Home Sweet Home!
Home Sweet Home!
Moving home to the family homestead.
In the early 1920’s a young English immigrant named William Bradshaw and his wife Orlean purchased a small farm just South of a bustling Railroad town in the West-Central Indiana town of Carbon.
This property has changed owners within the family for now over a hundred years.
His youngest son Bob and his wife Norma raised two sons Rich and Rob until they were teenagers, then built a home on a nearby pond.
Later, his middle son John and his wife Carolyn moved their three high school age children Don, Lisa, and Jay back to the farm from a career with 3M in Northern Minnesota. John would later buy a home down the road from the farm, but remained farming the property and raising Short Horn cattle until his passing in 2013.
Don would continue the cattle operation and remodel the farm house until an untimely fire (the third in the farm house history) cause major damage to the house. Undeterred, he began the process of rebuilding the farm house and with assistance from a family friend named Kenneth Thom, was able to plan an addition to the house and put on a red metal roof and a sharp looking grey vinyl siding to give the house a traditional farmhouse look. The entire house was gutted down to the studs with big plans for the future.
Unfortunately, Don passed away suddenly in 2021 and the house seemed doomed to sit unoccupied and unfinished.
Little did we know that William and Orlean’s great-granddaughter Elizabeth and her husband Noah Coley and their five children were just the type of adventurous souls who were looking for an opportunity to raise their kids in the country with traditional values found on a homestead. Their children Henry, Elliott, Benjamin, and twins Amelia and Arthur love being outside playing with their chickens and Henry’s 4-H Goats. While it wasn’t on their radar to ever move back to the family homestead, when the opportunity presented itself it was a perfect match.
This site is where we are going to document all of the hard work of rebuilding a house, raising children, and establishing our own roots in the family homestead.
We have big dreams for this place! A farmhouse where we can raise our family and teach them how to become good partners for their future spouses. Raising animals and gardening to offset some of the food we rely on to eat, and for teaching skills on how to cook and not be solely reliant on someone else for essentials. And taking on big scary projects like rebuilding a house, converting the upper portion of a barn for a gymnasium, planting a garden and orchard, raising meat chickens and so much more…
It has not been, nor will it be easy, but everyday it gives us opportunities to reconnect with our past and sow seeds of opportunity for our future.
If you would like to join us for this ride please consider subscribing to this newsletter and our social media for updates.
Noah and Elizabeth