I was born June 5, 1904, near Ashford,
Washington. Ashford is a very small town in Pierce County. it is the
last town you would pass through if you were to go up Mt. Ranier (sic). It is
a place where very tall cedar trees grow. The Nisqually River ran
between our home and Ashford. it was a small, swift, roaring river fed
by the melting snow in the Mountains. there was no bridge across it at
that time. My mother used to have to walk to Ashford for supplies, and
she had to walk across the this river on a log and carry my brother,
James and me. The older two, Blanche, age six and Arthur, age eight,
could walk across by themselves and carry some things. I could not do
it, even to this day.
We had nothing to live on except what we raised so my father worked and
was gone all week. One December night when I was six months old, the
house burned down. James, age two, kept running back in the house. My
mother had to carry him out several times. She was able to save almost
nothing. My sister took me and ran out in the woods. She took off her
apron and wrapped in around me. My mother sent Arthur to the nearest
neighbor's for help. They had two big dogs which they kept tied up in
the day time but let loose at night. They jumped on Arthur and bit him
in the face very badly. When my father came home that week he found the
house burned, and the family gone. He stirred through he ashes to see if
there were any bones. We were at Grandpa Richey's house.
We left Washington and moved to Cottonwood, Idaho, where Grandpa and
Grandma Zigler lived. My father worked in saw mills and on farms. My
brother, Clarence, was born near Cottonwood, Idaho, July 15, 1906. In
1908, my parents took up a homestead in the mountains (Craig Mountain)
Nez Perce County. We first moved into a one-room shack; I think it was
about twelve feet square. There were eight of us in the family at that
time. I remember hearing my mother say, "This place is so small, I have
to go outdoors to turn around". We lived there until the neighbors got
together and built us a log house. It had only one big room downstairs
and one the same size upstairs. We felt like we had a palace. The logs
were not smooth on the inside or on the outside. My mother used to paper
the walls with newspapers. Our favorite Game to play at night was to
find a certain word in a space on the wall. The snow would get about
eight feet deep there in the winter. We could not travel at all. We had
to live there seven months out of the year in order to prove up on the
homestead. Every year we moved to some logging camp for five months.
This meant a different school for us. We gave the ground and helped to
build a log schoolhouse on our homestead. Our school term was for only
three months.
One day before moved to the homestead, only Arthur, Blanche and Bennie
were old enough to go to school, the wind was blowing awfully hard. Mama
thought it would not be safe for them to go so they stayed home. In the
afternoon the wind died down a little and we needed some flour so Ben
got on a horse and started to the store to get some. There were a lot of
trees across the road. One tree had fallen on three children who usually
walked to school with my brothers and sister. They were all dead. For
some strange reason, grass never grew again in the spots where these
children were killed.
While we were at a logging camp, on February 16, 1912, a new baby
brother came to live with us. His name was William Albert. Grandpa
richey stayed with us that winter. He read the BOOK OF JASHER aloud to
us.
In 1913, Grandpa and Grandma Zigler both died; Grandpa (John Lear) died
January 20, and Grandma (Lydia Jane) died March 26. That year our family
moved with horses, cows and chickens. We road in a covered wagon from
Nez Perce County, Idaho to Douglas County, Washington. It took us about
three weeks, a distance of about three-hundred miles. What a change! We
left Idaho, with mountains and beautiful tall trees to move to rolling
prairie land all covered with rocks and sagebrush. On our homestead in
Idaho we had had a spring of clear ice cold water. In Douglas County we
had to drink alkali water. We all got sick, and Willie almost died. At
this time, this was a wonderful wheat country and any thing we planted
grew well. We were about twenty miles from Mansfield or Coulee City
which were our nearest towns. There was a store and Post Office at
Leahy; that was only five miles. We had a wonderful crop of wheat and
were going to start threshing the next day when a big hail storm came
threshed it all out on the ground. Of course, that was just bad luck,
and it would not happen again. My parents mortgaged everything we had,
including the homestead in Idaho, and bought a thousand acres nine miles
from Mansfield. it never did rain in Douglas County after that. We were
living on this place in 1917 when Willie got sick and died. He is buried
in the cemetery at Mansfield, Washington.
