Wylie & Rose Lineages

Redmond Lake was a family friend of the Roses and so the first child of Lewis and Sarah was given that complete name in his honor. Maybe Redmond Lake

As a young man, Redmond often played the banjo at dances “where the rugs were rolled back from the puncheon floors.”(Roma). When the banjo head wore out, Redmond tanned the hide of a groundhog and used it to fashion a new head. Years later, Redmond’s oldest son, Ray, adopted his father’s old banjo. A photo of the Rose house in Crown City taken by an itinerant photographer shows various members of the family, including Ray with the banjo.

When he was eighteen years old, his father died and the responsibility of providing for his mother and five younger siblings fell to Redmond. He took Lewis’s blacksmithing tools and set himself up in business, working out of a cave on Williams Creek. His family always said that Redmond raised two families, since he supported his brothers and sisters for eight years until the youngest one, Annie, was fourteen. At that point he apparently felt he could go ahead and marry and raise a family of his own.

A strikingly handsome young man, Redmond was of a mind to find a wife when he made a date with Minnie Moore to attend services at Lawrence Chapel one Sunday night. He shifted his focus, however, when he saw Minnie’s older sister, Willie Ann at the services. It was love at first sight. “That’s the one I want to marry,” he said, and he did.

The young couple set up housekeeping on Williams Creek in Lawrence County. Their first child, Virginia Alice, died a few weeks after birth in 1901 and Clifford Ray was born a year later. Both Roma (1904) and Rolland (1907) were born on Georges Creek where the family lived next, but in two different houses. Redmond and Willie Ann then moved to Huntington for a year or two, living on 51st Street near Redmond’s brother, Jesse, and his wife, Pearl. The two brothers had good-paying jobs there, but there was some friction between the families. Redmond and Willie Ann had little taste for the “citified” ways of Pearl, especially, and so moved back to the country. They lived near Good Hope Church for a short time before going back to Williams Creek where Redmond set up another blacksmithing shop “at the foot of the hill (Roma) Peggy was born here in 1910. Four years later the family made its final move. Redmond bought a house in Crown City from Dr. Martindill (Martindale?) for $1200, moved the family into it in March, 1914, and opened his final blacksmith shop in a building on the back of the lot. Nellie was born in December of that year, with Janice Lindell following in August, 1917, and Columbia Geraldine (Gyppy) bringing up the rear in May, 1921. Redmond rented land from area farmers in order to grow tobacco as a cash crop so that the house was paid off, without interest, in 1918. Described much later by Roma and childhood friend Miriam Lanier Doughman Neal as “the typical village blacksmith, just like the poem,” Redmond was always handy with tools and his hands, able to create needed household items from wood and metal. The outdoor toilet at the back of the lot in Crown City was a two-holer, and Redmond had meticulously smoothed the small-sized children’s hole as well as the conventional sized one for adults. A hand-made wooden dispenser for a toilet paper roll was fastened to the back of the door. When Rolland and Alice were dating, Redmond carved a butter paddle for her, grinning slyly as he carved her initials, AP, into the handle and observing, “It’d be easy to make that P into an R.”

Not only was Redmond good at doing things himself, he could hardly stand to watch someone else do a task that he knew he could do better. Sarah remembers seeing his hands literally twitch while watching a grandchild try to master use of a tool, forcing himself to let the youngster learn when what he wanted to do most was take the work away from the beginner and do it right, himself. He always had ideas about how a piece of work could be done. Typically, he would hear someone describe a project they were considering, and respond with, “Now I’ll tell you what you do. You take ... and do...”

When Rolland was teaching in Crown City he helped Redmond buy and install mill equipment into an addition built onto the blacksmith shop. Farmers brought loads of wheat or corn to the mill to have it ground into flour or meal. His grandchildren would sneak samples of the fresh ground meal, or, better yet, chew grains of wheat into a gum-like consistency. After Redmond’s death the mill was torn down. Rolland salvaged the two burrs (circular, grooved grinding stones about 2-3 feet in diameter) and incorporated them into the walk from the back porch at the Bay Hollow house.

Redmond was a no-nonsense disciplinarian with his own children and demanded obedience. His children described him as firm but fair, strict but not harsh. They knew that when punishment was threatened, it would be followed through. “If Dad promised you a licking, you’d get a licking, even if it took until the next day for him to get to it. If you ran away, you knew that the licking was still waiting for you whenever you came home,” recalled Rolland. Family memory has it that only Nellie was of such reasonable and obedient disposition that she never got punished.

