I figure you must be somewhat interested in my life to become a patron, so this is just for patrons. If you're not interested because it's not beekeeping, then just skip this.
This is a picture of my house in 1902. Construction started in about 1856 and was completed in 1895. It was built by Isaac Pollard. He used to run a bank out of the house, the bank vault is still in my office. Isaac started the trend of planting orchards in the area and there are still a lot of orchards around, though his died out, unfortunately.
The background on the man, Isaac Pollard, and the history of the house, starts in Vermont where Isaac and his best friend, Larson Sheldon, did what we now call "crowd funding" and got their neighbors to fund their trip to the gold fields in California in 1849. They sailed to Panama and walked across the isthmus and took a boat to San Francisco. The two worked in the gold fields with fair success, until about 1855 when they returned to Vermont. Isaac married Larson's sister and Larson married Isaac's sister. The families then migrated to Nebraska where Larson started manufacturing cement mixer kits that were sold mail order all over the country and Isaac started orchards, a bank, a saw mill, a stockyard, a brickyard and other concerns. Mostly Isaac needed the bricks and lumber for his house. And so he made the bricks and the mortar and cut the lumber for his house. Pollard's son, Mark, because a US Congressman and Sheldon's son George, became the 14th governor of the state.