At this time, Blanche was growing up, and the young men were doing a lot
of buzzing around our place. Some of them even had cars. Clarence and I
were having lot of fun teasing. One day we were embarrassing Blanche
more that usual and she said, "Ma, spank these darn kids". "Ma, spank
these darn kids," got to be our battle cry. The time came when she
decided to marry Walter Howard. On November 11, 1918, Dad took them to
Waterville, our county seat, to get married. When they got there they
found everything in an uproar. Stores were closed, people were dancing,
shouting and singing in the streets. Everyone was so happy. The war had
ended. They finally found a justice of the peace and were married and
came home to bring the rest of us the glad news that the war had ended.
During the war no one could buy flour without buying a lot of flour
substitutes. We some wheat that was second class. They allowed us to
keep it for hog feed. We had a little hand-grinding mill. We ground
wheat everyday and made "Lazy wife bread" out of it. Sometimes we at
much. We were so tired of this kind of bread we could hardly eat it, yet
we knew we were lucky as most people did not wheat a way of grinding it.
One time the folks had little money and gave us a choice of buying a
sack of white flour or something else that we needed. We all yelled for
the flour. When they went to town they bought the sack of flour. It cost
over thirty dollars by the time they bought corn meal, rice flour,
potato flour and all the other things they had to buy to get it. Of
course, we were glad to get the substitutes too because were something
different to us.
Blanche and Walter went by train Winchester, Idaho, soon after they were
married. The following year we fixed up another covered wagon and went
back to Idaho also. We had a couple of cows and a few horses. Clarence
and I rode horseback and drove them all the way. We moved in with
Blanche and Walter. They were living in a very small house. They had two
rooms and a bath. Their bed folded up in the wall. I do not remember
where everyone else slept, but I made my bed in the bathtub. Walter, Dad
and James worked in the saw mill. The men working in the saw mill were
allowed to carry home a pitchy board for kindling. They carried home
these boards one at a time which built us a good-sized house. Blanch and
Walter's first baby, Freda, was born October 19, 1919. A date that was
easy to remember because of three nineteens.
I went to school for a while in Winchester but quit and went to work in
the saw mill. Tehre were about six girls working there. We sorted lumber
and put it in different places in the drysheds. Two weeks before I was
sixteen, they found out that I was only fifteen. They were not allowed
to hire any one under sixteen so they asked me to quit until after my
birthday. Soon after that, a depression started, and they were laying
off people so I n ever got to go back. Dad, Clarence and I moved to a
little farm near Kamiah, Idaho. Clarence was going to quit school; I was
not. I did not know anyone and was so lonesome I did not know what to do
with myself. Idaho then passed a law that children had to stay in school
until they were eighteen or through the eighth grade. I went to
Clarkston, Washington and stayed with Aunt Mary Zigler and finished the
eighth grade. Aunt Mary had a cancer operation and needed me. The next
fall she and I moved back to Winchester. I started high school there.
I had only been in high school six weeks when my father decided to move
back to Iowa. Aunt Mary begged me to stay there with her, but I could
not bear to have the rest of my family leave without me. Dad's cousin,
Tom Kimberling, decided to go with us. He and his wife had no money so
talked Dad into paying their expenses, and he would pay him back. What a
mistake! We had two old Model T's; and he had a big Grant. We made
pretty good progress for one day. After that we hit snow, rain and mud.
No hard surfaced roads in those days. We often did not make more than
ten miles in a day. The Grant was always in need of repair, and we would
sometimes have to camp and wait a week to get them. At this time, we
almost wished we were traveling with horses and our old covered wagon.
We spread our beds out of the ground to sleep. they were wet, but we
rolled them up in the morning. They would freeze and not dry out so when
it was night we would have crawl into a wet bed again. We were in
Colorado when we ran out of money. One model T had given out in Wyoming.
