# The House With Nobody In It

- Link: https://www.oldhouseguy.com/the-house-with-nobody-in-it/
- Published: 2013-08-18T20:34:49-04:00
- Author: Ken Roginski

[⌊abandoned house spotswood nj⌉⌊abandoned house spotswood nj⌉[

474 W Main Street, Spotswood, NJ – demolished 2021. This is NOT the subject house
but one I found to use as an example.

**The House with Nobody In It**

**Whenever I walk to Suffern along the Erie Track** **I go by a poor old farmhouse
with its shingles broken and black.**

**I suppose I’ve passed it a hundred times, but I always stop for a minute**

**To look at the house, the tragic house, the house with nobody in it.**

**I never have seen a haunted house, but I hear there are such things;
 
That they
hold the talk of spirits, their mirth and sorrowing.
 
I know this house isn’t haunted,
and I wish it were, I do;
 
For it wouldn’t be so lonely if it had a ghost or two.

**This house on the road to Suffern needs a dozen panes of glass,
 
And somebody
ought to weed the walk and take a scythe to the grass.
 
It needs new paint and 
shingles, and the vines should be trimmed and tied.
 
But what it needs most of 
all is some people living inside.

**If I had a lot of money and all my debts were paid,
 
I’d put a gang of men to
work with brush and saw and spade.
 
I’d buy that place and fix it up the way it
used to be,
 
And I’d find some people who wanted a home and give it to them free.

**Now a new house standing empty, with staring window and door,
 Looks idle, perhaps,
and foolish, like a hat on its block in the store. But there’s nothing mournful 
about it; it cannot be sad and lone For the lack of something within it that it 
has never know.

**But a house that has done what a house should do,
 
A house that has sheltered
life
 
That has put its loving wooden arms around a man and his wife,
 
A house 
that has echoed a baby’s laugh and held up his stumbling feet,
 
Is the saddest 
sight when it’s left alone, that ever your eyes could meet.

**So whenever I go to Suffern along the Erie track
 
I never go by the empty house
without stopping and looking back.
 
Yet it hurts me to look at the crumbling roof
and the shutters fallen apart,
 
For I can’t help thinking the poor old house is
a house with a broken heart.

**Joyce Kilmer**
 _Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918) was an American writer and poet mainly
remembered for a short poem titled “Trees”, which was published in the collection“
Trees and Other Poems” in 1914._

Thank you to our reader Debra G. and her sister from Connecticut who sent us this
lovely poem. They are restoring an old house together.

Although the house in the poem may be run down, it is still alive and loved.  So
many people don’t understand old buildings and never take the time to realize that
a house is more than just a building.  When looking at an old house, take some time
and allow yourself to gaze into its soul and imagine the people that lived there
throughout the years.

Even though the seasons have passed as have its many residents, the house has lived
on with secrets of the past buried within its walls. Now years of memories, some
happy, some sad, silently echo through its halls.

Old homes were built and designed with pride.  Sadly this is not always respected.

John Ruskin (1819-1900) expresses it very well in the following:

**“. . . Old buildings are not ours. They belong, partly to those who built them,
and partly to the generations of mankind who are to follow us. The dead still have
their right in them: That which they labored for . . . we have no right to obliterate.”**

**“What we ourselves have built, we are at liberty to throw down.  But what other
men gave their strength, and wealth, and life to accomplish, their right over it
does not pass away with their death . . .”**

_by John Ruskin 1849, “[The Seven Lamps of Architecture ](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/048626145X/kenroginskihisto)”
chapter 6_

## The House

This house was built in 1905. Spotswood NJ is a small town where history is and 
has been ignored.

[⌊Google maps from 2017⌉⌊Google maps from 2017⌉[

Google maps from 2017.

[⌊Google maps from 2023.⌉⌊Google maps from 2023.⌉[

Google maps from 2023.