Chapter 2

 BAREVILLE

 

For some reason that I have been unable to discover, my mother's maternal step-grandmother, being senile, needed someone to take care of her. She was a step-grandmother because my great grandfather, Joseph Martin by name, the father of my mother's mother, having lost his first wife, married again. Now just because he married his first wife's sister did not change the fact that when she became senile, being then a widow, she still needed help and could not live alone. It seems that her trustees, needing help, approached my parents when I was about twenty-five months old and asked them to move our family to her house in Bareville, Pa. I don't know if there was a term agreed upon at the beginning, but we did live with her for about twenty months.

 

So in October of 1911 my father stored most of our possessions in a small rear room of the house at Earl Union and rented the house to another family. My sister Mabel tells me now that they were extremely sloppy people. If you will read this story to the end, you will discover that my wife Ada and I did the same thing when we went to Central America for twenty months. I think our renters were even "worse sloppy" than the people my parents rented to. ( Again, like father, like son.).

 

Nest at Bareville recreated from my description by Elizabeth A. Weaver

The house at Bareville was a typical two-story frame "Gross-dawdy house." It was close to the street now known as Route 23, and had a small front porch serving two front doors. There were two porch benches built on either side of the porch and anchored between the two porch posts and the wall of the house, just beyond each door.

 

Now I was only three years and nine months old when we moved back to Earl Union again, but I have many clear memories of living at Bareville.

 

The Conestoga Traction Company trolley-car line from Lancaster to Terre Hill went right past our front door; the right-of-way being on the street. I remember sitting on the porch bench to watch the cars. Sometimes "Traction Engines" went past; then I sat as close to the house as possible, and Mabel had to sit in front of me. I have always been timid.

 

The house faced south. A few hundred yards south of the street was a branch railroad parallel to the street. I often watched the trains on that line without fear. It was farther away!

 

Just before we moved away from Grandmother Martin's place I got my first pair of pants. Yes my first pants! Before that I wore dresses like all little boys did at that time. I could show you a picture of myself standing beside my seated sister and I am wearing a nice white dress with broad box pleats from the shoulder to the hem. The hem is at the knees.

 

Well, back to my first pair of pants! My mother had just finished making them and put them on me for fitting. Now some men were painting the outside of the house and I said to Mamma, “May I go out on the front porch and watch the men paint?" She said, "All right, but don't get against the porch post; the paint is still wet." Of course the first thing I did was to lean against the post and get paint on my new pants.

 

The western end of the house on the first-floor was the living or "sitting" room. One front door opened to this room. The eastern end of the house was divided into two small rooms and the other front door opened to the front one of these.

 

This is the room we four used as a bedroom. Grandmother Martin slept in the rear room, which had a connecting^- doorway to our bedroom. Right in the middle of this open doorway stood a round potbelly stove. Pieces of sheet metal were fitted in the opening, being cut to fit close to the stove and so closing the doorway between the two rooms. The stove was serviced from "our side" since Grandmother was not to be trusted with fire. It was an ingenious way to heat two rooms with one stove. I also remember lying in my bed in that room and wondering why the transom above the front door had blue glass.

 

Grandmother Martin had her rocking chair in the southwest corner of the sitting room and spent her time rocking and talking to herself in "Pennsylvania Dutch." She seemed to enjoy watching me play on the floor in front of her. One day my mother, as she told me later, (I don't remember this) was in the kitchen which was to the rear of the house and joined the sitting room by a doorway under the staircase, heard Grandmother Martin laughing more than usual. She came in to see what was so funny and found me lighting matches to entertain the old lady. I have always been interested in physical science and that was my first experiment.

 

We didn't use the upper floor of the house but when my mother cleaned up there I often played with some strange things. I remember a set of model railroad cars and a track. The track was made of three strips of wood hinged together at the ends. I see it now as very long but I suppose it was made of three twelve-inch pieces, opening up to about a yard long. I cannot remember how the wooden cars looked, but they were connected by some unusual method. When I asked my mother, after I was older, what that model set was all about, she said that her Grandfather Joe Martin had invented a system for car coupling. It seems someone else had made a better invention.

 

This house we lived in was, as I said, the "Gross-dawdy house." The estate consisted of a farm with another larger house and a barn. My father kept his horse in a stable in the barn, which was just west of our house. He owned a very nice driving horse named Timmy. I remember that one afternoon a very severe thunderstorm developed and my mother and my sister became very concerned because Papa was not yet home. Soon it started to hail very hard end as we watched out of the western window. of the sitting room, Papa and Timmy came tearing in at the gate at top speed. He had Timmy hitched to his "Gagger-wagon" (a topless buggy) and was shielding his face with his left arm. When they neared the stable door Papa jumped from the wagon, running, and taking Timmy's bridle pulled the horse's head into the open upper half of the stable door. They stood there waiting for the hail to stop. Before it stopped the ground was covered with a few inches of ice. The next day there was still a large drift of ice behind the barn.

 

Because Papa had a Timmy, I got a "Timmy” also. Papa made a wooden horse and mounted it on a board that had casters on each corner. Mama padded this frame with rags and made a cover for him with brown fuzzy cloth. With the addition of a mane and a tail, made with black string and with embroidered eyes and mouth, I had a very beautiful horse. He was just high enough so that my feet touched the floor when I was about three years of age. I rode Timmy many a mile for many years. My sister Mabel still laments that we allowed him to be sold at one of the disposal sales that my parents held when they were about to "move again." I can remember riding Timmy around the table in the kitchen at Grandmother's house. I think the checkered oilcloth on the floor looked the worse for it.

 

Two other things I remember from that place. There was a small, unused chicken house just to the rear of our back porch. In it were many strange and interesting things to examine. One was a stirrup pump that had a member of tin nozzles that slipped over the tapered end of the spray hoop. Some were round and of different sizes and a few were flattened and fan shaped. How I would have liked to try that pump with a bucket of water!

 

I also remember spending much time lying on the floor on my belly looking at old poultry books. There were color illustrations of many kinds of chickens; hens and roosters. White Rocks, Barred Rocks, Rhode Island Reds, Leghorns, Minorcas; even "Banties" and fighting game cocks with huge spurs. I was a wide-eyed little boy at that period, as you would see if I could show you that picture I told you about.

 

It must have been while living at Bareville that I started talking. I formed a habit of speech that I was not able to overcome until I went to school. To my parents I could never refer to myself with the first person singular pronoun. In place of "I" it was "Naa" (pronounced as the word "nag" without sounding the "g"). I think that when I was just a baby, my mother, when talking to me in "baby talk," called me "My Doodley." I heard it as "Naa Doodley." So, for many years I said to Papa and Mamma, “Naa don't want to;" or, "Naa can't;" or, "Naa fell;" or, "Naa's coming." To other people I had no trouble using the pronoun “I.” I was strange!