Grandma's Panaca Home

When I was a kid in the 50s, I loved to visit Panaca. Often we would travel from Panguitch, later from Provo or Logan. As Karen and Weston and Brenda came along, the kids rode in the camper and vied for first glimpse bragging rights. The first who saw the lights of Panaca from the summit won. Grandma Mathews' home was defended by four huge honey locust trees. Invariably, when Dad pulled the pickup parallel to the fence, the camper would scrape on the lower tree limbs. Grandma's house was always dark. No visible street lights until after we moved into Grandma's house in 1981. Grandma was very unassuming. She greeted us with a quiet smile. Hugs were exchanged and a few muttered pleasantries. Sometimes Grandma would just go back to bed after saying "Hello."

I loved sleeping in the back porch bedroom. It was away from adult scrutiny. The only drawback was having to go through the bathroom to get to the bedroom. Fortunately, the bedroom had an outside access. The other part of the house that fascinated me was the cellar. It was dark, dank, and dusty - as if nobody had been down there in decades. The steps were steep and the shelves filled with bottled fruit or vegetables from Medieval times.

One of the more entertaining pastimes when I was a kid was chopping up and old stump with a rusty, neglected Butcher knife. The knife was forever in that stump. Grandkids would whack, whittle, and chop on the stump for what seemed hours on end. I threw the knife away and removed the stump when we moved in, a tragedy really. I didn't want my kids getting hurt, and the stump's roots had long since dry rotted away.

When the sewer system was installed doing away with the need for a septic tank, the old cement block tank covered with cedar poles and dirt gradually caved in. I filled it in with gravel hauled by hand from a belly-dump's worth in front of the fence using the old homemade wheelbarrow. Later we assembled a metal shed over the place.

Anyway, here are some recent pictures of the old homestead.