My Lucky Horseshoe


I went by the Lesmeister Building today, looking to see what progress was made Thursday and Friday of this week (the answer is not much, as far as I can see). While standing on the sidewalk in front of the building, I looked down into the dirt where the workers recently jackhammered away the concrete slab floor of the building where it met the sidewalk.

There in the dirt, where it had been sleeping since before the concrete floor of the building was poured over it ages ago, among the rubble of broken bricks and concrete, I saw a horseshoe with the old rusty square-headed nails that once held it on a horse’s hoof. On the back side of the horseshoe the nails are still as a long ago blacksmith left them, bent over to lock them onto the horse’s foot…until the shoe was “thrown” and lost for about a hundred years under my building.

I’ve got to decide if I should clean it, remove the rust, sandblast it back to “new” condition, or what. I’ll put the horseshoe on the wall of one of the Lesmeister Guesthouse apartments, along with the story of finding it, and hope it brings good luck to the old building for a long time to come!

The bottom, or street side, of the old horseshoe, showing the square-headed, hand-made nails.
The top, or horse side, of the horseshoe, with the tips of the nails bent over to lock them onto the horse's hoof, before it worked loose and was lost so long ago.

2 Replies to “My Lucky Horseshoe”

  1. Robert Carroll

    Pat,

    FYI. When I get the e-mail with the story of the horseshoe, I don’t get the pictures. It seems to want to load them when I hit the “download pictures” (Roux has some of that material blocked on my mail, but I can accept it if I want), but it just downloads the green quilt like logo as well as the W in a circle, but not the photos. The same was true on the threshold piece.

    At this rate you will cover your first couple of loan payments just with the value of the antiquities discovered on the site…….or maybe not.

  2. Patrick

    The blog software handles what you get in the e-mails and I guess that’s how they have it set up. It’s not something I control from my end.

    So far the antiquities are costing more than they’re bringing in, especially that cistern! It cost the architect about $1600 just to get an engineer to come up here from Little Rock to look at it!

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