Historic Preservation in Indiana: Essays from the Field

12. Guinea Hens in the Churchyard: Signposts of Maple Grove Road

178 Lauren Coleman Guinea Hens in the Churchyard: Signposts of Maple Grove Road The first time my husband and I drove Maple Grove Road, a rural historic district near Bloomington, Indiana, we were surprised. From the descriptions given us by friends, all of whom praised its rural charm,wehadformedanexpectationofidyllic,uninterruptedfarmland dottedwithbenevolentoldfarmhouses.Thefarmlandwasstillthere.But so many of the houses were distinctly modern; the kind with faux-brick façades and preternaturally green lawns; the kind you can’t imagine, a hundred years from now, standing, let alone eliciting the pleasure of the district’s few remaining aged farmhouses, which are as wholly right in their environment as the enormous trees that shade them. I am a twenty-eight-year-old woman from Southern California, where iconic, early twentieth-century Spanish Colonials and Craftsman bungalows coexist with vast tracts of McMansions. My time in Indiana is brief and somewhat arbitrary, the result of my husband’s three-year graduate program. I am a vegetarian of twenty-one years (not, I like to think, of the proselytizing variety; rather of the “this is comfortable for me” variety) who subscribes to homesteading magazines with headlines such as “Butcher Your Own Hogs!” and “Onions: Truffles of the Poor.” Although I do not identify with a sub-culture, I acknowledge that I am somewhat of a cliché: a young, college-educated, temporarily (and not all that uncomfortably) lower-income person, yearning in a vague and naïve way toward a rural way of life I know very little about. At present, myeffortstoaccessthislifeareessentiallylimitedto–ironically–spending money: I pore through my homesteading magazines; I splurge on organic tomatoes at the farmers’ market; I plant carrot seeds that lantwelve Guinea Hens in the Churchyard 179 guish in the clay soil of our side yard. My husband and I talk earnestly of pint-sized houses, backyard chickens, herb gardens. I imagine a life in which I milk goats, bake whole grain bread from scratch, and sell some sort of felt craft on Etsy. In other words, I’m sort of annoying, in the way myhusband’sprecociousfreshmanstudents(“I’mgoingtogetmyPh.D., become a professor at Yale, and write for the New Yorker on the side”) are annoying. Not because my daydreams are wrong or bad, but because theyreekofinexperience,alackofacquaintancewiththerealitiesofgoat poop(Plate13).Andbecausetheymakeoffarmingandlivestockapretty game, where once people lived and died–indeed, still live and die–by poor soil and mastitis. So it is, I appreciate, not surprising that the modern houses of Maple Grove Road–insulated, free of the specter of lead paint, with spacious bedroomsandbuilt-inclosetsandweather-resistantvinylsiding–jarred me, that first drive. They were so insistent on the now, in a town with its fair share of then. Consider Bloomington’s Beaux Arts-style courthouse, dedicated in 1908 and saved from demolition in the 1980s by tenacious local citizenry. Consider the town’s Vinegar Hill Historic District–established in the 1920s and named after the smell from the abandoned, rotting orchards on which its first houses were constructed–where the nation’s limestone carvers built their own homes, embellishing them with fanciful carvings. Consider, through the starved eyes of a Southern California girl, an aforementioned cozy farmhouse, in harmony with its trees and outbuildings like a turkey among cranberries and mashed potatoes on a Rockwellian Thanksgiving table. Of course, Maple Grove Road has a lot more to reveal to the interested . Sure, its flanks are peppered with houses too young to tell many stories. But look closer. Look patiently. There, a mortar-less wall of flat stones–nestled, balanced, one against the other, their crannies inhabited by moss and small animals. The walls were built by itinerant Irish stonemasons in the 1800s, by hand, each rock carefully mated to its surrounding rocks, the walls’ beauty a byproduct of their functionality (Plate 12). Too, the rows of Osage-orange trees, dropping their pale green, brain-like fruit along the roadway to be crushed by tires and hunched over by black, leisurely crows; the trees are no accident, but were planted as windbreaks and thorny cattle hedges, their dense wood 180 Lauren Coleman prized for fence posts, tool handles, yellow-orange dye, long and hotburning fires. Surprisingly, the fruit is the least useful product of these serviceable trees; eating it may induce vomiting. I paused to retrieve an uncrushed globe in early November. Today, it perches on a wooden porch post beside a row of small orange pumpkins, wearing a jaunty cap...