Uncle Harve's Journal: 2. A New Community

Scaring yourself in an old farm house, and life in a one room school.

Not all of Mason County was sand. Much of the county was rich black soil and was a swamp in the early days. Drainage ditches were dug every mile or two to drain the excess water. With tilling the soil became very productive. When Uncle Harve was about ten years old, the family moved into this part of the county. A cousin, Frank Lewis, was a near neighbor.

-- OMS

The Three Boys

Once upon a time there were three boys. There was the biggest boy, Claude, the middle-sized boy, Harve, and the little boy, Frank. Not that the biggest boy was so much the biggest; he was the oldest. And not that the little boy was so much the youngest; he was small for his age. These three boys went out for a walk.

South of the cousins house was an old orchard. The blackberries, raspberries, plums, grapevines, and weeds had grown up in tangles until the boys and rabbits had it mostly to themselves. There are no orchards like this any more. Of course, this orchard had an owner (Miles Van Horn), but he didn’t care if the boys helped themselves to the fruit. There are no owners like this anymore, either.

On the side next to the road was a big hedge fence (bois d’arc) as tall as the old-fashioned apple trees. One big, lonesome cottonwood stood guard over the whole—also over the hole where the boys crept through the fence. Farther along at the top of the hill was a gate. But who wanted to fool with a gate? In spite of brambles there were open places under the apple trees where the blue grass made a carpet much finer than any the boys had at their homes. The three boys, devoted readers of the Youth’s Companion, had often lain on this carpet and told stories: stories of hunting, of robbers, of Indians, and of ghosts—until the old house and barn that stood on the hill above the orchard seemed lonely even in the day-time.

The boys walked down the road and stopped by the old cottonwood. Outside was bright sunshine; inside was shadow and tangled thicket. The boys crept through the hedge. After eating plums and apples they wandered up to the old barn and then over to the old house which looked about ready to fall down. Then back to the orchard. They must fill their pockets before they go home.

Listen! An awful groan over there in the corner. They started to investigate. Another groan worse than the first. They held a consultation. It might be a wounded robber. They were afraid to go on. Wait! Someone in a buggy was driving along the road. They would run up and look while the buggy was close.

There in the corner was a old well in which a young horse had fallen. The well was partly filled up and had no water, but the horse couldn’t get out. One of the boys ran for the owner, and the other ran to the cousin’s house to get help. The horse was not badly hurt, and with a little help jumped out and ran away.

We learned in school about this time a song about an old barn, which I have always associated with the old barn at the orchard.

Rickety old and craggy,
Shingleless, lacking some doors,
Bad in the old upper story,
Wanting some boards on the floors.

Beams are all hung with rich cobwebs,
Ridge pole so yellow and gray,
Seemingly hanging so helpless
Over the mow of sweet hay.

I sat for hours last summer
Upon the threshold so gray,
And saw the cows in the pasture
Take up their lazy-paced way.

Lambs as snow white as the daisies
Frolicked from bill to the barn,
Or fell asleep in the shadow
Made by that clever old barn.

Pennsylvania Lane

When I was ten or twelve years old I lived in a community that been settled by Pennsylvania Dutch. There was a road called Pennsylvania Lane, and also a school by that name. Also, Pennsylvania Township. The school was a mile and a quarter from where I lived. Between my home and the school were two old orchards. One of them I have already written about. The other had no buildings of any kind. There was nothing to show where the buildings had been. Just an old
orchard in a pasture. It did have a large pond where the turtle doves came for water and would sit by the dozens in the dead trees. I have often wondered about these two old orchards so close together. For us kids, one was a wonder; two was a miracle. This orchard had some apples that I didn’t know the name of then, but I now think were Lansingburgs. It is, I think, the latest keeping apple. It is very hard in the fall and, in fact, is not good eating until late spring. One of our schoolmates, a young Irishman named McGuire, used to eat them in early fall. So while we were not up on apple varieties we just called them McGuire’s Brickbats’. Some of the families who lived near the school were Benscoter, Van Horn, Peet, Puch, Hurley, and Severn.

School Days

I went to school in a one room school where there were fifty or more pupils of all grades. In such schools many of the old-timers got all the schooling (I didn’t say education) they ever had. Lincoln, the greatest of them all, was one of them.

