“Honey, when you become a grown lady and it’s time for you to get your own home, get an old one. There’s nothing like the old. Those things were made when people still worked with their hands, when they were still mostly honest, and when people took pride in their work. Don’t waste your time on the new stuff. It’s only pleasing to the eye, not solid for generations.”

Those words were told to me by my grandfather as we sat on the old kitchen stoop of my grandparents’ 1790s log house, eating banana popsicles after a day’s work in the fields when I was just seven years old. I remember them. You see, when my grandfather spoke, it wasn’t just words–it was pure North Carolina foothill farmer wisdom.

My passion of the old began with him. Born in 1929 in a small two-room cabin to sharecroppers in King, North Carolina, he knew quite a bit. Not from his third-grade education, but from good, old-fashioned, God-given common sense.

Much of my childhood memories are wrapped up on that old 50-acre farm. The old homestead that I took my first steps in was built in 1790, with additions in 1850 and a “modern” kitchen added in the 1930s. Most of the house was completely unchanged. No heating, no AC; just good breezes through the windows in the summer and heat from the wood stoves in the winter. My grandfather still had his old horseplows “just in case the tractor broke down”, and I have many memories of making the treck with him down to the cattlebarn to check the horse or to gather eggs, and walking across the farm to check the crops. He always found some way to teach me of the “old ways”.

When he died of pancreatic cancer, we tried to keep the farm up, but there’s not much a widowed lady, her poor-in-health son, a daughter raising two girls of her own, and a son-in-law with a “city job” can do to fight land-hungry developers. Much to our bitter regret, the day came when we had to say goodbye to our beloved farm, the 1790s house, the tobacco barns in continuous use since the 1850s, the old two-seater outhouse, century-old woodshed, corncribs, and packhouse.

When I walked off the old porch for the last time as a fifteen-year-old, I made sure I had the old doorknob and lock safely in my pocket, awaiting the day I would put it in my own old home.

That was my “As God is my witness…” defining moment. I determined I would one day own an old house. While I could not preserve my grandparents’ place that was so dear to me, I could at least preserve somebody’s old place, even if there might not be anyone alive who cared about it anymore. One day, I would have that old house with the picket fence and the wavy glass windows with the wood plaque hanging from the pole by the road that would bear the name of the first owner of my home with a “circa-whatever” giving witness to the years of stories hidden within its walls.

Time went on. I graduated high school and purchased my very first antique piece of furniture–an old 1942 cedar Lane hope chest. My collection grew and my parents kindly put up with their shrinking space in the basement as I continued to collect antiques. I graduated college and began saving my money for an old home.

Three years ago, I finally began my search. Several times I almost “settled” for something not what I truly wanted, shed a few tears, smelt a few funky smells in old houses, even had my high heel plunge through the old wrap porch of a Queen Anne (the termites done packed up and moved off from that one…).

When the day finally came and the McCuiston House was mine, the first thing I put in my new old home was the old doorknob and lock from my grandparents’ house. The old white farmhouse wasn’t the same as the old log place my grandparents called home, but it still hearkened back to a time where the world seemed so much simpler, things were made with pride by hand, and there was still a wide national respect for God and His Word.

The John James McCuiston House is getting a new beginning, and in some ways, I am , too.