Odd & random sights on the way to the farm

[poppy]

Edit to say that I probably should have put this under Off-Topic. 
Have been meaning to document some of the odd sights that I see everytime I make the trek to the farm.

Right after turning onto my road going out of town, I continue seeing these examples of tree trimming.



Someone has talked the good folks of Adams county into "trimming" trees in this way.  There are hundreds of examples within a 10 mile radius of the farm.

Sometimes they "trim" a second time.



Then as I round the first bend this barn comes into view.



Set-backs?  We don't need no stinkn' set-backs.  Zoning and building standards are non existant, even in town.

House trailers can be put anywhere.



This was once a very nice craftsman style house on a corner lot, but the pictured trailer is on one side and there is literally a trailer park across the street.  

On an unrelated note, I had mentioned in another thread that Zane's Trace once ran through Adams county.  Here is a township road that is on the old Trace.



The house in the background (at least the stone part) belonged to Governor Kirker, one of the first governor's of Ohio.  The kirker famliy stills lives on this homestead.

[MountainDon]

Don't worry about off topic or not.

That tree topping is one of the worst things anyone can do to a tree!!!!!!!!      

It causes stress (to the tree as well as me) , may cause bark to be sunburned which can cause branches to die, and makes a tree damn ugly.  If a tree is too big there are only 2 solutions. One is hire an arborist and cough up the price and have the tree properly trimmed. Two is firewood.

[poppy]

I just realized that the governor's home stead has had some of that tree "trimming" as well. 

Yea Don, I thought the trimming methods that I have witnessed didn't seem correct.  It could be the reason that I am also seeing many trees in town cut to the ground for firewood. 

[MountainDon]

http://www.heritagetreecare.com.au/top_trees.php

The above link has info on what's wrong with topping.

[harry51]

Some people prune the mulberry trees around here the same way. All it does is ensure that you will have to prune every fall, or have a bunch of unstable suckers on your tree to get broken by the winter weather if you don't. The rationale in favor of it here is that it keeps the tree from getting too tall, overhanging the buildings, etc., and if you prune before the leaves fall, you avoid raking again and again. My question is: Why have the tree if it doesn't even produce a significant amount of shade?

[Freeholdfarm]

You see a lot of trees trimmed that way around here, and it does look horrible.  I don't know why they do it that way.

That said, at one time coppicing and pollarding were very common ways of forcing trees to produce desired materiel such as withes for basket-making and for making other stuff used around the farm.  The shoots were also used for livestock feed in some places.  This was mostly done in England and Europe, I think. 

Poppy, with that house that's too close to the road, you see that all the time in New England.  The house was there first, probably just had an ox trail going past it, and then over time the road got built up and widened until it was too close to the house.  One of our neighbors in NH moved his house farther back from the road, but not everyone can afford to do that, or has the space to do it.

As far as the trailers, too bad, so sad.  People have to have a place to live, and sometimes that's all they can afford.  Zoning laws that forbid trailers make it so that people have to pay more than they can afford to rent or buy 'regular' housing, keeping them in poverty even longer.  I don't have much sympathy for those who think all the world ought to be well-off like they themselves are, or at least pretend to be.  Do what you want with your own place, and let the neighbors alone!

Sorry if that sounds a bit snarky, but we all expect the rest of the world to let *us* do whatever we want to do, but when someone else wants to do something we don't approve of, we think we have the right to come down on them like a ton of bricks.  If we are going to be allowed to have any freedom at all, we must grant it to others as well.

Kathleen

[MushCreek]

I'm not sure why, but they do that a lot in Europe. It's called 'pollarding'.

[MountainDon]

There are villages around NM and other parts of the west too. They too were in place before the roads developed into today's sizes. I believe this can be found in many places around the country.

However, back home in Winnipeg, Manitoba the main thoroughfares are several lanes wide. The reason that city grew up with such wide main streets can be traced back to mud. The city grew up around east-west routes across Camnada and north-south routes to the USA. Travel then was mainly by ox cart. The spring and summer muds were thick and as a result the carts and wagons tended to spread out.

From Pierre Berton's The National Dream, "The (red river) carts left deep ruts in the soft prairie turf, so deep that the wagons tended to spread out, the right wheel of one cart travelling in the wake of the left wheel of the cart ahead; thus, the prairie trails could be as much as twenty carts wide, a phenomenon that helps explain the many broad streets in Winnipeg. Portage Avenue [edit: the east-west main road] is the widest [edit: 120 feet in places] thoroughfare in Canada and was known as Queen Street during the period from 1891 to 1893 as part of a failed scheme to introduce a numbering scheme to Winnipeg's streets. It is actually part of the old trail that led west to Portage la Prairie and then on to Edmonton."

in 1939...

[MountainDon]

  Zoning laws that forbid trailers make it so that people have to pay more than they can afford to rent or buy 'regular' housing, keeping them in poverty even longer. 

Zoning laws generally prohibit the mixing of trailer homes in 'regular' neighborhoods. They usually set aside areas where trailer homes are placed together. I think that is fit and proper.

