maslin home

When I was little, my mother would frequently talk about the summers that she spent at her grandmother's and aunt's homes in North Carolina.  Her aunt, my Great-Aunt Martha, had a farm in Tobaccoville, and we'd visited it plenty, but I'd never been to my great-grandmother's house.  It seemed so unfair that I'd never seen this house that was so central to my family's past, so I demanded to go.  I was told that it had been bulldozed long before I was born, replaced by a parking lot.

I would never get to see the house where my grandmother and her sisters were born, where they spent the hard years of the Depression.  The house where Martha threw a party and invited my grandfather, the night he first saw my grandmother (and declared he was going to marry her).  It was gone, and there was nothing I could do about it.  It broke my heart.

So imagine my sheer delight when I came across this treasure while digging through a drawer.

I recognized the columns on the front from snapshots taken in my grandmother's youth, but I was hesitant to believe that I was actually seeing the house.  Fortunately, I come from a long line of women who label the backs of their photos.  I turned it over.

"Maslin Home" "Country Club RD W.S. NC"  In my  grandmother's hand.  I'm so thrilled I could burst.  We're short on old family homes.  This one fell to a bulldozer, and Aunt Martha's Little Field Farm was sold at auction after her death.  It hurts my heart to think about them, but having this little piece of history makes it a little bit better.