Aside from the little farmstead on the windswept plains of northwestern Minnesota, the place that I have lived the longest is being torn down and a new home build in its place.

The four years that I spent at North Dakota State University represented some the happiest moments in my life, but also some of the lowest points.  Through it all, the FarmHouse Fraternity house at the corner of 12th Ave North and College Street was my home base.

For three and a half years, I called that rickety old house home.

And what a home it was.

The building was orginally a Copper Kettle resturant back in 1911.  FarmHouse moved in and called it home starting back in the late 1950’s.  By the time I lived there, it had gone through three or four major additions and numerous renovations.  Because FarmHouse is one of the only dry fraternities in the United States..it luckily was spared some of the abuse of some of the other fraternity houses on campus.

The house could hold about thirty-five guys.  On warm spring and fall days, you could walk up and find at least a handfull - and sometimes a majority - of the guys sitting on the front porch, visiting, laughing, and just having a good time.

Walking into the house was the foyer - a large message board was on one side, a stairways leading upstairs on the other.  Straight ahead was the living room - the formal room in the house.  Off the living room was the House Mother’s apartment - a place where lived our female advisor who could advise us on etiquette, social skills, women, and just life in general.

Under the living room was the kitchen and dining room.  FarmHouse gave you a good two square meals a day (you fixed your own breakfast) and for most of its history, the cook was the same - Gladys - and what a cook she was.  Most freshmen complained of the freshmen 15 - at NDSU FarmHouse it was the freshmen 50.  Her cooking was outstanding.

The balance of the house was hallways and bedrooms where people slept, studied, watched television, atempted to solve the worlds problems, or just talked.

Picturing the rooms in my mind, each one has a legend prescribed to it.  Each one has a personal memory.  The stories told.  The wrestling matches.  The pranks.  The hopes and dreams talked about.  The study sessions that ended with a pizza at one o’clock in the morning.  The bible studies.  The root beer socials.  The dances in the basement.

In the end, the memories, the house, the fraternity are not about the building - it is about the people, the friendships, the brotherhood that was born and developed there. 

It is about FarmHouse’s tradition of building the whole man.  The morals, the principles, the attributes of a good man.

The bricks and morter don’t matter…it is the heart that counts.