Catch-Up 3: Moving Day!

This was the day of the big move. The JayBee only had to be moved a few dozen feet; so close, yet so far.

Lots of planning, and checking, and adjusting, and hemming and hawing. I just stood back and let these guys figure things out. I had wondered if I would be too nervous to watch this process...

It turned out that these guys were very careful, and thoughtful, and gentle--so I trusted them to do a good job and was pretty relaxed during the move.

While I waited for the plans to become fully formed, I wandered around and took pictures of ducks.

I had wondered if I might need to buy new tires for the JayBee's move. They had sat in the same spot, buried in mud, for nine years, and they had no air in them. Did I ever get lucky, though! It took a lot of work but, eventually, all six tires held air again for the move.

Starting to move. The excavator was used to move the JayBee because it made pivoting in tight quarters much easier.

Starting the jackknife turn towards the new foundation...

Doesn't look like those tires are going to make it up onto the slab, does it?!

A number of boards wedged this way and that...

And there she goes.

Lots of assessing and tweaking the final position.

And, there she is. The JayBee in her new home. Ta da!

Catch-Up 2: New Foundations & Driveway

 I now have a driveway that sheds rainwater instead of collecting it! Revolutionary.

Here are the forms for the slab foundations being built...

Then the new foundations were poured. First, for the new shop.

Then, for the JayBee.

Here's the JayBee's new home--complete with tie downs, water line, and septic line.

Catch-Up 1: First Came Demolition

Just when you think I won't finish my tiny house in my lifetime (or in anyone else's lifetime, for that matter), I actually have progress to report.

Up until now, I have been too busy to blog. I decided months ago to sacrifice reporting on my progress in order to make a lot of steady progress. At some point in the spring, I decided this had to be the year I tore down my wreck of a house and replaced it with the JayBee. The JayBee was too far out of level and it couldn't be easily leveled back up, so I didn't feel I could work on it where it was. I had limped the wreck of a house through yet another winter, but it was so clearly beyond its useful life, I knew it had to be put out of its misery.

All of my non-working time in the spring and summer went into packing and organizing stuff, selling and giving away loads of stuff, and endlessly moving stuff from one location to another. Summer here was unseasonably wet, which added to the challenge of moving so much stuff around. I managed to sell 25 pieces of furniture and appliances by advertising on Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace. While it all went relatively smoothly, it took a lot of time. For many weeks, I continuously put a steady stream of things at the end of my driveway under a "free stuff" sign, and most of it magically disappeared! I filled my car multiple times with things I donated to Goodwill. And, thankfully, I live near a fabric recycling bin, because I loaded that thing up three or four times. I am blowing by these months of labor with this brief description because it's the boring part. But! I've said this before, and I'll say it again: The downsizing part of this project was the hardest part for me--harder than anything I've encountered during the construction process. I got so burned out on it; I thought it might kill me. (No joke.) I had the last stuff moved out of the house only one hour before demolition began. (Phew!)

Now for the more interesting stuff...

The river was quiet and pretty before 7:00AM on demo day.

I walked around the house and thanked it for its years of service and for all the life lived and memories created there.

All of my remaining belongings (and the things not yet installed in the JayBee) were stored in these U-HAUL U-BOXES lining the driveway.

There wasn't a lot of space to work with, so the dumpster ended up really close to the JayBee.

The first thing the excavator took was the ramshackle addition on the side of the house that I had used to store wood and tools.

The garage went next.

I had to go to work as the tear-down of the main house started, so I missed that part.

At the end of the day, this is what was left:

I loved watching the skill with which the driver maneuvered the excavator. All of the pieces of foundation wall were carefully laid down in the crawl space--to minimize the waste that had to be hauled off, and to minimize the amount of fill that had to be brought in.

Hard to believe there was ever a house here!

Mounds of fill was brought in to raise up where the new shop/office will be. That's right: I'm having a wood shop/office space built on the site of the old garage.

No small blessing during the demo and excavation days: It didn't rain! Miracles do occur.

Fort Richmond

Last autumn while driving home from an appointment just days after buying a new phone (going from an iPhone 5 SE to an iPhone 11 Pro is a dramatic leap!), I decided to stop at the new Dresden-Richmond bridge, walk to the top of the bridge, and practice using my new phone's camera. (Maybe the bridge no longer qualifies as "new," since it was completed in 2014.) The old bridge, built in 1931, was a flat metal swing bridge. The middle section would swing open to allow tall ships to pass up or down river. The new bridge stands much taller--steeply sweeping up and down. It was designed with 75 feet of clearance during high tide so that no ship will be blocked from passing beneath it. This photo, taken before the old bridge was removed, shows how dramatically different the new bridge is from the old bridge.