When Alice and Rolland announced that they would be the first to make Redmond a grandfather, he gave no reaction and remained a Stoic through all the teasing of his daughters, who accused him of shouting “Grandpa!’ into the rain barrel so the echo would let him know how it sounded. When baby Sarah was brought to Crown City for her first visit, Redmond kept his dignity and his seat on the porch swing while Willie Ann and the girls rushed out to the car to greet the new arrival. He somehow managed to stay within view of the baby, however, still feigning indifference, and in the morning contrived to clatter and bang so that she was up and stirring before he began work in the shop. He warmed quickly and progressively through his years of grand-parenting, however, becoming a soft touch to the summer sweaty faces of youngsters who obviously needed an ice cream cone or a bottle of pop from Sims Grocery down the street. He often laughed and told others about holding Ann when she was just learning to say a few words. He lifted her up to face level and said, “Ain’t Grandpa an ugly old man?” She regarded him steadily and replied, “My, oh my!” This struck his funny bone, and he’d laugh heartily every time he re-told the story.

“Bread” meant biscuits or cornbread, and Redmond wanted them every day. “Light bread” from the store was scorned although home-baked was fine. For breakfast every morning he had two eggs sunny side up. He broke the yolks and crumbled his biscuits on top, then covered it all with creamed tomatoes and stirred it around. Willie Ann, on the other hand, dropped a pinch of flour into the hot grease before she broke in her egg so that it fried into a crisp little patty with a solidly cooked yolk. She persuaded Sarah to eat eggs by giving her a piece on a biscuit and coaxing, “Now you try that and see if it doesn’t taste like fried chicken!”

Willia Ann Moore Rose Willie Ann often told about the harsh times of her childhood in the log cabin built by her father on Williams Creek. In the winter she would waken in the mornings to find snow drifted through the cracks between the logs and settled in ridges on her bedclothes. As soon as she was old enough to help with chores she would be wakened early to go to the barn. Still craving sleep and the warmth of her bed, she would stumble out the door of the cabin and around to the protected corner where the stone chimney abutted the side of the house. Here she would huddle against the warmth of the chimney for a few more minutes of comfort before tackling the chores waiting for her.

Christmas may have been observed with an extra service at church or a somewhat festive meal, but there was no gift-giving or elaborate observance of the day. Somewhere along the line, however, Willie Ann heard about Santa Claus and the magic of filled stockings on Christmas morning. She decided that she would hang her stocking on Christmas Eve despite the disapproval of her parents. In the morning when she shook out the contents she found only lumps of chicken dirt. When later generations expressed dismay over what appeared to be a cruel trick, Willie Ann was philosophical. “Oh, I cried about it at the time,” she would recall, “but mother and dad didn’t want me to get my hopes up for something that couldn’t happen. They knew there wasn’t going to ever be any Santy Claus at our house and figured I needed to make up my mind to it.” When guests came to the Moore home, the men would gather on the porch to smoke cigars and talk while the women washed dishes and visited indoors. Willie Ann was fascinated by the cigars and decided she wanted to try out that process of smoking them. So she and her sister Ida crept unseen around the side of the house and hid until someone flipped a cigar butt close enough that they could get it without being caught. The two little girls took turns puffing on the butt, but Willie knew right away that she had made a major mistake. “Oh, but I was sick!” she would recall. “I was so sick I thought I’d die. I managed to get to my bed, but it kept going around, and I had to puke but the chamber pot wouldn’t stay still and I was afraid I’d miss it. That was the sickest I ever was, and I never wanted to smoke a cigar or anything else ever again!”

Educational opportunities were limited, and Willie’s schooling stopped at third grade. She was self-conscious about her handwriting and spelling as an adult but was faithful about writing letters to keep in touch with family. She “got religion” as an adult and read her Bible devotedly, sometimes working to puzzle out the unfamiliar vocabulary and format of the King James version. She said she had often taken the Bible with her to the toilet, that being one of the few opportunities she had to sit down and read. As an adult, Sarah gave her a more modern translation one time as a gift, but Willie returned it, saying the changes in wording were confusing to her. She often quoted from Revelations to “neither add to nor take away from what is written.”

Willie bore eight children and raised seven of them. She had unpleasant pregnancies, remembering that she had been nauseated all nine months with each of them. “I’d have to cook a big meal for everyone else, and the smell of the food would just make me sick. I’d go outside and puke, and then have to come back in and keep on cooking.”

She cooked for more than just her immediate family, too. Redmond’s customers would plan their trips to the smithy so that they would be there when dinner was on the table at noon, knowing that the Rose hospitality would feed them. So Willie cooked with an eye on the shop, never knowing just how many extra plates to set on the table. While her generosity didn’t begrudge feeding hungry people, the one-sidedness of the situation sometimes rankled. “You’d think someone would bring along at least a head of cabbage sometimes. But they didn’t. Maybe one or two in all those years.” The Crown City jail was directly across the street from the Rose house, and whenever there was an occupant (usually a tramp, rarely a lawbreaker) he could count on a hot meal provided by Willie Ann.

