an old barn in Fair Grove, Missouri

Fair Grove is a small town of about 1500 inhabitants in southern Missouri. Steuart and his family lived here during his teenage years before he left for school and his parents are still here. It is a farming community though there are fewer farms each year. How we settled here is a story for another day. For now, we want to share what makes this place so special.

We live on Mutton Hollow Road. No one had lived on the property for decades when we moved there. It was last used some thirty years ago to run cattle. A barn still stood, and looked strong, despite it’s weathered siding and rusting roof.

There was so much to discover. The hundreds of blackberries bushes were obvious. Next we found the mulberries trees, and then the persimmons, and elderberries! What we thought was an invasive Bradford pear tree turned out to be a fruiting European pear tree, which bore hundreds of fruit after we got bees and a second pear tree to cross-pollinate. We also have two peach trees, though the possoms always beat us to them. There are black walnut trees, white and red oak, many junipers, a whole forest to get lost in. Even a creek that runs off the big pond (we still haven’t cleaned our pond, so it’s pretty green in the summer). We also have our share of honey locusts (awful, thorny trees that spread like wildfire), ticks and chiggers, not mention the Missouri summer humidity. There are certainly some seasons during which it is better to visit Missouri than others.

The moment we moved our tiny home onto our property.

When we first moved to Missouri, we moved with our tiny house on wheels, which we had built the year before in Ohio. We moved onto Steuart’s parents property and began our search for a place of our own. Just as we started to lose hope - and as prices started to soar - we were blessed by a neighbor of Steuart’s parents who wanted to sell us her property just down the road. We moved our house on wheels while the ground was still frozen, dug a well (hired someone to drill a well…), moved our off-grid solar setup, and we were home! Honestly, it was pretty stressful (at one point we thought the 28-foot house wouldn’t fit through the driveway opening!), but we were so grateful and happy to have this place on earth.

Over the next couple of years Steuart started clearing, making paths and planting. We took the wheels off our tiny house and added on a small room. We moved our garden to a new spot each year as we learned that there is such thing as too much sun, and it’s best not to be too close to a walnut tree. We also started to dream of ways to share this place with others.