working on the kitchen of the old farm house, patching a bit of wall board, in doing so we found that there was no foundation under the walls of that room. The old man had framed up the first shack (which became the old farm house kitchen) right on the bare ground, all the original 2 by 4's were rotted away sitting, as they were, on the damp ground. The old man had poured concrete between the boards right on the ground, and called it a floor. Building codes were not what they are now, a man could build a house however he pleased back then, for better or worse. The more we dug into the old structure the more we saw needing done.

In the end we gutted the kitchen, and rebuilt it again.The Living room floor had to be rebuilt from the ground up, half the girders supposed to be supporting the sub floor, were hanging loose in the air on one side of the room, the living room floor bounced like a trampoline when you walked on it, bouncing all the furniture on the one side. Gophers had tunneled under the pier blocks, which were just sitting on the bare earth, toppling them, they no longer held up the girders. Every where we looked there were needed repairs. Step by step we rebuilt it ourselves, without much money, paying as we went along.

kitchen gutted and rebuilt

After we rebuilt the living room sub-floor. We decided to put in wood flooring instead of replacing the ancient off white wall to wall carpet, with more carpet. The day after the wood flooring was installed, we had a hard rain. A tire washed into and blocked the culvert under the road, the water backed up and made a lake around the house, a lot of h2o ran under the doors and flooded the place with four inches of water. Quite a shock to find our house full of water the morning after. Up here in the foothills where there is not usually any danger of flooding. In the end not much harm was done and the house dried out.


It finally all got finished. True the job was hard, yet such a good learning experience. I'm glad we did it.We moved in January of 2006, with all the critters and stuff, and ready to start working earnestly on bringing the farm alive. As challenging as remodeling the house was, we were excited to start working on rehabbing the old farm, it was like the adventure we had been working for a long time had finally begun. We had a lot of work to do, but our dream was coming true, finally we had a farm of our own!

The back yard, wild and unkempt 

the day we moved in.