Peggy took a dim view of all those meals. “Mom and Roma would do all the cooking,” she’d lament, “and Mommy never could cook without dirtying every single dish and pot she had. Then I was the one who had to wash up every-thing when the meal was over.” On one particularly bad day when the kitchen was awash with dirty dishes, the summer heat and that of the stove turned the room into an oven. Peggy tried to swallow her resentment and was gradually getting the place cleaned up, when she discovered the dirty churn sitting in the corner after some butter making in the morning. Peggy hated cleaning the churn under any circumstance, but this day it was just too much. “It was the last straw,” she would tell years later. “I picked up that old churn, stepped out the door, and flung it just as far as I could!” Then she’d laugh with that infectious rich chuckle of hers and add ruefully, “Of course Mommy really let me have it with the switch, but it was worth every lick I got to see that nasty old thing a flyin’ through the air!”

The Rose house had a separate building which had been Dr. Martindill’s office originally. When the family was mostly at home, that room served as the kitchen because it was large enough to accommodate so many people, and because it kept the heat of cooking out of the rest of the house. In winter, Willie would have the big, black coal stove fired up, lifting the stove lids from time to time to add fuel or move the hot coals around for even distribution of heat. A reservoir on the side held a couple of gallons of water, kept hot and ready for washing up. Because dishwater cooled down before the last dish was washed, she often set the enamel dishpan on the range itself to keep the water hot. In summer, her kerosene stove did the cooking, with whatever grandchild was handy sent to the store for a refill of the kerosene can whenever the glass tank on the end of the stove ran low.

Willie Ann often appeared to have second sight. Without any visible notice of visitors, she would bake a couple of pies or a cake and lay in extra groceries. “I’m fixin’ for Ray and Della (or whoever) to come this weekend,” she’d say, and the rest of the family would plan accordingly, knowing that most likely Ray and Della would come down, unannounced but nonetheless expected.

Typically, barefoot all summer, she felt it was somewhat improper and often kept a pair of shoes handy to slip on when she saw someone coming. Otherwise, she laughed apologetically and let it go. A nightly ritual was to wash her feet before going to bed to cool as well as clean them. The Roses kept several hives of honeybees for many years, but Willie Ann was always careful to steer clear of them. Highly sensitive to bee venom, she once ate comb honey in which a stinger was imbedded. Her mouth and throat swelled nearly shut.

She loved flowers and her garden, growing quantities of vegetables for the table in season and for canning. Pots of flowers lined the porch in summer and filled the windows of the sitting room in winter. At night she would painstakingly move them closer to the stove and/or wrap them carefully against the cold since the room temperature would drop below freezing as the fire burned out. One of her special flowers was the pink spotted lily with its sweet, sugar-candy fragrance. Descendants of that lily survive by the locust tree on the Lithopolis farm and in Smyrna, GA.

When women got the right to vote, Willie Ann decided she wanted the privilege of casting the first female ballot in Crown City. Another woman, Myra Garlic, had been bragging that she would be the village’s first female voter. Willie kept her mouth shut about her ambition but got up extra early so that she was the first one in line when the polls opened, thereby stealing Myra Garlic’s thunder. While she would never have let herself be a political activist, she did insist on a fair shake when necessary. Sometime in the early to mid-1940’s the streets between the river and Rt. 7 were being paved. When she asked about the street between her house and the jail, (‘Her” street) she was told it wasn’t scheduled for paving. This made her mad. She talked to someone with better knowledge of the law, probably Mr. Lanier, and then told the pavers they’d better do her street, or she’d file an injunction against them. They paved her street, and she celebrated her victory for years to come.

While Willie’s own standards and moral character were extremely high, her kindness and compassion outweighed any inclination to be harsh with those who lived by a lesser rule. Not far away a woman of very questionable character lived with her two boys and an old man purported to be her father-in-law. The family lived in filth and squalor. When the woman slipped into a fatal illness, Willie took food to the house, bathed the sick woman, and brought a degree of comfort to chaos.

In her older years, Willie Ann had the leisure to indulge a playful sense of creativity. She painted designs on her flowerpots with leftover house point. She used the back of wallpaper remnants and a set of watercolors to paint birds and chickens. Her version of an indoor toilet was a chamber pot balanced on the cross braces of an old kitchen chair with a missing seat. A black velveteen pillow with a cat face stitched on it covered the pot lid when not in use. Whenever grandchildren came to visit, they were treated to a trip into the bedroom “to visit the black cat” instead of a cold trek down the garden path to the privy.

