The fascination began within a woodlot near my great uncle’s farm, where I found a square-shaped jumble of rocks. A few old pieces of metal — more rust than tin — confirmed it had once been a house. Trees thicker than my 14-year-old self growing from inside the foundation told me the place had been as such for many years.

I learned the place had been mostly prairie when my uncle first saw it around 1910, but already in serious ruins. My young mind conjured up scenarios that the old homestead had been destroyed during the pre-Civil War border war with Missouri.

Decades later, my mind still wanders when I happen across an old homesite, no matter how poorly standing. My first thoughts are what a place must have looked like in its prime, and the story behind the people who had thrived enough to build it.

I’m not sure many today can appreciate the feeling of pride the first owners must have had when that last stone was laid or final nail driven. Some began their lives on foreign soil, and had the courage to cross an ocean and start anew in a land with different laws and language. Their bravery and work ethic must have been amazing.

Out west, I’ve found the remains of dugouts, little more than caves notched into hillsides, where pioneers probably began their lives in Kansas. How many years they survived subterranean, before they built a real house, has always been a question.

Some, I’ve heard from descendants, had to bring boards via horse-drawn wagons from 30 or so miles away for roofing. In addition to regular farm labors, they gathered rocks from the surrounding hills and took them to the homesite via draft animal and sled before the arduous work of stacking the stone to make walls.

With permission, I like to wander the old sites and picture the landscape when the home was brand new. Many areas now thick with trees were prairie then, but did the area still hold buffalo? Did the pioneers see the thick flocks of now-extinct passenger pigeons, packs of wolves or maybe a grizzly? Were they looking over their shoulder as they broke the sod to farm and build the house, fearing raids?

I’ve tried to imagine the stress of working from sunup to sundown, knowing things like hail, a prairie fire or a few weeks of drought could wipe out a year’s worth of labor. My imagination has thought of all the happiness that had been within such places, often simple things like the birth of healthy child, family reunions or fresh meat filling the smokehouse. It must have been a thrill the first time a lone light bulb lit up a room, the first automobile bounced down a nearby road or biplane passed overhead.

Of course, I’ve often thought of the rampant sadness at such places. As well as crop failures, there was extreme heat and cold and I’ve wondered their thoughts when they watched a voluminous mountain of dust blowing in from the west in the 1930s or ‘50s. Many knew true hunger.

That death could come at anytime was just part of life. So many women died during childbirth and so many children died before adulthood, from things as simple as a cold or infected wound.

I’ve spent hours wandering and wondering in old cemeteries, too. I’ve imagined what someone experienced born in the 1700s in Europe before dying in the early days of Kansas. My appreciation for modern medicine improves when I find things like the grave of a mother, and four of her young children, who apparently all died within a few months from influenza. All were neatly laid to rest side by side in a desolate cemetery half the size of my house, in the rugged Chautauqua Hills.

Countless times I’ve interrupted hunting or fishing trips to walk a few hundred yards along some of the thousands of miles of stone fences still at least partially standing in the Flint Hills or eastern Kansas. I can only imagine the strength it took to do such construction day after day, and often for only meals and a place to stay.

I’m sure many such stonesmiths had little formal education, yet they were smart and skilled enough to build things like fences and buildings that stand largely unchanged 150 years later.

My favorite old site is in the Flint Hills, once the finest homesite within in many miles. It’s gradually being reclaimed by the prairie its builders came to conquer. Erosion of a nearby streambank has claimed one of the original outbuildings. The others, including a soil-roofed cellar and the two-story house, stand amazingly strong under long ropes of thick vines, with elms and oaks now sprouting from most rooms.

Many times I’ve parked on an old path made for horses and maybe mules, with a main purpose of hunting turkeys or fly-fishing for spotted bass. I doubt there’s ever been a time, though, when I didn’t give the place a long look before leaving.

I never get tired of wondering, nor will I ever lose my awe for those who settled our lands.