Very cool, Im jealous.
I remember when I was about 9 my parents looked at a farm, big for Indiana. You westerners would probably laugh, like 180 acres. Anyway it had somewhat of an abandoned town on it. Maybe 6-7 abandoned houses and a few old barns falling down around what you might describe as a dirt street. As a 9 year old (early 70s) I was Uber-fascinated. My parents didn’t buy it because the primary home wasn’t much better than the abandoned homes and they could not swing the land AND re-model costs.
BTW
That’s probably the greatest change in the USA I’ve seen in the last 1/2 century; Land prices. The idea a couple with a teaching job and a Secretary could even seriously look at a 180 acre farm within a 30 something minute commute to Louisville today would be very unlikely. Sad really and unlike anything in our history, first generation to be unable to buy land.
Land is weird. In another area I’ve got five sections (as in square miles) that had major gas lines on it, a huge electric substation, and gas plants. Windmills. Typical mediocre pasture. Tax value is $5k/acre. Pretty ugly, a cow every 50 acres kind of dirt ranch.
Well it’s big enough and has gigawatts of power available plus highway frontage such that the big processing centers are offering me $100million and bidding against each other, Apparently suitable sites are slim. They’ll put their own little campus and airport and whatever.
I bought it as a favor from a buddy 20 years ago and regretted it ever since.
We’re talking the middle of nowhere.
Around 2000 my late husband and I decided to sell 20 acres he inherited in southern Illinois and buy rural land on WV closer to home. The land we bought cost around $5,000 an acre. but we did a Starker exchange for $500 in legal expenses, but saved paying IRS capital gains tax on the land sold and applied the sale money directly into the WV land purchase. The land had a small lake at the bottom of a large wooded hill. Not much open flat land for growing crops. Starker exchange is an IRS method for exchanging land for land or building for building. The new “business property” must cost more than the old property, you must use a lawyer. and complete the exchange within six months.
Regarding the illness, it sounds like possibly Hanta or some other hemoraghic (sp?) fever type illness. If Salmonella, drought conditions would have made water safety issues more likely. I imagine smallpox and these other possibilities and others not mentioned probably all played an ugly part. By the mid 1500s Cortez’s conquest was well over, and many more Spaniards and Europeans would have arrived with their various illnesses. Also, by this time Syphilis had been carried back to Europe for all the people having fun there. I saw a news report the other day we now have an Ebola case in the US.