She must have been in her seventies when she had thyroid surgery. The doctor called her a “tough old turkey and she loved to quote him with a hearty laugh. She managed to live alone into her eighties with the help of neighbors and friends who carried in her coal and brought her mail and groceries. Surgery for a bowel obstruction turned up polyps, later diagnosed as cancer. Her children and grandchildren took turns visiting, supporting her with love, and saying their good- byes. At one point she said ruefully to her daughter-in-law, “Oh, Alice, if I’d known it (the surgery) was going to hurt this much, I’d have just stayed home and died there.”

Tales Told Remembering Growing Up in Crown City Rolland’s responsibility as a boy was to make sure there was a supply of kindling as well as coal beside the stove each morning so the fire could be lighted. Rather than get up earlier than his parents to bring in the fuel in the morning, he would carry it in the evening before. To his disgust, if he brought it in too early, someone would burn it all before bedtime, and then he was in trouble the next morning. He tried a new strategy. He split the kindling early and then hid it under the front porch until bedtime. A quick trip outside and the kindling was in place for morning. One night he slipped outside for his kindling after his sisters had gone back to the bedroom but before they were asleep. When they heard noises coming from under the porch just outside their window they panicked and set up a howl that something was going to get them.

While a boy or young teenager, Rolland was invited to go fishing with M and F, two men who were probably in their early twenties. As it turned out, Rolland was supposed to supply the muscle and row the boat upriver while M and F lolled in the back of the boat and talked. Rolland rowed some miles upstream to where they caught enough bait to set their trotline, then started back, still doing the rowing. A wind had come up, the water was quite rough, and Roland was smarting at being used by the other two. So he pulled to mid-river, stood up without warning, and pitched one oar as far to the left and the other as far to the right as he could. He then dived in and swam to shore, leaving the two dandies to retrieve their oars and get home as best they could.

A and B (and no doubt some others) were in a brawl when A grabbed B’s ear with his teeth and literally bit it off. The brawl ended with this bizarre act and the two combatants rushed B and his ear to Old Doc. The latter was something less than a great doctor, and probably in his cups at the time. In any case, he sewed B’s ear back to his head - upside down! Grumbling all the while, he removed it and sewed it on right the second time.

Head and body lice were common in school, and were constantly battled by Redmond and Willie Ann. Roma recalls sitting behind one of two unfastidious sisters, both of whom wore their hair in stylish upswept knots on top of their heads. Head lice made superhighways out of the long strands of dirty hair pulled from their napes to the crowns of their heads. Oscar Pickens recalls a boy he termed the “filthiest I ever saw,” whose fellow students gave him a wide berth and watched with some fascination as the body lice (graybacks) crawled on, over, and around him. A school official, himself only a bit cleaner than the boy, finally directed him to either clean up or quit school.

Peggy always swore that her mother dirtied every dish and pot on the place with every meal she cooked. Considering that WiIlIe Ann fed not only her own family but any people who came into town from the country to have blacksmithing work done by Redmond, she frequently cooked for a lot of people. Rarely would she know in advance how many people would end up at her noon table. As Peggy recalled those days, it seemed that Roma was always the one drafted to help with the cooking, and Peggy was stuck with the hated chore of cleaning up. One hot summer day when there had been many people to feed, the kitchen was piled high. Peggy gritted her teeth and dug in. She heated water on the stove to fill the dishpan, a rinse pan, and set the teakettle to heat more hot water when the first round got too gray and greasy to use any more. She washed the glasses and flatware, the plates and coffee mugs, the serving bowls and platters. She soaked and scraped the granite kettle, the aluminum stewpots, and the iron skillets and baking pans. And then, when the end finally seemed within sight, she spied the churn waiting in the corner to be cleaned of its sour residue from the mornings butter-making.

“Seeing that churn was just too much, the last straw!” she would say in later years. “I hated to wash that churn at any time, and that day after all those dishes it was just too much! I picked up that churn, opened the door, and threw it as far into the yard as I could!”

Peggy’s story usually ended there, or perhaps with some passing reference to being punished for her temper. It’s likely that the churn in question was wooden and probably not the crockery one which Wilie Ann later handed down to Rolland and now is in Sarah’s living room.

Oscar Pickens was Ray and Rolland’s best friend. At the time they became friends in Crown City, Oscar was living with his grandmother, and both of them are included in Roma’s photo of some of the Rose family in front of the house. Many of Rolland’s tales of his boyhood included Oscar, or were about Oscar. Here are some of them:

Ray, Rolland and Oscar were out tramping around the hills one time, just enjoying themselves and their free time. Rolland caught a flying squirrel and, pleased with himself for his cleverness, carried it as they continued their tramping around. The flying squirrel, however, was less pleased and delivered some painful bites to the hand that was holding it. Rolland checked his first impulse, which was to drop the flying squirrel in a hurry. Instead, he said to his brother, “Hey, Ray, you want to pet my flying squirrel? I’ll let you hold it if you want to.”

