An Old Farm East of Springfield

Before noon on Sunday 23 February 1999 I was reading a paper I wrote in 1996 on doing womanly things. As I read a certain part of it I remembered an incident which had happened prior to 1958 which may have had some connection with it.

The following section is copied from the paper about doing womanly things:

While I was studying Sociology in College we arrived at a part of the text which dealt with this social problem. I asked mother why she had fed the bums.

Mother corrected me, saying, "David, they weren’t bums. Each one of those men and boys was some mother'’ son and I only did what I prayed each night that someone would do for my sons if that Depression didn't end. You will never understand the despair your father and I felt as that Depression just got deeper and deeper. Your father and I could see no end to the Depression and feared that our sons might one day be forced to wander the countryside looking for work. My God, David, I gave food to a man one night on the back porch of the house on Labelle Street and when he finished he said, ‘Thank you, Emma. I had been five days without food.’

"I looked hard at him and finally he said, ‘I sat next to you in Reed School. Everything is gone, Emma. Mother and dad are dead. The farm was sold to satisfy the creditors and I’ve been on the road for nine years. Good farm hands are a dime-a-dozen.’

"He turned and slowly walked away.

"It was two days before I realized who he had to have been.

"With this realization came a great fear for each of you. Then I sat down and cried as I had not cried in year. I cried for the man I had fed. I cried for each of my children. I cried for your father. But mostly I cried for my country which I had seen the greed of a few men destroy.

"David, remember this, never kick a man when he is down for some day you may be down there yourself."

I learned a great lesson from this. I learned that women were then and are today the backbone of America as well as civilization.

That sets the stage.

It was sometime during the summer of 1957 that mother and father went for a ride with Billie and me.

Mother wanted to go over south east of Springfield to see Reed School and the homes she lived in while she attended that school or just lived in the area. Reed School was almost due east of Springfield.

As we left Springfield on the south Charleston Pike we of course saw the two houses which sat on the north side of the road, sharing a common lane which had a huge old willow growing in the center of it just north of the Pike. These were the houses mother and dad had lived in when they met. The willow tree was the one that grew from "Uncle Sam" Clark’s staff which he had inadvertently left stuck in the ground at that point one morning many years earlier while droving farm animals from South Charleston to market in Springfield.

Next, just as we were approaching the "big four" tracks where they cross the South Charleston Pike there stood "the old toll house at section ten". This huge house still had the "pike" house attached. During my mother’s childhood this room was the kitchen and since the "turnpike" was twenty-seven feet long it had a very high ceiling. The ceiling was so high that it was not possible to see to the ceiling, because the two windows were both small and low. This is the house with the secret doors and passageways because it had been used as a major assembly point on the Underground Railroad.

We saw the two "haunted" houses that she had lived in.

One had a locked room from which emanated inhuman sounds, very human sobs and the sounds of great chains being dragged and rattled at any time of the day or night. Mother and dad decided that the family had a demented or retarded child caged in that room. The farmer, from whom my grandfather leased the house and the land, came once a day with food and while there cleaned and disinfected the room.

The second house was still haunted. Shortly after sunset each day someone or something carried a lit candle down stairs from the attic. Then shortly afterwards returned first to the attic then back to the second floor and right into the large front bedroom. The bedroom had three windows on the roadside of the house and two on the side at right angles to that.

We saw two or three other houses in which mother had lived.

We were ready to head home when she asked, "David, would you mind turning around and at that last intersection turning east? I want to see something."

We went back.

She had me stop in front of a once beautiful house on a once prosperous farm. The great barns, there had been three of them, were beginning to fall apart. One silo was down. The corn cribs and tools and equipment sheds were just scattered piled of lumber. There was a sign on the gate and then again every fifty feet on the fence which stated, "posted, it is illegal to trespass on this property. This farm is the property of the [unreadable] bank."

Dad said, "Emma, that bank failed in 1929 and is still in the hands of the receivers."

Mother sat tight lipped and said, "Damn! Please, let’s go home."

I think maybe that may have been the farm on which the "knight of the road" mother had told me about had grown up.

Regardless of whose family the bank was dispossessing, the bank did nothing for itself, the family the economy or the country.

There are times when I believe businesses make money in spite of themselves not because of themselves.

END

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Copyright © 2000 by Don Hall. All rights reserved.
Revised: 06 May 2003 14:29:06 -0400 .