Pang in my heart

Originally published in the October 8, 2000, Springfield News-Leader’s Progress Edition

“Progress was all right, only it went on too long.”

--James Thurber

The peaches held tight. Not yet ripe – little more than fuzzed green skin carpeting the pits with precious little flesh, though growing and sweetening each moment – the peach nodes went down with their tree, succumbing to the dozer’s blade. The apples, also still green, fell before, an easier pushover. Only eight years old, the two apple trees did not present resistance as formidable as the peach tree’s 30-year root hold.

Already gone, spared the earth-trembling treads, were four Concord grape vines, transplanted to safer quarters and thriving with their tap roots thrust into Stone County’s rocky soil. These 50-year-old plants escaped.

Not so for the sugar maple, in its infancy. Neither the redbud, nor the dogwood continued to grow, but were plowed under also beneath heavy machinery.

Though the bulldozer exacted its price, the silver maple still stands. The 100-year-old tree still reaches to the sky, now presiding over and shading a barren lot, in repose. For a stout lower branch hangs cracked with its compound fracture evident. The bark of its trunk is scraped to a gaping wound that, if the tree survives this maltreatment, will scar and mark this dastardly day in the way trees heal themselves: slowly, patiently and oblivious to the danger all about it. A tree cannot flee.

It is these trees, and their demise, that troubles me more than the fact that a 114-year-old home was flattened here. And not any house built in 1886, but the one I owned. I took it, as might be expected, personally. There is a bitterness to match that of the apples halted in their ripening to sweetness.

Where once there stood a home, there is now bare earth.

Where once a structure built while Mark Twain was writing, while Queen Victoria was alive and could lend her name adjectivally to the overwrought American architecture of the day, there will soon be a parking lot.

Where once I and my family worked and ate and slept and loved, there is now nothing, with only photographs to vouchsafe its existence. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it doesn’t keep you dry from the rain.

This home’s demise was not an act of God, but of people. We, the people of Greene County, willed it so through the representation of the three-member County Commission who expressed their interest in purchasing the property – it was always property to them, the historic house was as nothing – to expand the growing holdings of the county on Boonville Avenue and North Campbell Avenue.

There a part of the increasingly vast empire is the under-construction jail facility – among the most useless words in the English language, related appropriately to the word facile, both deriving from the Latin facilis for easy to do – and its footprint ate up parking spaces, already deemed in short supply. So the good people of Greene County needed more parking spaces to conduct their business with the fewest number of steps as possible interceding, and the 114-year-old house impeded that most Springfieldian of desires.

This was part of a plan, albeit an amorphous plan that never contracts but only expands in its purpose of knocking down houses and laying down asphalt. The commissioners negotiated in good faith, mindful of their fiduciary duties to the county’s coffers and aware of the reality that I was in possession of property they wanted.

Of course, the specter of eminent domain loomed as a scythe above my neck. It didn’t come to that. I was paid handsomely for the house, I got my 20 pieces of silver and used it to purchase another house, itself old, grand and beautiful in its way, if 36 years younger.

The old home was demolished in July. Unceremoniously.

With it went all the sweat my family put into it, and of all those families who owned it before.

Gabriel N. Shelton owned the land first, as soon as it had been surveyed and white-man ownership was thus possible, through a land grant from President James K. Polk in 1848. The property passed through the hands of John P. Campbell on its way to Joseph Gott, who subdivided it. The house was built by Alex Clapp, who bought Lot Three of Gott’s Addition and had an $800 mortgage on it. His wife, P.S. Clapp, signed the warranty deed with her mark, an X. Richard W. Barrett in 1902 bought the house and died under its roof in April 1912.

Down the years, the property’s abstract continues to tell the highly abridged story of its owners, on through the mildly scandalous and hugely hilarious photo negatives of our immediate predecessors discovered during our own renovation efforts. These stories remain, of course, even if the craftsmanship and materials and beauty of the structure’s architecture do no longer.

Jesus advised his disciples to give up their worldly possessions and follow him. It is a preachment few of us Christians follow very assiduously. And the Apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians that “old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” if members of their church would but know Christ. I share an affinity with these sentiments, with the idea that our attachment to things material hinder us as we seek to understand our lives.

And yet these things, these buildings, these homes are a connection between who we were and who we might become. It is at our own peril that we knock them down. It is at our own doom that we forget them.

The house at 944 N. Campbell Ave. is gone. That doesn’t mean it must be forgotten.

It is this reticence to hang onto inanimate things that allows me to stomach the sale of my home, the demolition of my home. But trees are animate, if not human.

A pang in my heart for the home now gone diminishes each day. But those trees still bring my blood to a boil. Perhaps it is transference to something more palatable, more explicable.

Whatever, as long as the silver maple that used to grace our view west lives (and it may not be long, given its scarring, given the vast macadam soon to encircle it), I will each autumn think its loosed leaves are shed as tears to the folly of ahistorical humans and I will each spring consider its budding greenness is sprouted as hope to the chance we’ll one day learn.