Ray was eager to hold the squirrel, and Rolland handed it over without letting on that he’d been bitten. Sure enough, the squirrel bit Ray, too, and let Rolland have the laugh of playing a practical joke on someone.

Shoes had been a problem to Oscar as a very small boy. No matter how hard he tried, he always wound up with them on the wrong feet. He tried to correct this by taking them off carefully at night and setting them side by side the same way they’d been on his feet. He was usually thwarted, however, because his older brothers would wait until Oscar was asleep and then mix up his shoes. He also had difficulty learning to tie the laces. He could get the first part of the knot but not the bow. One morning he worked diligently, but no bow. So he kept tying what he knew how to do until he had all the loose ends taken care of. The only problem was that he had tied both shoes together and couldn’t walk. So, he slipped his feet out of the shoes, slung the footgear over his shoulder, and went downstairs to tell his grandmother, “These shoes just won’t work!”

Oscar managed to acquire an old pistol one day and tried his hand at target shooting. He propped a board against the blank section of his house wall between the door and window. He took careful aim at his board target and fired. The bullet missed the board by several feet, went through the glass window, and into the stovepipe. His grandmother was frying a skillet of potatoes at the time. The stovepipe came down and filled her skillet with about a quart of soot. She shrieked and yelled for him to come home, but Oscar made himself very scarce for the rest of the day. As he fled from her wrath, he hid his pistol in tall grass near the fence, but she found it and took it. When he crept home much later, Grandma was still waiting for him with fire in her eye and due punishment for the seat of his pants.

One Halloween Oscar and some of his friends made a tic-tac and planned to tie it on the door of Oscar’s Uncle Tom, a man of unpleasant disposition. They succeeded in getting it fastened where they wanted it, but Tom opened the door immediately and threw the tic-tac into the grass. The boys retrieved it, and in a little while Oscar was elected to again tie it on the door, figuring that since Tom was his uncle, things would go easier for him if he were caught. As he tied the noisemaker on the door, Tom suddenly jerked the door open and Oscar sprawled face forward on the floor of the living room. His aunt was waiting for him with a broom and whacked him thoroughly with it before he could escape.

Transcribed from tape made by Alice Plumer Rose for Sarah Rose Gorsuch on July 31, 1983.

When I graduated from college, I got the position of (high school) teacher at Waterford, Ohio and taught there for five years, from 1925 to 1930. In 1930 I discovered that I was not rehired; someone else had been hired in my place and it was up to me to find another place to teach. A friend who taught there in Waterford with me, who was originally from Gallia Co., told me that he’d heard of an opening in a small town, Crown City, which is a wide place in the road there between Gallipolis and Huntington. He and his wife were going to Gallipolis to visit some relatives that summer, so he invited me to go along. He knew the Board members in Crown City. We left his wife and little girl with her relatives in Gallipolis and then we went on down to Crown City.

I waited in Paul’s car in front of the grocery store while he went in to talk to someone, and while I was sitting there, I saw this good-looking young man come out of the house on down the way and get into this little bug of a car. That was my first glimpse of Rolland Rose!

Paul introduced me to two or three members of the Board. One of the Board members was blind, Dick Waugh, but his father kind of maneuvered things for him, in a way. I really did more interviewing with him (the father) than I did with Dick. But anyway, they decided to hire me. I don’t know if it was on Paul’s recommendation or not.

