The Old Willett Place stood along the Little Missouri River between Camp Crook and Buffalo, South Dakota. It was the ranch house where the Melby family ranched during the latter half of the Second World War, and where Patrick Melby spent the first three years of his life before the family left in 1947 and moved to Missoula, Montana. In about 1985, on a trip back to the Dakotas with his father and his brother Bill, Pat found a corner post from the little front porch lying on the ground where it had fallen. It had been out in the weather for thirty-eight years. He carried it home to Montana and kept it on his deck for the next four decades, with its written history and a few photographs tucked into a plastic sleeve alongside it.

Facing a move to Arizona and unsure what to do with it, Pat sealed the wood with epoxy, set it on a concrete base, and fixed a ceramic woodpecker made by Beda to the top. He gave it to his son, Andrew Campbell Melby, on his forty-seventh birthday. This article gathers Pat’s own account, the typewritten history he kept with the post, and four photographs of the house — including two wartime views in which the little porch and its turned balusters are plainly visible, and a 1991 photograph of the house standing empty in tall grass with the porch long gone. The connection to the Cranston line runs through Pat’s father, Sidney “Tip” Melby, born a Cranston and raised by his mother’s second husband, Ole Melby, a Norwegian immigrant.

You can read more about this by clicking the link below.

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