Dearest Jacquelin, you, my first grandchild have asked me to write for you the happenings in my life as I remember them. This will be a little strange for me as it is something that is new to me but I am proud that you would be interested in such, so I will try.
I was born January 29, 1904 in Wisconsin on a farm near Boscobel which is in Grant Co. I am sure it must have been a cold wintry day and since women were not given sedatives in those days to ease the hurt, I do appreciate the suffering borne by my dear mother in bring me into the world attended by a Dr. Armstrong, who generally teetered under the influence.
I came into a family of father, mother, two sisters and one brother and the sisters and brother came down with whooping cough about the time I was born so I also had it and being very young, my mother was told that they might as well dig my grave, but it wasn't that bad, somehow little babies seem to be protected from serious disease, a certain immunity given to them by their mothers milk and I survived.
We lived in a wonderful home on a lovely dairy farm in Wisconsin. The house was not always the way I will describe it as it has been remodeled an vaguely I remember the carpenters being there and pounding around but I only remember it as it was after being changed. It was large with four bedrooms upstairs and a large sleeping porch, a long hall and also a small room that was to be used as a bathroom but the bath had never been installed until we lived there. Downstairs was the parlor - large dining-room and a bedroom which my grandma Steele called her home, she seldom if ever left her room as I remember my mother caring for her and taking food to her. She was very crippled with rheumatism. We children would go in and visit with her and she would show us pictures in her Bible.
The rest of the house consisted of a warm bright kitchen - with pantry cloakroom and the stairway that led to the basement opened into the kitchen., also a room we called the washroom. Outside the washroom close to the house was a cistern, which was filled with soft water and inside the washroom was a hand pump built on a table over a sink where we pumped the soft water up from the cistern for washing purposes. This cistern was kept filled from the water which ran in times of rain from the roof into the gutters along the eaves and then lead into the cistern. We also had a kitchen sink built in front of a window in connection with the work tables and cabinets and that was pretty snazzy for the times.
I remember the bedrooms upstairs, I slept with Velma in a double bed and Hazel slept in the same room on a single bed. Harley and Bob [who was born after myself] slept in another room then father and mother had their room and the forth room was the guest room and only used for company. Downstairs I remember of course my grandmothers room but I must have liked the big dining room for I remember it most clear where there was a big, big window and it was filled with house plants and my mother use to sit by this window in her rocking chair as she mended or did other things.
There was the telephone on the wall in this room and the big dining table around which we all gathered three times a day to partake of huge farmer meals. Breakfast was always pancakes with meat or eggs or both or cereal with heavy cream. Doughnuts with coffee for the grownups and milk for the youngsters. I don't think my mothers cookie or doughnut jar was ever empty. The parlor wasn't open every day but it had sliding doors which were opened on the occasions when it was used. We were the first people in the community to trade our organ for a piano and Velma who was going to high school in Boscobel at that time started music lessons.
We had a big wood furnace in the basement and shelves and shelves lined with half gallon jars of fruit put up by mothers hard working patient hands - big barrels filled with wild nuts from the woods and apples from the orchards gathered in the fall. Big ten gallon crocks sitting on the hard clean swept dirt floor, cool and damp, along with perhaps a five gallon crock butter churn filled with cream waiting to be churned by the up and down motion of a paddle.
Lovely serene days for a little child with parents loving you and watching over you and brothers and sisters to play with and to sleep and dream beside, warm and sweet in our beds, when the day was ended.
I remember the big hay barn too where in summer when the hay was almost used up and the barn was emptied, swings would be put up by our Dad and we would swing from one side of the big barn to the other with chills and goose pimples from the sailing through space or climbing over the sweet new hay when it was put fresh into the barn, sweet timothy and clover hay, put up by such effort by the men folks. Or I remember running around in the lower part of the barn when the cows were being milked by hand - twenty to thirty cows - each morning and evening, with the milk put into 50 gallon cans to be taken each day to the cheese-factory - and then the smelly old cans that they took along in the wagon [used only for the purpose of hauling milk] were brought back filled with whey to be given to the pigs out in the pig house by the corn crib. That corncrib... what a nice playhouse it made in the summer when it was empty of corn.
The big garden with grape vines growing on the fence around the sides of the garden. We used to sit huddled under the vines in the shade and eat grapes. Mother would say not to eat too many and be sure to spit out the skins, for they were old fashioned concord grapes but we couldn't resist them and once I ate too many and was dreadfully sick.
Father or papa as we called him in those days use to go to town and always brought us home a sack of stickcandy, horehound or peppermint sticks and we would watch for him as we played outside on a summer afternoon and when we saw him coming over the hill how we ran to get to him ... out through the gate and into the road, and then... he would pretend that he did not see us and whistle loud and look straight ahead at the horses while we hollered and called for him to stop for us... then he would whoa to the horses with a great flurry and so surprised to see us and how happy we would be that he had heard us and we crawled up into the wagon and waited for our candy which he sometimes pretended he had forgot, but he never really did. Sometimes Mother left us with the hired girl and went along too - but oh! My feet got hot and tired in summer and my head always ached so I would rather stay at home.
We had a whirly-gig out by one of the orchards, it was a large plank fastened somehow on a post or tree stump and it would go around like a merry-go-round and was lots of fun. There were bee hives quite close by and also the clothes line but the bees didn't seem to bother us.
The front part of the lawn was slopeing and was lined with maple trees, in the fall we covered each other with leaves. Hazel was always doing things that I couldn't do and I remember her standing on the big round fence posts and reciting poems for Bob's and my entertainment. Some of them she made up herself and I thought they were very good.
We used to walk over the hill to the mailbox for the mail each day and there was the cheesefactory, the cheesemaker would be making the days cheese and it would be just at the right stage for us to eat the curds - rubbery and yellow and so good. I can still smell the odors that met us as we walked in the door, the warm curdy smell of the big cheese vats where they warmed the milk into which they had put the rennet and the coloring to make the cheese yellow, there was the knives that were used to cut the clabbered milk into curds and the press wheels where the cheeses were squeezed to press out the whey, and the storage room where they were put away to ripen and age for use after being taken from the press. Later they might be covered with cheese-cloth and paraffin put on them and shipped away but each farmhouse had all they could use in their own household. The cheesemakers seemed to never have a family whether they were bachelors or not I do not know but they were not local men and they generally boarded at the Yannas who lived across the road from the cheese-factory. They always would sweat a great deal in the warm room where the milk was made into curds and we used to think surely some of that perspiration from their noses as they bent over the vats wasn't always caught in the cloth they kept to swab their faces with and perhaps occasionally dripped into the cheese mixture itself. [Well it had to be salted anyway] They were always good natured and didn't mind us coming in for curds to eat. Sometimes they would board at our house as we were next closest place after the Yannas.
Get your own Free Home Page