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You look upon beauty in the countryside, and in looking try to catch a glimpse, a notion however idealized, of what life was like living and working around those old buildings when they were new- an idea of the tone and feel of the everyday pace, the pastoral rhythm of country life, as revealed in the things left behind.
People drive for hours just to be out in the country, and get great satisfaction just from gazing upon old barns, remains of chestnut split-rail fencing, crumbling stone walls and old mills around where we live.
Seeing new fencing and bams, and fields, heavy with the heady, sweet scent of new mown hay on a hot humid day, dotted with freshly bound, light green, tidy new hay rolls alongside those old farm artifacts gives a sense of history in action, and ancient rhythms moving slowly along. Its very comforting and anchoring, somehow, looking out at the countryside and being able to see from the buildings themselves how things have both changed drastically and yet stayed the same.
What does an old building represent in this landscape? You look upon an old mill that is passing away, such as Fletcher's Mill outside of Sperryville, and it seems to speak about the past, to be a reservoir of stories of the years of day to day activity within its walls. It's as if you could glean from the shapes of its rotting boards images of people and summers gone by.
This is a mill that in 1820 was, in some form, already grinding grain into meal and flour between large, water powered stone mill wheels. For well over a continuous century, every summer crops were sown, grown and harvested, and much of the grain
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