This post is the official beginning of a series I want to do from my Grandpa Lyle’s memories.  My mother, bless her heart, who didn’t think to tell me much about her side of the family and didn’t write much of it down, did think to tape interviews with her father over a couple of years.  She had a list of things she wanted him to talk about, and he did although he had his own ideas about what needed to be remembered too.  These interviews were done in February 1985 and February 1986 (my mother was a teacher and these were on her winter vacation visits to her father), when Grandpa Lyle was 88 and 89 years old.  The first in this series was actually my post about Grandpa Lyle and food (a big part of his life for someone who as far as I know never cooked).  This is the next.

The theme of this series is life in north-central Ohio in the early 20th century.  My grandfather was born in 1896 and these stories about life in Ohio were from then to about 1910, some a little later perhaps.  So they provide an “up close and personal” look at what different aspects of life were like in a small village farming community.  Wakeman, Ohio, is located in Huron County and the Vermilion River runs through it.  It is close to the shore of Lake Erie, just south of the lake.  And is part of the historic Firelands area of the Connecticut Western Reserve.

“This little bit of information I lived through and I can give you a fairly accurate description of it. My younger sister, Doris, which was Anna Doris, but she preferred the name just Doris and the word Anna has been left out of her name a good deal. But that’s her correct name. She was born in 1906. We had — six months earlier, knowing that Mother was pregnant, we left my grandfather’s house on River Street and moved into a rented house on Pleasant Street. We lived in that house for a little over a year perhaps. She was born in June. We had lived there six months before her birth and we stayed there until the spring, probably the spring of 1907. That’s as close as I can recall right now.”

“Directly, or not directly, but across the street from where we lived and about two houses to the north of us was an old house that needed a lot of repair. It was being rented to someone there and there was a change of renters and one thing or another. The house was in a low lot and sometimes water would gather around it and there was no basement under it. It was in a very bad shape but the location was good and the framework of the house was good and my father arranged to buy that house for $700, thinking that he would restore it, which he did.”

“We got moved — I have forgotten exactly when we got moved into that house, but it was not too long after he had purchased it. He had contractors come in and place timbers under the framework of the house and start jacking it up. They raised that house very high, I would say a matter of eight or 10 feet and we had to go up steps to get into it. We lived in that house up, that had been raised up there, probably for the better part of eight or nine months, maybe longer. I don’t recall. The reason: he wanted to put a basement under that. And in order to — and the ground surrounding it was low and he wanted the dirt out of the basement to fill up the, and raise the level of the earth around the house so the water would drain away from the house instead of draining towards it. The basement was dug out with pick and shovel for a little while until they could get a one horse scraper and they dug a sort of a passage way that a horse could be driven down under the house and the scraper loaded with earth could be pulled out with the horse and scraper.

Digging a cellar with a horse and a Buck scraper

How many days that took, I don’t recall. But that’s the way the excavation under the entire house — it was a two story house and about six rooms. It was a two story house. The roof needed some repair and it needed repair all over. And, of course, in those days there were no sanitary facilities or no electricity and no plumbing of any sort.”

“But we got the house raised and then Father had the basement all cemented. He prepared a place for a furnace to be installed. He had a division through the center of the house. The furnace and the storage for coal and kindling. We used corn cobs for kindling and they would put in a wagon load of corn cobs in the window. And there were two basement windows and coal would be put in the other one there and it would hold several tons of coal and a load of corn cobs. The partition divided the furnace room from the storage room. My father decided that instead of having straight walls on the sides of his basement, it would be nice to have a shelf to put things. So the wall was constructed down, oh, we’ll say with a 12 inch shelf all the way around. Concrete. The earth was faced with concrete up to this. Then there was a setback of about 12 inches. And then the rest of it was concrete or building tile. I think it was building tile was used — the upper part, to the height that they wanted it. When that was all complete, the house was lowered onto the foundation that had been made. That foundation had to be constructed, and was constructed, correctly so that the house settled onto the building tile and there would be, there was a space of perhaps three feet from the floor of the house down to the self — it was a 12 inch shelf completely around the sides of the walls there — on which we stored everything that you can, a family might want there.”

I actually visited this house as a teenager with my family, I think in the summer of 1961 or so.  I can’t describe it fully and don’t seem to have any pictures of it.  What I remember as a snippet is that the old kitchen had a pump in the sink as a remnant from the time before there was water and indoor plumbing.  There was also a pump in the yard outside.  I was intrigued.  The other clear memory from that trip was that my uncle and cousins made homemade ice cream, taking turns cranking by hand, which I had never seen done before.  It was delicious!

