A life I could have had...
A life I could have had...
Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the hippies, including a good number of Vietnam war draft dodgers, were moving to the rural area south-east of Algonquin Park in Ontario, known as the Killaloe area. There they were building and living in Buckminster Fuller geodesic domes, or were buying up farms with rustic farmhouses. I have a big collection of photos of the area and the activities that went on there like auctions, etc. but they're all in storage in Canada. All of them were taken with my beloved Canon F1 35mm SLR and processed in my darkroom.
Many of those people were my friends, as I was known as a weekend hippie back then, and I often drove up to their places and even considered buying a farm and moving there. I talked two of my friends into buying farms there - one was bought by a husband and wife who were folk musicians, but these are the barns at a farm bought by a partnership of a Rock and Roll group leader and their manager who were my clients. The barns were in great condition. They rarely used the property, so many times I stayed in the farmhouse that was heated by an antique wood-burning cookstove and a pot belly one, but the run to the outhouse in winter was freezing.
When you walked along the road in front of the house where the power lines were it was so quiet in the area that you could hear the wires singing. This is a logger's road a short walk from their farmhouse. As you can see they cleared out virtually anything old.
I saw a farm I fell in love with, and could have bought, but I guess I was still a city person. This is a photo of the farm I wanted to buy.
It was idyllic, tucked away on a gravel road near Rockingham, a post office village with a general store, gas station, one-room schoolhouse, a couple of houses and not much else. What you are looking at is a 300 acre property including a 35 acre spring-fed lake stocked with bass, 65 acres cleared and the rest forest. I took this photo from a spot close to the road and beside an abandoned one-room brick school house that was on the property and could have been developed into a home. There is a long drive into where the farm house sits with a barn. The house was a tight little insulated bungalow with a drilled well and a cistern to collect rain water from the roof, and it had indoor plumbing which was unusual for that area. The barn wasn't in good condition, but there was a little cabin at the edge of the lake that you can't see. The owners were old and wanted to retire into town, so they wanted $15,000 for the place - can you believe I didn't buy it?
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