Angelkeep has two mature walnut trees of sufficient age and stature to produce nuts. It’s a dirty, staining, hard job to harvest walnuts for eating the meats inside.
Anglekeep loves the pungent taste of black walnuts. The grocery cost runs high for them, but gathering, husking, cracking, and picking homegrown walnuts has been abandoned. They are left for the squirrels. It was likely the squirrels that planted the trees in the first place, via buried nuts stolen from the neighboring woods. The largest pond-side walnut has an offspring tree growing with branches entwined, both now nut producers.
Two additional trees were mistakenly planted by squirrels directly below power lines and the company eliminated that pair as hazards. One had started producing nuts. As long as there are Angelkeep squirrels and Angelkeep black walnuts on the ground, there will be new generations of walnut trees.
Angelkeep walnut trees bring back this writer’s childhood memories of Grandma Wolf’s Craigville home, and her giant walnut tree. It also brings back memories of an old friend, Dwayne Goodwin, sitting in his Bluffton driveway picking meats from black walnuts, slowly accumulating quart Ball jars filled to the brim. His wife Ruth turned black walnuts into wonderful cookies and black walnut cake.
Another favorite memory related to walnut lumber came from Dad’s error while living on the farm on Meridian Road in Lancaster Township. Most farms at the time yet held, and frequently used, an outdoor privy. Dad decided to update the farm’s outhouse, or “necessary” as some called it, by digging a new pit and building a new shelter using as much wood as the old barn provided inside from his father’s lumber storage. The stack was rough sawn, grayed, and aged, so Dad felt the heavy thickness and extra wide width of the planks would surely make a sound and, best feature, “free” floor for the new outhouse.
While showing off the completed structure to the local farmer that did the actual farming on a share-crop basis, Dad learned from farmer Ervin that he had used valuable walnut planks as the privy flooring. After a laugh, his comment was something like, “Only the best for my wife.”
Jacob Funk of nearly half a century prior to Dad’s walnut find, actually 1909, owned a long ago abandoned log cabin on his Rock Creek Township farm. Jacob did not make the mistake Dad would do decades later. Jacob recognized walnut lumber created the ceiling inside the abandoned cabin home. At the time the cabin served as storage of seldom needed items. Eight years prior Samuel Harnish was placed in the dwelling as a “pest house” after Harnish contracted a case of small pox. The log cabin was utilized to quarantine him from the rest of the county, thus controlling the spread of the threatening disease.
Angelkeep can relate to infectious disease pandemic, due to the COVID issue, although Angelkeep had the best of fortune to not have contracted the virus. No quarantine necessary. Mr. Harnish recovered. Generations of his family yet thrive in Wells County, Indiana.
The old log cabin on the Funk farm — pest house facility for Harnish — held walnut boards on the ceiling up to 16 inches in width. That’s a similar size to what Dad used for his outhouse floor. Over four hundred feet of these fine walnut planks were removed from the log cabin, making it a windfall of lumber value to Mr. Funk.
It will take several more decades before Angelkeep’s walnut trees can be cut and milled into lumber with a 16-inch width. Owners of Angelkeep, long after the present owners have passed to Heaven where it’s promised that even the outhouse will be paved with gold … well, the future owners will wonder why someone planted a grove of walnut trees directly on the shoreline of a pond. Foolish, they will think, since half of the walnuts drop into the water. The delightfully flavored nuts could only be harvested by boat.
Walnuts yet in the husk float on the pond surface. They get blown to all corners of Angelpond. Some could get washed into holes created by crawdads or muskrats. Once underground, they could sprout.
Who knows, a century from now, someone might write of the strange history of a pond completely surrounded by walnut trees, and by that time potentially renamed “Walnut Pond.”
Mr. Daugherty is a Wells County resident who, along with his wife Gwen, enjoy their backyard and have named it “Angelkeep.”