So, then the next thing was to find out where I would be staying down there. This one Board member suggested the Hotel Florence. Well, I didn’t have any balmy ideas about the Hotel Florence, it was just a great big building with the words Hotel Florence across the front of it. It was run by an elderly lady, Ella Kerns and her daughter Etta. Etta had never married. But of course, I didn’t discover all that while I was down there with Paul Haskins. I wrote to her to see if she could give me room and board, and she wrote back that they’d be glad to have me. Of course, the town is just a little town, not many places of business; the usual grocery stores, and the beer joint, the schoolhouse and a gas station. Mom and Dad took me down when it was time for school to begin and met Mrs. Kerns and Miss Kerns. Mrs. Kerns was a little, kind of wizened up lady, you know, and her daughter was tall and not especially good looking. They showed me a room, a nice great big room to the front. Now the hotel had no bathroom, just outside accommodations. It was comfortable enough in mild weather, but that bedroom got pretty cold in winter. No heat in the bedroom at all, just blankets to keep me warm in bed, but no heat. I had hardly got settled when the little girl catty-corner across the street came over and said, “Miss Plumer, let me take you around town.” Geraldine Rose. I said okay, so we started out and walked down toward the river, just a few blocks. And every place we’d go past she’d say “How do, Miz So-and-So.” or “Hello, Mr. Such-and-Such!.” She was showing off that she was walking with the teacher, you see. So I got an introduction to the town in that way, through Geraldine. We did not go through Buzzard Roost, which is a part of the town, across a gully and up the other side. Course I was over there later on, but not that time. Then as we came back past Rose’s house there was this real handsome guy there on the porch, you know, and he spoke to me, too. People were very friendly. I remember going up to the schoolhouse and the fellow I taught with that year, Rudy Rogers, was a real Santy Claus built fellow, real round face. When he’d get kind of exasperated about things he’d say, “Well, tiger tracks, Miss Plumer!” The expression I’d always heard used was “Hell’s bells and panther tracks,” but he’d just say, “Tiger tracks.” He had never done any teaching to amount to anything, and as far as organizing the high school - it was just a two year high school - he didn’t have any idea how to go about it. There were just two teachers, he and I, and he was the principal. I taught French, which I’d never planned to teach, and English and biology. I think Rogers taught the history. It sounds like a very small number of subjects but I can’t remember anything else. He must have taught the math, too. Anyway, that was it, it was just a two room deal, and the two rooms opened out to make an auditorium when necessary. His half had a piano and we did have a piano teacher. She came once or twice a week. I taught on the ground floor. It was an interesting bunch of youngsters, a different type in their attitude and their way of looking at things. than what I’d been with before. A lot of it (what was different) was their conversation or talk. At Christmas time, of course Rudy and I had to learn the customs. I was informed that the teachers always treated the youngsters, always treated them (with bags of candy). Well of course at Waterford they’d gotten out of that when they got out of grade school. Max Garlic (one of the students) insisted, “Oh, but we always did that. The other teachers always did it!” So, we did, and we had a Christmas program of some sort.

By that time, I’d become acquainted with that fellow on the porch, you know, by the name of Rolland Rose. We’d had several dates. He had a little bug of a car, just a knock down kind of a thing; I think he’d gotten it from his brother Ray. It didn’t have a top on it nor any running boards. It was really knocked down, but it would run. That year he was going down to Marshall College in Huntington for some more work, so for our first date he came over and asked me to go with him to a football game. I don’t remember who they played. So, we went down in the bug and I remember he had his student ticket and he said, “Now I’ll wait here in the entrance-way and you go get your ticket, he gave me the money for it. Well, I couldn’t tell you a thing about the game. Then after the game was over, we went into town and got something to eat, and then we came home. It was real pretty driving up Rt. 7 alongside the river with a full moon, and you know I’ve always been kind of nutty about moonlight anyway. Of course, Crown City is really right on the river, and I was familiar with the boats going back and forth by then. But that night after he’d gone home and I was getting ready for bed I could hear a boat down on the river, and it just sounded so romantic. Maybe I was just in the mood for romance, but I thought I had just never had a better time.

There were the grade school teachers in the school building. Miriam Lanier and Evelyn Sims and Mrs Voorhees. They taught in the various grades. Rolland was not there that first year, but he was the second.

There were a lot of boatmen, fellows who worked on the river boats, who stayed at the Hotel Florence and ate there. That eating experience was something, too. At home Mom would have cornbread once in a while every week or two, and it was kind of a neat. Down there, you had it every day! Every day. It was good enough. Had lots of beans, cornbread and beans. Those fellows just lapped it up, of course, and then they served meals to people who were just coming through, people who just stopped to get a meal. I remember this fellow from Marietta, Sam Bellville. The two Kerns ladies and I had eaten one Sunday, and he came in and they said yes, they’d fix him a meal. So they got him a plate. Then he reached up and took out his teeth and laid them beside his plate, and then ate his dinner! He just gummed it, and I’d never seen anything like that before in my life. That was just one of several things that were new. The boatmen worked on the boats going up and down the river and would stop for meals or overnight; they all had rooms upstairs. When the Kernses got breakfast for those boatmen I had to be up, dressed and ready to eat at the same time. I’d be ready for school by 6:30 or so and it didn’t start for another couple of hours.

Miriam Lanier lived two or three houses beyond the hotel and she stopped by for me on the way to school that first day. We got acquainted and would walk up to school together. She introduced me to different ones of the townspeople.

The Kerns ladies were not always real hospitable about Rolland coming over when we were dating. Early in the fall we’d sit out in the porch swing, but when it began to get cold, I asked them if it would be all right for Rolland and me to sit in the parlor when he came over. for a date.

“Well,” Mrs. Kerns kind of raised up and got bristly, “I never let Ettie!” I don’t know what made me say it, I wasn’t trying to make it sound like it did, but I said, “Well, maybe I’d better go someplace else.” Meaning, I knew that we could go to Miriam’s to have a date. I wasn’t threatening to leave them or anything, I just thought well maybe I’d better handle the situation another way. But they thought I meant to move elsewhere. Mrs. Kerns changed her mind right off. She said, “Well, if he just comes maybe a couple a times a week., that’ll be all right.”

