Hello and Welcome to Bearfort Lodge. I hope that you enjoy your visit and find the information you seek. Please feel free to leave a comment. -- Bearfort

For years it had sat in boxes and crates in the recesses of a storage area in the barn back in Illinois. As a kid I remember many times having to move it here or there with instructions to keep the boxes together when ever that part of the barn was ‘reorganized’.

Each box had a few pieces of this and that and a drawer front or two. Here and there a stile was mixed in with a piece of molding or a shelf. Larger pieces had been neatly stacked atop or along side the boxes in no particular order. Some boxes held doors, handles and hinges and a small drawer or two and always provided perfect shelter for spiders and mice among the captured debris.

The cabinet itself had been reduced to a stack of slats and boards tucked away in the corner loosely tied together with baling twine.

So many times I remember someone saying “just throw it out” or “why don’t you get rid of all this junk?” The reply was always the same - “leave it be, it just needs to be put back together” end of conversation.

It was the spring of a 30 year slumber when the barn was to be cleaned for the final time. Iron beds, gas lamps, decorative iron fencing, chairs, stained glass windows and various other treasures were wrestled from their long hiding to be sorted among us kids. Each had their favorite. There was more than plenty to divide. Generations of tools, toys, gadgets and furniture long since stored. Eventually the boxes slats and boards of the old hutch emerged and warmed in the sunlight.

It had been placed in the back of the barn sometime in the early 1960’s in boxes after Grandpa had given it to us. He had started to refinish it at one time long ago but apparently after taking it apart for repairs eventually lost interest and tucked the pieces into the back of his garage in the early 1940s. Before that it had been been in their kitchen since the 1920’s, a hand-me-down cabinet from his grandmother and grandfather who had it in their kitchen for the better part of the 1800’s. He was a cabinet maker.

Now in pieces in vegetable crates it sat outside the barn in the sun. “What a mess. What a beautiful mess”.

On the other side of the field a burnpile chewed through the remains of scrap wood and debris. Eager hands helping with the final cleaning began to load it into the back of the trailer headed for the burn pile. “WAIT you can’t burn that!” with a shake of the head and an incredulous look of dismay the boxes were unloaded.

“You actually want this junk?” With a smirk it was loaded into that back of my trailer with all the other junk I was rescuing. Yes, I admit it, I am a pack rat.

Being a pack rat is not a mentality but an embraced inherited trait in my family. Portions, pieces, odds and ends are not merely things to be pitched but rather something glorious to behold, elements of something greater, the details of that which can be.

For another near decade the boxes sat untouched in storage - taking up space as some may say but to me they were in waiting.

Once again the boxes emerged into the sunlight. Reassembly was a grand puzzle slowly discovering if all of the pieces survived. They did. Piece by piece the hutch came together.

Now it proudly sits in the kitchen. The parts left untouched by my Grandpa’s hands remain untouched. I like that the portions of it, with the original paint still intact, are in stark contrast to other parts that have been stripped. To me it bespeaks a charm, the evidence of having been passed from one hand to the other now spanning four generations each having touched and contributed. Each having loved. To each a connection.

Hardly retired, the cabinet now houses baking supplies among other food stuffs and old kitchen gadgets and has become the baking center once again.

Atop the hutch sit Great Grandma’s butter churn and a couple pieces of her granite ware - somehow it seems very fitting. Funny how things change, people seeing it in the kitchen often comment “Wow, what a beautiful and interesting piece”. Hmmm, a piece. Interesting, what was destine for the burn pile is now a ‘piece’ to behold.