Freedom of Expression
Posted By Randy on December 19, 2010
Click the picture for a larger view.
Where Mrs. LFM and I call home, a lot of people live inside of antiques. Many of the houses hereabouts have passed their first century which makes them slightly older than me.
One of the houses we are professionally involved with protecting from the Dread Prophet Murphy is a massive pile atop a hill in Green Bay, Lunenburg County. First a family home, later a nursing home, and now once again a private seasonal dwelling, the place is only a little smaller than a Zeppelin hangar and has an interesting history.
The story goes that the house was built by a man who owned and operated a successful local general store, success made all the moreso by the fact that it was the only one for miles. The house was built much larger than needed because the man had married a woman with delusions of grandeur, and the continual additions and embellishments at her behest ultimately put an end to both the family fortune and the marriage.
Click the picture for a larger view.
Among the embellishments I speak of are some beautiful wood carvings that adorn most of the door casings on the main floor. I say “most of” because, as one walks from room to room, it becomes obvious that the job of carving the doorways was not only never completed, but that it came to a sudden end at one critical point.
To pick up the story again, it’s said that the talented wood carver who created the work I’ve pictured here had a problem with his elbow – it kept bending on the job. To make matters worse, the foreman who hired him was a temperate man who was reaching the end of his rope on this particular project. So much so that one morning he read the riot act to the wood carver as soon as he showed up for work.
The foreman's portrait. Click the picture for a larger view.
The carver said nothing and went straight to work leading the temperate foreman to believe that he had finally gotten through to his wayward charge. Some hours later however, the foreman returned to the site only to meet up with an obviously intoxicated wood carver who proudly announced he had just finished carving the foreman’s portrait (the picture at left).
A firing was never so swift.
Wonderful story ! We, just this evening, visited an open house which is annually internally decorated for Xmas. The house was once the Lutheran Parsonage on Phoenix St., in Bridgewater and was built in 1885. One of the most interesting architectural stuctures that I’ve ever seen. The craftsmen of yesteryear were indeed unsung heroic artists, the likes of which we will never witness again.