Four Mile Historic Park: a place for all seasons

Parks & Recreation, Jan, 1998 by James Edward Hartman

What do they see as they catch glimpses of this wonderful place? Just fields and open space? Maybe. But, those who look closer see far more. They see a magical place of many moods, a historical place for many people, a special place for many reasons, a park for many seasons.

School children come to experience the life of their great, great grandparents: a time less complicated and manipulated by technology, chemicals, and genetic engineering. Here, life is stripped to their senses -- what they can see and hear, touch and smell and feel.

As the sun rises over old Four Mile House, its barns and jack leg fences, the rooster crows and smoke rises from the wood-burning stove where school children will bake cookies and bread before the morning is over. The wash tubs are filled with water from the well, and the hard wooden benches in the canvas schoolhouse await their pupils.

Maybe today the blacksmith will heat up the forge where school classes will gather to watch metal artfully turned into tools and hardware. The teamster may corral Dick and Dan, the muscular Percherons (draft horses), and fit them out to pull a recently restored cherry red Concord coach or a farm wagon loaded with children or maybe a plow or a disc. Across the way, the herb garden offers "pinch-and-sniff" herbs including sage, rosemary, and dill; the kitchen garden proffers its harvest of vegetables and the orchards their apples. This is a day that will bring history to life for children who, in the midst of television, computers, and portable compact disc players, will have a better chance to grasp the history conveyed in their classrooms and books -- the real source of their food.

The log house that the brothers Bratner built, the stage stop and tavern that the widow Calker ran, and the farm house that the Booth family occupied for more than 80 years will soon be filled with visitors. There is the tobacco twist so valued at the time that it sometimes functioned as money, the playing cards with no numbers (for the players who couldn't read the numbers but could count the spots), and Indian chiefs and the nation's fathers, instead of kings and queens (because monarchies were still distrusted in the country). There are the pelts and furs that were traded and the gold-dust scale that measured the transaction and the violin that symbolizes the simplicity of the entertainment available on the frontier.

Across the narrow hall is the 1860s parlor. Abraham Lincoln's picture hangs on the wall, not far from the hair wreath that always begs questions about Victorian taste. The adjacent bedroom has a narrow, short bed shelf where occupants reclined, while upstairs, the open loft shelters the belongings of the typical travelers of the day -- a Civil War-era veteran, a latter-day trapper, a hunter, a miner, and a farmer.

Up five stairs and through a doorway is a different world, one closer to our own, that of the relative luxury brought by the railroad -- the elegant Victorian chairs and settee, the graceful window coverings, the Axminster carpet, the pump organ, comfortable bed and chest of drawers, and kitchen and dining rooms furnished with matching chairs and even a water pump. How times changed from the days of President Lincoln to those of President Harrison.