But Politics is not the issue . . .

Political philosophies are how people strategically get together and get along. We are political in the sense that we want to get along and have a concise viewpoint on what it means. But at the heart of this farm is the underlying philosophy that, as much as possible, we want to give it all away and serve people. We want them to eat well and recreate themselves. So that is what our actions will look like.

Reminding the reader that our intention in late Summer 2012 is to eventually build a wedding venue, and that we have so far succeeded only in obtaining three Basset Hounds to breed as part of the bigger plan, we can leap forward a year or so and talk about January 2015. . .

We had at one time found a suitable property for the Farm project. In fact I had looked at a suitable property every day as I drove to school prior to the Summer of 2012 when we decided what we wanted to do. But the property I had seen and based all of our plans on had sold to another couple and so the plan remained even if we needed another place to put it. But the money wasn't there to buy in January 2015 and more than it was there to buy in 2012, so we would have to wait until at least June of 2016 before our next move. But the story got interesting in January 2015 despite our thinking and planning.

We decided, just for fun, to drive around north-western Washington County on a Saturday afternoon in the rain and see what some real estate listings looked like. I looked up some listings and guessed at a route that would take us by as many as we felt like looking at without getting out of the car. We were not at all serious. We drove past four or five places, each cheap, each with a multitude of problems and good points, just to get a feel for what might be available. But while driving towards the highway to Vernonia a sign caught my eye which was not in the listings I had looked up. So we circled back for a look. The picture above represents what we found. A fence with very bad gate.

But we aren't the type of people who just see things and decide what they are. So we went through the bad gate and looked around, fully believing that we might be wandering into a crack den, or hobo camp. This is what we found.

Most people would have just run away at this point. Our story is much much stranger and all the more marvelous.

We couldn't see how large the place was, it was buried under years of trash and vegetation. I thought that maybe this was a County repossession or something equally interesting since there was no way anyone else would ever even consider buying it. But there was an old real estate sign laying in the ditch by the bad gate, and the place interested me for some reason. 

We walked around, picking our path carefully, trying to figure out the story of the place with very little evidence.

There was a gate at the back.

And a creek.

And the place was covered in old fruit trees of some sort. The was a meadow to the east, another to the west. And, if you subtracted the trash from the scene, the place had a certain charm which was hard to describe. But we did like it right from the start.

There was little to go on. The real estate sign was very old and the company didn't seem to be involved in selling the property anymore. So I decided to dig into the place's records a bit and try to figure out what it was.

There wasn't much to see, but Washington County has a good GIS system which showed that the taxes hadn't been paid for nine years (a good thing for me to find). Other records showed me that the place was about two acres (too small), and in the right price range. And I could see for myself that the house had been burned down (part of the story, but what happened?) and this led me into finding out that the owners had died in a house fire in 2007. Curious-er and curious-er. So, even though it was too small, my interest was peaked. And so I decided to dig a bit further.

After a few more searched I found a citation that the County had issued on the property complaining about the trash, and the citation had another person's name associated with the property, so I dug into finding that person, looking for an heir and expecting to find some farmer in the area who didn't want to take the time to fix the place up. After about a weeks of tracking people down, I did find an extended family of people with the same name who fit my hypothesis; but, even though it did lead me to finding an entire family of farmers of the same name, didn't lead me into finding the name I was looking for. So the search continued. 

Long story shortened by about a month's time. . . 

We found the owner, or someone who called herself the owner, living in her broken down car, in southeast Portland. She had been there for nearly seven years.