We sold it to a junk dealer for fifteen dollars. We then had pile the
load of that car onto the other one. We were really piled up. It was
just a one-seated car. As we came near to Denver, we had nothing to eat
and no more money for gas. We passed a big field of cabbage that had not
been gathered. Dad went to a house and asked if we might have a head of
cabbage to eat. The lady said for us to help ourselves. Then as Dad was
turning to leave she said, "Wait a minute." She went back in the house
and came out with a loaf of bread with a dollar bill on top of it. We
some money in the bank in Lamoni so we used the dollar to send a
telegram, and they sent us a hundred dollars.
Etta Kimberling had a brother living in Denver so she and Tom went to
his house for supper. They came back later to tell us they had decided
to stay there. It was a happy "Good By" for all of us. We never heard
from them again. Dad had said all the time that we would never pay us
back, and he was right.
Dad had a brother, George, living in Kansas. they had not seen each
other for about twenty years so we hunted the family up and had
Thanksgiving dinner with them. they took us around to see all the other
relatives who were living there. While we were there a big sleet storm
came. The roads were solid ice. they begged us not to start out on them,
but we thought we had to go. We had gone only about twenty miles when
the car rolled over three times. James was driving. I was sitting on
Clarence's lap. Arthur was spilled off about twenty feet down the road.
He was the first one up and asked, "Is any one hurt." I quickly
answered, "I am not." then I looked at Clarence. He seemed to be
unconscious, and his face was covered in blood. I thought he must be
hurt badly. I was leaning over him and soon found that the blood was
coming from me as I had broken out the windshield with my head. Some one
called my cousin, Delbert. He came and took the rest of the family back
to Uncle George's. He took me to his place and called a doctor to come
sew me up. I also had a broken breast bone. Dad and the boys got jobs
picking corn. They earned enough money to fix the car again, then they
went on to Iowa without me. I stayed with Delbert till the first of
January, 1923, when I came the rest of the way to Iowa on the train. At
this time, Albie Tapscott met the trains in Togo.
I started to high school in Lamoni at the second semester taking any
four subjects I could with this late start. I was the only girl in the
General Science class taught by Blair Jenson. K. C. Harder was my
teacher in two subjects. When school was out we moved to a small place
northeast of Davis City, where we raided vegetables and sold them.
Sometimes in July of this year, 1923, there was a circus in Lamoni. It
was held on Turney's farm and was just over the fence from Grandpa
Richey's place. I came to Lamoni to see what I could see. Mary Wightman,
Lorna Chasey and I got together. We were cousins and all the same age.
Lorna had a boy friend who did not have a car but knew a fellow who did.
He told this fellow he would get him a date with a couple of wild women
if he would take his car and take us for a ride. He agreed. This is how
I met Joseph Thorpe. He had a new 1923 Model T. He was very proud of
that car. We started going together very steady.
In September I started to school in Davis City. I was going to take five
subjects to try to make up for what I had lost. I was getting along very
well, when one day in Physical Geography class our teacher asked us to
write a theme on which state we would like to live in and tell why. I
was a bit homesick for Washington so that was the state I wrote about.
Having lived there most of my life, I knew what I was writing about.
Most of the kids wrote about California. Only one wrote about Iowa, and
he wrote very little. We were to read our stores out loud in class and
then tell which story we liked best and why. Everyone in the class,
except me, said they liked mine best. The teacher then told us to write
another theme on anything we wanted to as long as it was something about
Physical Geography, and again we would read them in class and tell which
we liked best. Spurred by my success on the firs theme I decided to
write about the Grand Coulee in Washington and put some of my personal
experiences in the story. I did not go home for lunch because I was
going to use the noon hour to write. I got an encyclopedia on my desk
and looked for what it said about coulees. I wanted a good background. I
wrote, "A coulee is" but never go any farther.
I heard a car honk outside and went to see if it was. It was Joseph. I
went out to him, and he said, "Lets go get married." I said, "O.K." I
went home changed my dress and told my mother what we were going to do.
