Snapshots are all I have of the inside of the Goodnight home, taking us back to the late eighteen hundreds and early 1900’s.
Mr. Goodnight died just after the stock market crash of 1929 and he, at 93, was ready to move on, feeling he had lived in the best possible times, much more fortunate than those that went before or those that were coming after.
Rooms in his house have high ceilings, tall windows with individually cut triangular glass panes of thick glass that has ripples and reflects light oddly. It has a downstairs for business, eating, entertaining, socializing. Upstairs is for sleeping, reflection, and repose.
In its day this home was a palace and Mr. Goodnight spared no expense for the comfort of his wife who, at the start of their marriage, lived in a dirt dugout on the prairie waiting for him to make good on his promises to cherish and protect. She was,as you can tell from a short bio on a brochure created for guests, as single minded as her husband and it must have been comfort to him to have a confidante in such a rough and tumble life of men and animals.
The rooms are wallpapered. In the restoration, the woodwork, that had been painted, was stripped and refinished to the way it was when the Goodnight’s lived here. Closets are a new touch because homes of this time period typically had no closets. When the Goodnight’s lived here, they used an outhouse, water was carried in from a well house, lights were powered with whale oil.
There is an out building used by Mrs. Goodnight as a school for cowboy children and as an Infirmary when hired hands got sick.
Dishes on the kitchen table wait for hungry animated ranching people to say a prayer and ” pass biscuits and gravy, please.”
Downstairs, in Mr. Goodnight’s study, there is a fireplace, a buffalo robe on the floor, horned furniture, a couch with a quilt for cold nights.There aren’t many books.
Mr. Goodnight was a rancher.
He didn’t have to read books to know what the world was about.
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