The bridge today:

Hiking up to the top of the bridge was much scarier than I anticipated. The breakdown lane is a narrow footpath, the bridge is very high above the water, and traffic zips along at quite a clip. The reward was worth it, though.

Looking north up the Kennebec River:

Looking south:

The Kennebec splits here. In the middle is Swan Island. To the east (left), the water flows south between the island and the town of Dresden.

To the west (right), the water flows south between the island and the town of Richmond.

Swan Island is a gem. It is a 4-mile long, narrow, 1755-acre island that was once its own town (Perkins) and is now the Unorganized Territory of Perkins. Bald eagles have always called the island home. In fact, one of the stories about how the island got its name asserts it was named using the Abenaki word "sowangen" for "island of eagles." After DDT decimated the eagle population, the 1972 DDT ban helped the population recover. Now, the bald eagle population in Maine is growing by 7% a year. There are some bald eagle nesting sites on Swan Island that have been used on and off for decades.

Centuries ago, the four bands of the Kennebec Indians of the Abenaki First Nation--each with their own chief--all paid homage to Chief Kennebis who lived on Little Swan Island, which hugs Swan Island's eastern shore. There was also a Kennebec summer hunting camp on the southern end of Swan Island.

In the 1800s, up to 100 white settlers lived and worked on Swan Island--farming, fishing, logging, shipbuilding, blacksmithing, brick- and glassmaking, and ice harvesting [see link and link]. Over the following decades, the end of ice harvesting, the Great Depression, the decline in prosperity of small farms and, finally, the suspension of ferry service to Swan Island, all contributed to residents moving off the island. The last full-time resident left in the 1960s. In 1988, the island became a wildlife management area; in 1996, the island was added to the National Historic Register. Now people can visit it for the day or to camp overnight. (See this site for more info.)

Prior to this picture-taking stop at the bridge, I had no idea that there used to be a fort at this location. What an interesting discovery! The small park on the Richmond side of the bridge has a number of informational plaques about Fort Richmond.

Before construction began on the new bridge, the Maine Historic Preservation Commission dug some test pits at the site, which revealed remains of the fort. This then led to an archeological dig that lasted from 2012 into 2013. There is a great presentation of some of the archeological finds here and a Facebook page for the dig here. The use of the site changed from one decade to the next, and the structures on the site were torn down and replaced many times over. Therefore, one of the challenges of the dig was figuring out which artifacts belonged to which era.

Fort Richmond was a British fort on the west bank of the Kennebec River, just north of Swan Island. Begun in 1721 as a garrison, by 1723 it was a full fort surrounded by a palisade. When it was rebuilt in 1740, the palisade walls were raised from 86 feet to 96 feet high. When at the height of its activity, the fort had a blockhouse, truck house (trading post), chapel, quarters for officers and soldiers, and ten or more cannons.

The Abenakis had long been in the area, and a few French settlers had already moved into the area, when the British built the fort. The fort was strategically positioned just beyond the northernmost reach of English settlement at that time in order to facilitate expanding English settlement territory northward. 

Initially, the site's trading post helped forge trading relationships between natives and settlers. The location on the river--a transportation super-highway back then--made the site more easily accessible as well. Relations between the English settlers and the Abenakis quickly deteriorated. The Abenakis willingly sold large tracts of land to the English but they thought they were granting the English hunting and fishing rights. The English thought they were buying the land itself and could do what they wanted on it and with it. The English also repeatedly violated the terms of treaties they signed with the Abenakis. 

It would take pages to detail all of the shifts in alliances and all the wars that occurred in this region (between different tribes, the French, and the English) over the decades and centuries. There were raids, attacks, sieges, slaughters, people taken captive--at the fort or within a few miles of the fort.

The fort was dismantled in 1755. By then, the English had settled further north and had built three other forts on the Kennebec River: Fort Frankfort in Dresden (later renamed Fort Shirley), Fort Western in Augusta, and Fort Halifax in Winslow. The site became the Parks family homestead from 1776 until 1830. During that period, the fort's cellars were used as garbage pits, which added artifacts to be found during the 2012 archaeological dig.