She and Arthur went with us to Leon to get the license. Then we drove to
Lamoni and stopped by Tom Bell's house and were married. I should end
this story here say "Lived happily ever after," but this is a true
story. Joe lived with his folks, his father and mother, at Andover,
Missouri. I moved in with them. We got off to a bad start. A large
charivari crowd gathered that night, but we slipped out. They were
disappointed so they tore up everything they could and for months after,
some threw rocks at the house and broke so many windows we had to buy
hardware cloth to nail over them. Joe worked for the railroad as a
section hand. He made seventy-three dollars a month. We thought that was
a lot of money. We could also get free passes once in a while to ride on
the train, but Joe hated this job. Once before we were married he and
Tommie Williams were working on the railroad and Tommie said, "Joe, we
are fools to works like this, let's quit and go to school." Tommie had
less than an eighth grade education, but he threw down his tools and
started to Graceland. He went as far as he could at Graceland; then went
to Ames and kept on until he became a doctor. Even though Joe hated his
job he did not have the courage to go with him. Joe had worked on the
railroad long enough to have the most seniority. Times were beginning to
get hard, and they were going to lay off some of their men. Joe and Leo
Harris had gone to Kansas a few summers to work in the harvest and made
good money. They wanted to go again, so he quit his job, and they went
to Kansas. But they could not find any work. He never got back on the
railroad to work again. From then on all the money we had was from
selling strawberries and other fruit. His folks had twelve acres in
Andover. It was all in fruit and very productive. Joe and his father got
the idea of trading this place for a fifty-five acre farm near Decatur,
Iowa. My mother-in-law and I tried our best to talk them out of it. this
place was brush, hiss and clay. I knew we could not raise anything on
it. The men could not be talked out of trading so moved to this awful
place. By then we had three children. James was four, Josephine was two
and Mildred was two months old. My father-in-law bought a beautiful
little jersey, which had lost her calf, for fifty dollars. We had never
heard of Bang's disease before. Now we had it. We could not brings on
the place without them losing their calves. If we raised any corn, the
groundhogs ate it. If we tried to raise ducks, they went down the river
which ran through our place. Rabbits ate our garden. There was no well;
we had to drink water from cistern. He placed five acres to soup beans,
and our family ate all we raised in one winter. It took every dollar we
could get to pay our taxes, and I think they were only about twenty
dollars a year. We made an old saw rig out of an old car so we could cut
and saw up some wood. Everyone else was poor, so there was not much sale
for wood. I cannot remember how we got them, but we had a jack and a
jenny and use to haul wood or go to town or any place else where we had
to go. We still had what had been our new Ford car, but we could not buy
a license or gas for it. Once we traded wood for sorghum. We had twenty
gallons and because we had so little else to eat we ate all the sorghum
in one winter. We sold wood to Mrs. Krucker who did baking in Lamoni.
She bought one load a month and paid us $2.25 a load. That was our only
steady income. Mr. Dobson killed a hog and gave us the hide. We picked
enough fat off of it to make us a gallon of lard which we made last as
long as we could. Much of the time all we had to eat was corn which I
shelled and took to the barn and ground and mixed with water and baked
with no eggs, milk or any thing else in it. Joe's health was getting
bad. He thought it would help if he had teeth pulled. I have no idea how
we got the money for him to do it, but he went to Independence, Missouri
and stayed with his sister, Violet, and had all his teeth pulled. After
that he had to live on our poor food with no teeth. We planned for a
time when we would be able to buy new teeth but knew it was out of the
question ever to do so. I tried to raise chickens and kept them in
little tin boxes. We had no money to buy feed so Joe would come to town
and sweep out the elevator for the trash to fee them. One year when we
sold the chickens and paid the taxes there was enough money left so I
could buy a pair of stockings. They cost seventeen cents.