I liked arithmetic, but it wasn’t as easy for me as it was for a cousin, Frank Lewis. There was one problem in common fractions that he got without much trouble (or said he did) that had me stumped. He was almost a year younger than I was so I couldn’t ask for help. I worked at it off an on (with occasional glances at the answer in the back of the book) for three days before I got it. I could work it now in my head in less than three minutes, but of course I don’t need to work it now. In later editions, they replaced it with a problem that wasn’t so difficult. It has been a long time ago but as I remember it the problem was this: A boat whose speed in still water was twelve miles per hour had the speed increased three miles per hour downstream and retarded three miles per hour going upstream. It was four hours longer in making the voyage upstream between two towns than it was in going downstream. How far were the towns apart?

At Pennsylvania Lane the directors had bought a manikin. They probably let some salesman talk them into buying something they didn’t want, but I have always been glad they did. Sometimes on Friday afternoon the teacher would have a couple of pupils take the muscles off that old boy while the rest of us would try to give the name of each one. When he had been reduced to a skeleton, we named the bones. What matters it that I have forgotten many of them now? I still think it was a good thing.

Sometimes at night we had spelling schools, and sometimes we gave a program of recitations and dialogues. These would be well attended, and there would be an intermission which gave neighbors a chance to gossip.

I remember one problem that we had where the younger pupils gave a dialogue. The little girl’s doll was sick and she called the doctor in. He was supposed to feel the doll’s pulse and say, “Madam, the crisis is passed.’ That went all right at rehearsal, but on the night of the program in addition to the large hat, spectacles, and the well known black bag, he had stage fright. He took one look at the doll, grabbed her hand, and said, “Madam, the circus is over.” The teacher said, “I think it is."

One thing I learned was to build fires. For seventy-five cents a month I would be at the school house early, and have a fire going when the teacher and the rest of the kids got there. We had central heat—that is, the big coal stove was placed near the center of the room. Even then, it took quite a while to get the room warmed up.

Sometimes at spelling schools (or spelling bees, if you prefer) we would spell trapper. That is, if you and I choose up, you would pick your best speller and he or she would go to the bottom of the line on my side. I would pick my best speller and he would take his place at the bottom of your line. The one who gave out the words wouldn’t notice if a word was misspelled, but the trapper was supposed to spell it correctly. Then he would move up one place. There was also a rule that if a trapper on one side didn’t notice when a word was misspelled, the trapper on the other side could spell it and move up two places. Of course, the trapper who reached the head of the line first won for his side. Finally, we would spell down. When you missed a word you would take your seat. There would be good spellers there from other schools, including the teachers. The competition was tough, and the best I ever did was second from last.

There was one teacher (a Miss Keisling) who was said to be able to spell correctly any word in the spelling book. Maybe she could, but I wouldn’t believe that of anybody unless I saw it happen. For some reason, these contests went out of fashion. Some people think spelling went out of fashion, too.

Eighth Grade Examination

A county superintendent of schools sent out this one in an eighth grade examination. A ball of string is four inches in diameter. What part of the diameter must each of three people unwind so that each will have the same amount of string?

For an eighth grader, I think the answer is, “Who cares?”

Alee Lucas

The spring I was fifteen we moved on the farm, then owned by Alee Lucas, that includes most of Red Oak Grove. He lived at Easton, about six miles away, and when he came out to the farm he drove a stallion hitched to a road cart. Mr. Lucas had a habit of beginning many of his sentences with the word which. Speaking of the stallion he said, “Which he had been seen to hit the three minute gait.”

We had been bothered for several seasons with chinch bugs, so I was surprised one spring when Mr. Lucas said, “Which he would give me a nickel apiece for twenty live chinch bugs.” The winter had been severe and that was his way of saying he thought they were all dead. We had a cornfield on the east side of the timber. After Mr. Lucas had gone home, my father told me to look in the fallen leaves in the timber next to the cornfield. There were thousands of them there, all apparently alive and happy. Too bad he had placed a limit of twenty, or I would have been in business.

Uncle Harve finished his elementary schooling at Red Oak School. At about that time there were more than fifty pupils in the one room school and one teacher taught ten grades. I suspect that this was the only teacher at the school to teach more than eight grades. My Mother completed her eight grades at that school, and I attended the school for grades four through six.

The Red Oak School building was unique in that the building was used for Sunday School and Church each Sunday. I know this was true for the last fifty years of the school until one room schools were discontinued. Most of the families who had children in the school also attended the Church. The Church had no expense for a church building, for upkeep, or for utilities. If anyone objected to the school building being used as a church during the fifty or more years, no one ever mentioned it to me. I suspect that the ACLU would not agree that this is proper separation of Church and State.

