You Can Go Home Again – Part Two

By Sherry — enjoying life in Virginia

GIVEAWAY! Julianne Holmes aka Julie Hennrikus is celebrating the release of the second book in the Clock Shop Mystery series. She’s been gathering the names of our commenters for the last several days and one lucky person will win a copy of Clock and Dagger so be sure and leave a comment!

I blogged once before about my dad’s home town of Novinger, Missouri. For those of you who don’t know, my maiden name is Novinger. I spent lots of weekends and holidays on my grandparents’ farm in Novinger and was delighted to take my daughter there for the first time in mid-July.

I’m so impressed that this very small town moved the home of one of the founders of the town Issac Novinger (a great, great, great — you get the idea — grandfather). The log cabin stood on a farm near Novinger. They took it apart log by log and rebuilt it in the center of town. Then they turned it into a museum and give tours. We were lucky enough to take a tour.

Novinger was a coal mining town. My grandfather had an old coal mine on his farm. Of course we weren’t ever allowed to go into the mine and much of it looked like it had collapsed. This cart, near the Issac Novinger cabin, looks just like the one from my grandfather’s farm.

There are three things in the cabin that originally belonged to Issac Novinger.

The top left picture is a grain bin made by Issac. The tour guide had no idea I was a mystery writer and told us: If you dropped the lid of this on someone it would kill them. Of course that got my mind whirling. He also made the bench. The magazine is dated August 1911.

The house has three rooms on the lower level:

A spinning wheel sat in the corner of the bedroom.

Our tour guide told us it was unusual for a log cabin to have an upstairs but this cabin did.

After the tour of the cabin we decided to drive out to my grandparents’ farm. I hadn’t been out there in thirty years so I hoped I could still find it. On the way we stopped to see the school my Aunt Ginny taught at.

The roads out to my grandparents’ farm gets smaller and smaller and smaller. My husband wasn’t convinced I could get us there. I recognized my Aunt Alberta and Uncle Bryon’s house and my dad’s best friend Glen Dale Riley’s house.

Then just when my husband was convinced we should give up, (I think the narrow road and private property signs freaked him out) we found it! If you look in the far distance you can see a glimpse of white that was my grandparent’s home.

We spent the night in the town of Kirksville, Missouri where I attended college. On the way from Novinger to Kirksville we stopped at Thousand Hills State Park, the site of many picnics and hikes when I was little and maybe a party or two during college. We had time to stop by the campus of Truman State College (Northeast Missouri State University when I attended and Northeast Missouri State Teachers College when my parents went). We had a fun dinner with my college friends.

It was on to St. Louis for the last leg of our trip. We stopped in my mom’s home town of LaPlata, Missouri.And then we drove on to St. Louis where my friend Dianne arranged a dinner with some of our sorority sisters. It was such a lovely evening! And such a fabulous trip.

Readers: Do you have a favorite memory of a place from your past? Have you been back to visit that place?