Reclaimed Memories

ca. 1956

roy's last day as president of Shenandoah College was June 30th and it was on that day that we closed the deal on the house and three acres of land which we thought of as "home" for the next 33 years. (On this same day Jim and Helen Smith, who are mentioned so often in my later writing, made their first visit to see us. Troy and Helen knew each other well when Pop Troy worked for Kendall Lumber Company. I think they, more or less, teamed up together when the young people from the church had their outings. We attended Jim’s funeral and later their only son's funeral, several years ago. Helen phones several times a year, but says she is no longer capable of writing letters. I write to her. She is a few months younger than I.)

The Evangelical United Brethren Church purchased the property earlier and wanted just the lot for additional parking space. They also bought another house next to the old parsonage. In order to get that they had to agree to buy three acres of land which was situated across the road. This road runs back of the church properties and the house the church purchased. The house was later sold and moved to a lot which we sold the buyer from our three acres. The church tore down the old parsonage and built a new brick structure in the center of the two lots. We eventually sold three more lots, realizing enough from the sales to cover the original cost of the entire three acres. There was still over an acre which went with the house when we finally sold it. For $2,500, the church sold us the three acres and the house with the stipulation that we bear the cost of relocating the house. When I was writing on the decade of the sixties, I wrote that I would sometime tell the story of that house so that you would understand why we were working on it during our vacations after moving to Florida. Now seems to be the time to do that.

The front section of the house was the first school erected in Singers Glen. It was the usual rectangular building, solidly constructed of heavy timbers, with two schoolrooms. The inside walls were sawmill lumber, twelve inches wide and almost an inch thick. We found to our chagrin, that the floor was almost two inches thick, when we set the furnace. It was built in 1882 and used for a school for seven or eight years. In 1890 it was sold and converted into a home. The building was divided into four rooms of almost equal size. There was a wide hall running directly from the front door to the other end of the building. Sometime later a very large kitchen, a small pantry and a back porch were added.

There was a nice front porch on the house with a lot of gingerbread trimming. But this all had to be discarded when the house was moved to our property in July. The movers separated the additions from the original schoolhouse and moved the whole thing in two sections. The day the actual moving occurred was a holiday for Singers Glen. Everyone wanted to see how it was going to be done. The movers had contracted to lay the foundations. They certainly did a good job! They put the two halves of the house back together and we did not even have one leak. It took all day to move each section and another day to put them back together. The entire job cost $1,000. Now it would probably cost ten times that amount.

We added a room for a study on the side of the kitchen opposite the pantry and back porch. There were no built-in features at all, not even a sink or a place for clothing storage. The owners had a well outside. It did have electricity. We rather liked the old fashioned chandeliers and saved them when they were removed to install ceiling fans several years later. One of them is now over our table here in Sharpes and another one we put upstairs.

One of the partitions was removed between me rooms, making a large living room. The spacious hall we converted into wardrobes for the bedrooms, a furnace space near the kitchen end and large built-in bookshelves in the living room. Howard wanted to try his hand at independent carpentry and he did a good job, for a twenty-one year old in building in the recessed book shelves. Troy and Howard together did the plumbing. We used the back porch and the pantry space for the bathroom and the utility room. The back entrance leads into the utility room.

The ceilings were ten feet tall in the schoolhouse section of the house. Troy lowered the ceiling to eight and one-half feet in the living room section, but left the tall ceilings in the bedrooms. The ceiling boards were the old fashioned beaded kind. All were eventually covered as were those heavy board walls. No reinforcements were ever needed in those walls, no matter how heavy the picture or the mirror!

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When we finished remodeling the bedrooms they had sliding doors, which recessed between the living room wall and the bedroom walls. To the wardrobe openings we placed accordion type doors. This made all wall space usable in the rather small, bedrooms. We also turned two of the tall windows in the bedrooms on their sides and installed them high enough to allow wall space for furniture. Those windows slide open, as ours do here.

The house which had been on these acres had either burned or been torn down years earlier. There were many old farm buildings still standing and we spent a lot of time tearing them down and burning the debris. There was one rather small building which had been used for storing feed for a poultry operation. It was in fairly good condition and stood at the end of a long poultry building. This we saved and years later moved near the garden for a workshop and tool storage area.

There was another building about nine by twelve feet that we acquired with the house and the movers also moved that for us. But we had to jack it up ourselves and put in foundation blocks later, as this was not in the moving contract. While we were doing all the remodeling over a period of several years, we used that building for the band saw and the storage of our carpenter tools.

We retired in 1971. By that time we had the inside of the house in fair shape. At least we were not ashamed to have our relatives and guests see it. In 1957, just before moving to Bradenton, we had the house covered by experts in that line of business. So we felt it would not deteriorate while we were away. It was locked up for eleven months of every year from 1957 until we retired in 1971.

One year when we returned to the Glen for our vacation Troy's project was the entrance way. This replaced the front porch which had been discarded.

The hardest work we did was soon after we retired when we decided to put a cellar under the house. It took the two of us all summer. Troy did the digging. I pulled the dirt up in a large bucket by a pulley contraption he had devised. This I emptied into a wheelbarrow and trundled out to our orchard. When the excavation was done Troy became a block layer for the first time and laid up the walls. It was a good cellar! Nothing ever froze in it. It had been thirty years since we had space for a garden and Pop Troy loved it! Of course. I had to can and preserve the vegetables he raised.

We enjoyed building and improving the property and in 1975 turned the nine by 12 foot building into a little guest house, with paneled walls, carpeted floor, a toilet, lavatory, a bed and other small accessories.

Grandchildren and others, I think you can understand why it was so hard for us to give up the Singers Glen home. The only work we hired done was the framing up of the study room that we added and having the house covered on the outside. I guess it was due to our genes that we have learned the ability to work with our hands. You two sons and your children seems to have the same native ability. Everywhere we looked in the house we saw the results of our toils. Then , too, the valley is so beautiful and it was such a pleasant place to live. But it is so nice to be close to all of you. We have never regretted making the move. But there is still so much I could write about that period, but my manuscript is already longer than I had ever dreamed of, when I began. As I finish each segment I always think there is not much to tell about the next, until I get started.

My school was out for the holidays on December 21st and we left immediately for Florida to spend the holidays with our sons. We returned December 30th.

NEXT - WAYNESBORO, VIRGINIA - 1957