They did have a stove in the parlor and I don’t remember whether she kept a bucket of coal in there we could use, and after we used it up that was it, or not. I don’t remember that. But I remember Miriam going by on the sidewalk which was just right up against the parlor. She could see the light in there and knew we were in there, and she’d tap on the window.

The next year another fellow from down at Proctorville, Jimmy Patton, taught there. Rolland and I were going pretty steady by that time. Jimmy had organized the boys to play baseball and he asked me to go along to a game. He asked, “Where’s Rolland?” and went over home and looked there and at the beer joint, not that Rolland was in the habit of going there! We looked all around and couldn’t find him. Didn’t know where he’d disappeared to. I said, “Well, I’ll go ahead anyway.” He had a bunch of the boys with him; it was nothing private. So we went to the game and the next morning I went over to Roses to see where Rolland had been. That was the only time in my experience with her that Grandma Rose ever acted cool. She knew, since Geraldine was the perfect informant, that I had gone with Jimmy. I asked her where Rolland was and she just, you know. But he was there, and I said “Well, where were you last night? Jimmy and I looked all over for you to go to the ball game.” Then Grandma, you could see the hackles laid down. Of course, maybe she thought I was just playing one against the other that way. I had eaten pickled beans at Grandma Rose’s house and they were good. They were seasoned with bacon fat and they had a different, sort of pickley taste, so when the Kerns ladies asked me if I liked pickled beans I said, “Yes, yes!” I came home from school the next day at noon and I thought “What in the world do I smell!’ Smelled like something had died. I didn’t ask about the smell, but directly they said, “We’re having pickled beans for dinner,” and there they sat. That was what I’d been smelling. Of course I’d bragged on them before, so what else could I do but waller a bunch of them around on my plate and pretend to eat them? Oh my. That was one of those things that you’d just as soon not remember.

One time Miss Ettie went to visit some relative out in the country, and she knew that I’d be there at night in my room so there was no reason why she shouldn’t go. So she went, and then during the day when I wasn’t there, Mrs. Kerns fell and I think now that what she did was possibly dislocate her hip. She was really in a sad way. When I got home, there she was. I got her to bed and called Mrs. Rose and told her and they got her son who lived across the river, Will Kerns. She wouldn’t let them get the doctor, but she really did suffer. She’d say, “Oh, I just punish!’ Miss Ettie, then, when she got back, oh she just blamed herself and said she never should have gone. The old lady, she laid there for quite a while, and then she walked with a cane for as long as I knew her after that. Her son had nine boys, but no girls. I liked his wife; she was real country type woman, likeable, and easy to get acquainted with, and she just wished for a girl, and that’s all she got was just wishing. They had Will Kerns’ ball team with all those boys.

There were maybe twenty-five students total in high school (two grades.) I had one room and Rudy had the other. The kids could bring their sack lunches if they came from out in the country. The others mostly went home for lunch. Most of the country kids walked it, some of them their parents brought in. I don’t remember when I was there that anyone rode their horse in, but some of them had done that earlier.

I had Rolland’s sisters, Janice and Nellie, in class. Janice has never forgotten this one thing. She was making some kind of reply, and speaking slow, kind of dragging it out, and asked what seemed to me to be an inane question. I said, “Janice, use your head. That’s what it’s for!” She hasn’t forgotten that yet. But I never had Geraldine because I just taught the two years down there and Geraldine was up to 7th or 8th grade by then. I taught just the two years there and then they disbanded that high school, so I was home (in Marietta) in ‘33 and we got married in ‘34. I was teaching there just the two years. There’s a fellow there in town, a barber. His father’s name was Haskins and his father and mother both died so his grandmother King raised him. He went by both names. They called him Herschel Haskins or Herschel King or Cackle King. He was a big, tall, gabby sort of a guy, the reason they called him Cackle, I guess. That’s what you heard most often. His barbershop was just across the street there from the hotel. When I’d go to school and see him out I’d always speak to him, not doing anything different than I’d do with anyone else. He told somebody, “Now, that Miss Plumer, for a woman from the city, now from the city mind you, she’s the damndest commonest woman I ever saw!” That tickled me, you know, that “from the city,” because he was as much from the city as I was, having grown up in the country like I did.