If an area was zoned with no restrictions from the beginning, that is one thing and fine, as everybody knows it up front. However I do believe that if an area is established and consists of 'regular' housing then trailers should be kept out. Placing a trailer as pictured in poppy's photo in a stick, brick and mortar neighborhood is guaranteed to affect the value of the 'regular' buildings in a negative way. Just to be clear, that's not to say people can't or shouldn't live in trailers. I simply mean they should be in an area zoned for them, just as commercial and industrial areas are zoned and segregated. If that sounds discriminatory, well, yes, it is.

[Freeholdfarm]

I agree, but in that picture, I would guess that zoning doesn't prohibit the trailer from being there.  It does look out of place in with the other houses, but Poppy said that there's a trailer park right across the street, out of the picture.

Where I really have an issue with that kind of zoning isn't in a residential neighborhood such as is shown, but in the country, where people buy land and expect to be able to live on it, even if they can't afford a nice house right away.  A lot of land has been made unavailable to people on low budgets in this way -- and they aren't all of the sort that would make bad neighbors!

Kathleen

[MountainDon]

The countryside is totally different in my book.  We have large expanses of desert to the west of us where the lots are an acre or more. Zoning is pretty much unrestricted. Problems arise when people move in and build their mega$$ houses without realizing what the wide openness really means. Recently some of the upscale owners tried to get the zoning changed to prohibit the outside parking of 18 wheelers on an owners property. That totally riled me up as it did several people who lived in the area years before the McMansion set ever arrived. They had bought land and built their homes out there specifically because the zoning permitted them to park their trucks and trailers on their property. Thank goodness the city government, in a rare display of common sense, rejected the matter.

[ScottA]

Around here you see alot of old broken down houses that have had mobile homes moved in next to them to take advantage of the existing utilities. Often the old house is then used as a barn or for storage.

[Don_P]

Pretty common here as well.
A little history I came across not too long ago was interesting related to coppacing and pollarding. The landed gentry in England and Europe often let the local population gather any firewood, limbs and branches that they could reach... "by hook or crook". I imagine they did their best to keep a number of trees in that range.

Dr Alex Shigo, who unfortunately died not too long ago, wrote some excellent articles on the workings of trees, among them was a piece on this type of trimming. It is generally done to a tree that is past its prime and just robs it of much needed vigor, so it declines faster.

[Freeholdfarm]

Yes, I've seen that done, too.  Someone has an old, paid-for house that needs more repairs than they can afford, so it's cheaper to bring in a used MH.  It doesn't look great, but hey, people need shelter!  You do what you can afford or have the skills to do.  

I guess, as long as the folks in the mobile home aren't druggies, I'd rather have them for neighbors than most of the folks who live in McMansions.  Not necessarily against large houses, per se, just against the 'keeping up with the joneses' mindset that seems to so often accompany the McMansions.  I'm more for function than form, generally, although I don't care much for clutter.

Kathleen

[poppy]

I somehow knew that tree topping was wrong (probably because we were in a social group that included the City of Cincinnati tree arborist) or maybe it was from a radio show with Denny McKeown, or it could be from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service brochure "Homeowner's Guide for Beautiful, Safe, and Healthy Trees" provided by the City of Cincinnati.

At any rate, here's what a search produced:
http://www.ansi.org/news_publications/news_story.aspx?admin=1&articleid=1767

My next step is a letter to the editor of the county's weekly paper.  They will publish anything. 

But first, I need to take more generic pics. of the problem, so that I don't embarras the owners.  Someone will take offense to my letter, because "we have always been doing it that way." 

[poppy]

On the subject of zoning and house trailers and why I took that photo:

When I was growing up, zoning laws didn't exist around us. I watched a couple of property developments start from farm land to lots and streets within the town limits.

You never knew what would end up on a lot.  It could be a nice house, or a car mechanic's garage, or a furniture store, or a Christian book store, or a house trailer, or a low income apartment complex.  All of those examples occured just inside the town limits in at least a couple of subdivisions in the 1960's.

House trailers didn't start showing up in the old part of town (where that pic. was taken) until much later.  It was not unusual for a house to be built 100 years ago on a double or triple lot, and eventually owners who bought the old house to rent out saw an opportunity to make some more rent money by placing trailers on the big lots while taking advantage of the utility infrastructure.

The only way for a home owner who had a historic dwelling that they wanted to preserve and maintain value was to "control" the lots around them, i.e. buy them.

For those who didn't want to or couldn't do that, they would sell out and move to a more established street.  That's what happened to that craftsman in the photo.

My uncle owned the house catty-cornered from the craftsman and when I was a kid, that was a nice section of town. Now it is somewhat depressed.

When we moved to the city, zoning was pretty simple.  Single family or single/double family housing in one area, multiple family housing (4-6 family) dwellings in another area, industrial areas, retail, etc.  It made perfect sense and worked pretty well in my experience.

Out in the country is a different matter all together as some of you have pointed out, but I was not disappointed when a trailer was moved out from a lot about 1/2 mile from my farm and nothing has gone in there since.

I do have an eyesore of a place across the road from me (a shack for a house and a couple of abandoned trailers, etc), but the owner and his son have been very friendly and helpful to me, so if nothing else, they help keep the other city folk out of there.