We had not been in Tennessee very long and there was so much to do. The place was in terrible shape. We walked behind the log cabin to see what had to be done there. What a shock. The ground had a steep slope down to the road. That wouldn't do. But the worse sight was the jumble stumps and stones just behind the cabin wall. That had to come out!

It looked like someone in the past had tried to build a fountain and laid up a cement pond surrounded by small boulders. The fountain was long gone. The rest remained in a tangled mess. The former pond had to come out or the area would be useless.
The tree stumps would be the hardest to remove. My husband and I took turns digging around them with a pick and shovel. An axe would be needed as well since the largest stumps were well rooted. It took us a week digging every day to finally dislodge the monsters. By that time, we had a good-sized hole to fill.

A sledge hammer was the next tool needed. The pond stones were cemented in the bottom of the pond and around the edges. They did not easily dislodge. When the area was finally smoothed and raked, no sign of the pond remained.
We looked over the area again. The slope was too steep to be used for anything. That would have to be development several years later.

The spring was an interesting place. We followed the pipe up the creek to where the water tumbled out of a shallow cave. Getting there was a challenge. The path was narrow and bordered with a lush stand of poison ivy and the occasional snake. We hopped from stone to stone in the creek as we made our way up to the cave. There, a piece of window screen had been wired over the end of the black plastic pipe. We went up there occasionally to clean the screen.