When the days are growing longer and the sun shines warm, on the south slopes, with the promise of golden hours to come, my thoughts persist in arranging building plans; for always, in the springtime, I want to build a house….
I have a fancy that the farm home should seem to be a product of the soil where it is reared, a permanent growth as it were, of conditions surrounding it, wherever this is possible, and nothing gives this effect more than a house built of rocks from the fields. Such a house, well built, will last for generations. Cement is another material of which lasting and beautiful buildings may be made. Even the common earth, the soil beneath our feet, can be used as building material and will last for hundreds of years….
A house planned with loving thought and carefully built of any of these lasting materials would be a much better monument to one’s memory than a costly stone in a cemetery, because it would be their embodied idea and the work of their hands, an expression of the mind and soul of the builder.
Rocky Ridge Farmhouse: A monument to Laura's memory…
Note: The above excerpts were taken from Laura’s “The Farm Home” column in the Missouri Ruralist, March 5, 1920.