The time came when so many people were having such a hard time that the
Red Cross started giving a forty-nine pound sack of flour to poor
people, once a month, I think. We were sure glad to get it. I do not
remember what happed to our jack and jenny, but for some reason Joe had
to walk the nine miles to town and carry a sack of flour back. He was so
tired he said that he would never do that again even if we all starved.
when it was time to go again he would not go. I wanted that sack of
flour so badly that I said, "I will go." He said, "You can go if your
want to, but I will not do it." I walked to town and got the flour. I
thought I would leave it some place until we had a way of getting it
home. My brother, Jim, was in town. I went home with him and stayed all
night. The next day he took me home in a wagon.
After Joe was gone, I moved back with my folks. They were living on a
farm that Aunt Emma Chasey had bought south of Lamoni. I had the idea of
taking my four children and moving to southern Missouri. I now had a cow
and one horse. Dad was going to give me another old blind horse. I did
not want to to Missouri without first going down and seeing what I could
find. I had no money so I was going to hitch hike. Mary Wightman, my
cousin, did not like to see me go alone so she went with me. We went as
far as Mountain Home, and then started back. We had found a place where
I thought I could squat for a while. We had been gone about a week. When
I got back to my folks, I made preparations to move, but several things
happened to delay me. Then Arthur kicked over the gasoline can. Gas went
all over his pants legs caught fire, and he was badly burned. We took
care of him at home for about a month, but he was only getting worse. I
hitch hiked to Leon to see if we could get him in the hospital. I had to
wait until afternoon to get to see the Board. The lady in the welfare
office asked me if had any money to buy lunch. I told her I did not but
that I did not mind about that. She reached into her purse and got a
quarter. She said, "Go buy yourself something to eat." I went to a a
cafe and bought a hamburger for a dime. I save the fifteen cents to buy
a box of soda and something else to take home. When I went back to the
welfare office, she asked me if I had lunch. I told I did, but did not
tell her I only spent a dime. Anyway, we got Arthur in the hospital for
a while. He got worse again after they brought him home so Dr. Hills
took him to Iowa City. He was there all winter. He did not get better
for the hospital asked my mother for permission to amputate his leg. She
would not allow it so they tried some new methods and in about three
weeks he was home.
In the meantime, Aunt Emma had decided with all the drouth, chinch bugs
and grasshoppers, she could not keep that farm so she sold it. I gave up
moving to southern Missouri and went to the county for help. There was
no A.D.C. in those days but the county gave me twenty dollars and month.
It seems like a fortune to me. I had had no money for so long. The folks
had to have some place to move. Dad and I ran everywhere looking for a
place. There was this little farm east of Davis City, fifty acres; it
was not a good place. It was brush, hills and clay banks. It had
belonged to Lotty Downey's father. We did not want to buy it, but we had
to. We had no money except the twenty dollars a month I was getting from
the county. They Downeys agreed to sell us the place for ten dollars
down and ten dollars a month. So we still had ten dollars a month to
live on. We had quite a few cows then as we had some of Aunt Emma's.
Fortunately for us there was forty acres south of us which no one used
and there was no fence in between. It was brush but it made extra
pasture. In 1934, we had a bad time the same as other people did because
there was no rain. 1936 was the awful winter we shall never forget.
After that things started to look better. My father started to get,
"Old-age assistance," twelve dollars a month. We lived on this place
either years. Then I sold it and moved to Lamoni, started hanging paper,
built my own house and now I shall say "Lived happy ever after."
I would still like to tell a few facts of how our family connects with
Lamoni history. My grandmother Zigler was a licensed mid-wife and
Grandpa was blacksmith. At one time he had a shop in Sedgewick. My
Richey grandparents and three oldest girls moved to Lamoni in 1883. They
came in a covered wagon. The girls went to Spurrior School at the same
time some of Barrs, Harps, Brantwaits and Joseph Smith children did.
Once Fred M. Smith put the cockleburs in Aunt Cora's hair. Grandma had
to cut it get them out. Grandpa burned the bricks for brick load of
cedar lumber back to Lamoni. Then he came back and helped to build some
of the houses in our end of town.
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