A Letter Under the Floorboards

When we first moved to the farm in 2016, there was a lot of work to be done to get the guest rooms back in shape to provide a comfortable stay for our guests. Painting, furnishing, decorating…… things like that. While working on the floor in the upper landing Bob noticed one of the boards didn’t have the caulking like the others did. When he was picking around, it turned out to be loose. It had been underneath a rug for years, so it is no surprise that it wasn’t discovered before.

The floorboard was about two feet long and when lifted out, it exposed a hollow space between the studs. It did not look like anything was there. Just a dark hole with chewed up insulation and mouse dropping, but when feeling around in there, he came upon a folded piece of paper. What could it be? Someone clearly put it there on purpose - it didn’t just fall in.

The corner of the paper had been chewed off by mice and we could only read a partial date. 20.. Hmm, what year? Some time in or after 2000. What prompted the writer to put it there ‘so recently’?

To date we had found old medicine bottles in the wall, and newspaper print dating back to the 1940s WWII. And a guest with a metal detector found a button dating back to the Civil War.

But this letter! How fun. Like a time capsule!

It was addressed to Papa Butler, by family members who clearly had good memories of their grandfather. Wiley Daniel’s middle name was Butler, and he also had a son named Butler, and this message clearly was addressed to the son, by his granddaughters (Wiley’s great-grand-daughters). We found out that Butler passed away in 1999, and the letter refers to the third Christmas without him. So the year must have been 2002. We are still trying to find out more.