Cultivating the American Life

Several years ago, my wife and I moved to an old stone farmhouse in a rural part of Frederick County, Maryland. In all the time we spent restoring the house and cultivating the land, however, we did not think much about the house’s history. In fact, for a long time we had naively assumed—and erroneously told people—that the house was built in 1847, because that number, alongside the name “Jacob Sponseller,” is inscribed on a drawer in one of the rooms.