Update: I recently got permission to use the picture I have inserted.  James Morgan of the www.seldomseensheep.tripod.com website was kind enough to allow me to use it.  Although it wasn’t under an existing house, it gives a good idea of what the process was like.  Thank you, James.

My grandfather, Lyle Denman, loved food and loved to eat.  I think this must have been true all his life.  Ok, this doesn’t make him a gourmet but he did like his meals.  And was always interested in where food came from and how you used it or preserved it.

He told the story about traveling with his parents as a young boy, to visit relatives in the West, and many of his memories included food, how they got it, what they ate, etc.  He said that on his 9th birthday, which occurred during that trip, he came to breakfast saying “Today I am nine years old and I am going to eat 9 pancakes.”  And he did!

Because he was interested, he carried the memory of how things about food were done in the early days of his life and he talked about this with my mother during the interviews they did.  Here he was describing the cellar that his father had built under a house in Wakeman, Ohio, that he had moved the family into.  His father had sold the farm and moved the family into town when his wife’s parents needed care and now they were in a house of their own.  These memories would be from about 1907 on.

“And there was ample room there to store crates of potatoes, crates of apples, cabbages, turnips, squash — all the vegetables.  Then there was a place that we had big ten gallon crocks for brine to, for corned beef, and to cure hams and bacon.  They would be cured in brine and then betaken out and smoked.  There was no refrigeration available at that time as we have now.  We did have what was known as an ice box which was kept up in the kitchen.  And we would get a chunk of ice and I will tell you more about the ice business later.  And that we would store milk in up there, and butter and things.

But most things, the meats, were all as they say, “pickled in brine.”  And they would be taken out and smoked.  We had ham, we had shoulders, and we would have spare ribs and things of that sort.  Father would buy half a pig or a whole pig or sometimes a pig and a half depending how many people were to be fed there.   At one time we had a man living with us.  He helped to build the mill and that will be another story.  He would buy a quarter of beef and we would have it cut up and it would be made into corned beef and we would — in the winter time it would be hung out on our large back porch that Father had built on the place.  And we had that screened in so that it could be practically fly-proof, or fly-resistant.  And we would hang the beef and the raw pork out there from the rafters of the porch during the cold weather until it got warm and it was no longer safe to have meat hanging out there.  We would smoke our hams and bacon; we used corn cobs in a metal tray.  We had a barrel, just probably a 50 gallon drum of some sort with both ends out.  And the bottom end was where the metal tray on the bottom — we would dampen them down, pour a little bit of coal oil or gasoline, just a small amount, to start a smudge.  And then we did get the small pieces of hickory bark and hickory to make a smoke there.  And we would smoke hams and bacon in that barrel.  We would hang them, maybe only two or three at a time inside the barrel on sticks placed across the top of the barrel.  And it would take, it would take a week or ten days to smoke them out sufficiently so they would keep through the summer.

Later, those would be taken — after they were smoked and when the weather began to get warm, Mother would slice them all up and place them in jars of lard.  She would have these crocks, a five gallon crock — the ten gallon crocks were used for the brine to pickle the meats or to have the meats cure in the ten gallon crocks.

This crock is used for pickles, not meat, but is similar to the ones Grandpa talked about

But the five gallon crocks was where she would — sausage that was made from the pork — a layer of grease would be poured in, then a layer of sausage, then another layer of grease and a layer of sausage, until the five gallon crock was filled with fresh sausage, covered with lard, pork fat, rendered.  And from time to time during the summer she would dig that out.  That would be, that sausage would not be fully cooked.  It would be heated through and partially cooked.  But it would be so that in the summertime when we wanted sausage, she would take a big spoon or a little trowel of some sort, or some article, and dig out the sausage and we would have sausage and pancakes or sausage and toast, and French toast and things of that sort.  And she did the same thing for ham.  Our hams, when the weather would get hot and we were afraid of the flies getting at the hams — the meat would become fly-blown and could not be used — before that would happen, she would have the hams cut up, sliced, and they would be packed in five gallon crocks, covered with lards.  And when we wanted a meal of ham, Mother would dig it out of the lard there, whatever we wanted for the meal.  And then would, if there was any uncovered, she would pour some of the melted fat back over so that it was completely covered at all times.  That was the way we lived there.”