What follows is the history of this house as I’ve gathered it from friends, a past owner, and my own observations.

For the past nine years, I carried around a lot of wrong impressions about this house, picked up from various sources. But when Barbara decided to sell it this time, I got very curious about its history.

“Claytons 1999”

I asked David DeGroot, our neighbor, about it. His parents moved to Living Springs around 1998. He told me that in 2008 he came up to the house with a neighbor and friend, and he noticed the words “Claytons 1999” written somewhere. I was intrigued. Then I found those very words pressed into the concrete at the end of the porch in front of the basement suite. Pretty observant for a 16-year-old kid, I would say. He is as sharp as a tack even now, in his mid-thirties.

The Claytons were an elderly couple. Yurl, the husband, was a music director at a big church. No one around here seems to have known them well. When I cleaned out the house, I found a box of papers with their names on it, and I gave it to Joan Rutz. The Claytons supposedly went back to their hometown around 1999 or 2000.

Jonathan Rutz figures the house was probably built in 1999, since the Claytons’ daughter stayed with him and his family. No one will swear the house went up that year, but a name and date pressed into fresh concrete usually marks when that part of the building was finished.

My friend Jake Jacobson, who passed away about three years ago, did a lot of the work on the building. I haven’t been able to find out who the other carpenters were.

A confusing set of dates

So I figured the house must have been built in 1999. Then I learned from David, the previous owner, that he bought it in 2006. On top of that, the county appraised it in 2003. According to the clerk at the county assessor’s office, the county appraises property every four years. I came to the conclusion that somehow the house was missed, or it was in the middle of being built during 1999 and thus wasn’t appraised. That is all definitely guessing.

So the dates are a little confusing, and I share them here just as I found them.

David’s years

David bought the house in 2006 and spent the next two years fixing it up. It was quite dirty when he got it, he said, but he had good cleaners, carpenters, electricians, and plumbers, and it is so beautiful now. It seems to me he didn’t spare any expense. In 2010 he built the giant 40 x 60 insulated, plumbed, very sturdy metal building.

David didn’t live here full time, mostly on weekends, but I think he did a lot of work on those weekends! People told me he loved his bulldozer, and maybe a backhoe too. The giant boulders that form a retaining wall in front of the house were his doing. Thank you, David!

He also carved a road all the way behind the log house, which works as a kind of erosion control. Now, with an additional ditch dug, the erosion seems to be very little, if any. I love that path so much.

The boulder wall, which I call the boulder cascade, is a lovely place to plant things. It got overgrown over the past two years because I was super busy, but I hope someone will reclaim it and plant something beautiful in every nook and cranny.

David told me he also had trouble with the flow of the spring. He did extensive work and got it all fixed up, so we have been able to enjoy the cisterns being full. The only exceptions have been technical difficulties at the spring, which were easily fixed, and the times someone left the hose running and drained the cisterns dry. Thanks again, David.

There’s also a huge rock near the top of the driveway with the letters TLH, for The Log House. Okay, I am guessing on that one. I’m sure David just dropped that baby right there. There used to be a huge tractor tire there, waiting to become a garden. That never quite worked out, and the tire has been made useful elsewhere, but in the spring the spot looks pretty nice.

David left lots of really good stuff behind for us, too: furniture, building supplies, household items. We accepted the gifts happily. Thank you, David!

Barbara’s vision

When Barbara bought the house with the vision of creating a vegan community, I moved in. Soon after that, my former husband, Robert, who still lives here, moved in also. Taking care of the place was too much for me alone, and Robert, a former contractor and a great handyman, was really helpful, and good company too. Family sickness and other challenges kept Barbara from moving here. For almost a year, the house served as the office, and hired help worked on the land. They planted four fruit trees, and three are still living.

Recently David DeGroot helped clear around those trees and water them so we could save them. He’s our favorite neighbor, a great handyman, and the son of one of the founding residents of Living Springs. The trees are eight years old now and ready to bear, I hope.

I covered as much of the Bermuda grass as I could with cardboard and mulch, using a mattock to dig out rocks big and small. You can read more in this article.

That’s the history of how this house came to us, and how its previous owners really blessed us.

When we had to let go of the vision of the vegan community, a year after we started, Barbara decided to sell the land. Why it never sold during the next eight years is a long story! It seems like we are waiting for the right people to take over the land. We definitely loved it and took good care of it during those years.

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How we wrote this together: This article was written collaboratively by Patricia, a friend of Barbara’s and a resident of the Living Springs Log House, and Claude.ai, an AI assistant made by Anthropic. Patricia gathered the history from neighbors, the previous owner, and her own years on the land, and told it in her own words. Claude put it in order and tidied it, keeping her voice and leaving the open questions open.

A few insights:

• Houses keep their own records. “Claytons 1999” in the porch concrete told more than a listing ever did.
• Much of what makes this place work today — the boulder wall, the back road, a reliable spring — came from patient labor by people like David and Jake.
• History gets clearer when you ask the neighbors. A few questions to David, the previous owner; David DeGroot; and Jonathan Rutz opened up the whole story.