Early Childhood

In the rural community where I grew up the schoolhouse was the community center. There was usually something going on there two or three nights a week: spelling school, box suppers, singing school, or literary society. Most of the young people and some of the old people went to Sunday School on Sunday. There must have been bickering and jealousy there because they seem common to every neighborhood, but if there were I was young and they passed me by.

I was too young to know when the first corn planter came into the neighborhood, but my good friend, Pat Sheahan, told me about it. He said it was owned in part-ownership by two men. When I grew up to know these two I called them Uncle Benny and Uncle Dory (Theodore), because that is what nearly everyone called them. One fine spring day Uncle Benny met Uncle Dory and said, “I guess I use that planter in the morning.” Uncle Dory replied, “My ground is ready but we can’t both use it, so you go right ahead.” That night there came an awful rain: a regular old cob-roller and chip-floater. The next morning Uncle Benny called on Uncle Dory and said, “Dory, I guess I won’t use that planter for a couple days. If you want to use it go right ahead. But in spite of the fact that Uncle Benny liked to get his corn planted on time, he was a good neighbor.

Uncle Dory had four boys who were all leaders In Church and Sunday School. I have often thought that in the early days each community had a certain family who were the leaders in Church and Sunday School, and in our community Uncle Dory’s family was that one. Two of them taught school and at different times, I went to school to them. As a Sunday School teacher one of these boys used often to repeat two verses from the Bible that I have remembered down through the years:

Trust in the Lord and do good; so shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed.

I have been young and now I am old; yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread.

Old-Fashioned Literary

Verily, the old-fashioned literary that we knew in the days of our youth is a thing of the past. Time was when they were common to many communities in the part of Illinois where I lived. At one time I belonged to three. As I knew them, they were held in country schoolhouses. The first part of the program was given over to music, recitations, or dialogues. A recess, which gave a chance for neighborhood gossip, followed. After recess, the next number on the program was the debate. The question for debate had been chosen at the previous meeting. The president of the society would appoint two persons to lead the debate, and these leaders would choose the ones they wanted to help. There might be three or four on a side. On the night of the debate, each leader would choose a person as judge, and these two would choose a third. I might say the decision was usually two to one.

A question such as this one came: Resolved, that the signs of the times indicate a downfall of the nation, gave the future Clays and Websters a chance to spread themselves. This was just after the Spanish-American War, and imperialism was a live issue. It was freely predicted by the audience that the world would hear from these orators in the future. “Yet have they passed on their way, and the world knoweth them not.

One time the debate was on the question: Resolved, that the Indians have received worse treatment than the Negroes at the hands of the Whites. A young lady was on the negative. She took the floor and told how bad the Negroes had been treated. She was proceeding something like this: ‘They had to work hard and were sometimes whipped. They had poor houses. They had little to eat, and hardly anything to wear. Sometimes nothing but an old pair of pants. I wouldn’t want to be like that.” Since this was in the days before girls dressed like men, the audience seemed to think she had made an important point, and rewarded her with liberal applause and laughter. The next day a lad who had heard the debate stopped at her home and started to kid her about it. It happened they were standing on an old boardwalk. She picked up a piece of board that had broken off the walk and proceeded to show him how badly the Negroes had been treated.

On this question: Resolved, that invention has done more for mankind than discovery, an old gentleman was on the affirmative. He told of all of the inventions he could think of and ended up by saying children are an invention. Seemingly as an afterthought he added, “Of course, they are not patented.” But the teacher who taught there (this was at Golden Valley School) objected to this. She said God made children, and anything that God made was not an invention. She didn’t claim they were a discovery, and didn’t say just how she would classify them.

I wouldn’t want you to think that the foregoing were true patterns of the debate. Rather, I have given them because they were out of the ordinary. Usually, the ones who were chosen on the debate took it seriously, and tried hard to win. Now all this has changed. There aren’t any more country schools, let alone debating societies. Modern invention has done more for (or to) mankind than has discovery, though perhaps we would be better off without some of them. But the literary lives yet in the memory of some people, a necessary part of the good old times.

People in Mason County, Illinois, at the turn of the century would have had little first-hand knowledge of how blacks were treated. To my knowledge, at that time no black family ever lived in the county. I remember the first time I heard anything about black folks. My older brother (in the middle 1930's) went with the basketball team when they played a small town in an adjoining county. The star player on the opposing team was black. My brother said that the other members of the family did not arrive until the game was about to begin. When they arrived, they were given a standing ovation. It is unfortunate that all black families weren’t so well received by their communities.

-- OMS