Different ones there liked to pull things on me. For instance Miriam’s brother, Sidney Lanier ... his father was sort of onto poetry ... Sidney Lanier, you know? Well, Sidney had a store and one day I was in there and he said “Miss Plumer, how do you pronounce rath-o-le?” I said, “Well, is there an accent over the e?” He said, no, he didn’t think so. He said, “Is it ra-tho-lee or ra-tho-lay?” I said, “Well, without an accent I suppose it’s ra-tho-lay.” He said, ‘Well, you know we just call it rat-hole down here!” He caught me fair and square, and of course he just laughed and laughed and I felt all over in spots. Miriam and I were real good friends. They lived in a brick house at the end of the street, nice big roomy thing. Her mother was so much fun. I’d go down there with Miriam and she’d always come around and talk to me. One time she came in the front door and down the hall to a kind of a living room where I was sitting. She opened the door and stuck her head in and let her false teeth fall. Then she said “Aw, isn’t that awful for me to do a thing like that to you, Miss Plumer!” ‘Course I didn’t mind. Miriam’s dad had been a teacher, country school teacher, and they ran the post office when I was down there. The post office was right across the street from Roses. The jail was across the street there too. Miriam was dating the man she married, Charles Doughman, everyone called him Dukie. She was a great one to act a monkey, too, got that from her mother, I guess. She had a sister, Joy, a very pretty girl. She wouldn’t go outdoors where people could see her without all her make up on. Miriam taught in the lower grades, maybe the first or second. Another lower grade teacher was Mrs. Voorhees, an interesting person. She had a daughter, Marybelle, a real pretty little girl, and her mother talked about her constantly. She had dark curly hair and big dark eyes, and round pink cheeks. Mrs. Voorhees herself was no beauty. One time she invited Miriam and me to go down to Proctorville where she lived and stay the weekend. So, we did and had a real nice time. Her husband was a quiet like fellow, and she was one of these nervous, jittery things.

The students and their parents, aside from the storekeepers and the fellow at the beer joint, had farms out from town, and tobacco was the big thing. ‘Course the kids liked to introduce me to things I was unfamiliar with. Coming home from school I came past a tobacco barn, where they put the tobacco leaves on these long poles and then put them up in the barn to let them dry, let the air circulate through them, you know. We were coming down the path there one day and some little girls that were with me said “Let’s look inside the tobacco barn,” and I said “Okay,” ‘cause I’d never seen one They opened the door and we stepped in, and you could hear the worms chewing on that tobacco. That was such a startling thing to me to think of all those little things working on that tobacco. Course I know it was true because we had our own tobacco later on. So far as other means of livelihood, Rolland’s father had the blacksmith shop. Somebody got the mail. They’d row a boat across the river to meet the train that came up from Huntington on the other side. Then they’d come back in the boat. In the wintertime they may have gone so far as to ride a horse across it when it was frozen.

Across the road toward Miriams’ a man and his wife had a little kind of a snack shop. What we generally got when we went to Mr. Macks was grilled cheese sandwiches and something to drink. I always enjoyed going over there. They were so nice. They were from Huntington. They always liked to have us come over, too, I think, ‘cause most of the other folks ... not that I’m trying to build us up, but like I said, I think they enjoyed having us come. That was about it so far as entertainment is concerned. We went to Huntington different times to shows and all. Evelyn and Stanley Sims took us down to shows several times, and we went with Miriam and Charles. And of course, we went just us two. Mostly what we went to Huntington for was just a movie. I never had eaten chili and we went down to one of those horror movies you’re supposed to get all worked up over. We went with Evelyn and Stanley and on our way back one of them suggested we stop at a little place for chili. I said I’d never eaten it, and they said “Welllll!’ So we ordered a bowl of chili apiece, and it was hot, at least to me, and I felt like my mouth would burn up, and they said, “Take another drink of your coke,’ and it seemed like the more I drank of my coke the hotter the thing got. That was my introduction to chili. I was introduced to a number of things!

Rolland’s additions to the tape made July 31, 1983 by Alice.

“R” probably Rudy (Rogers) didn’t have any teacher training. He had a degree and of course that was sufficient to get him a certificate, so he was hired to be principal of the school. As she said, he apparently didn’t know anything about enrolling the kids or anything like that. About all you had to do to get a certificate to teach high school was to have a degree. There wasn’t any stipulation about how much administration you had, and what you had probably didn’t apply to your teaching. Probably at that time the situation was true all over Ohio. Things have changed over the years. If you had a degree and the County Superintendent, okayed for you to have a certificate, then that was all it took... Anyway, Rudy just said, “Tiger tracks, Miss Plummer! You do it.”

He was good on violin, and I took several lessons from him. That was one thing he was good at. He’d come to school with a big grin on his face and a pipe in his mouth. Before school began he’d knock his pipe out against the building and go in to teach. About the only sporting activity at that time was mostly just spontaneous. We played baseball, or kickball or might call it soccer ball. The girls would jump rope and play tag and sometimes the boys would have a marble game going. During the wintertime everybody that had a sled, or even if they didn’t, were out there on the hill (behind the school) sleigh riding so long as they had snow.

When I started teaching that was 6th grade, then the next year I was teaching 7th and 8th grades. Some years, but not necessarily at that time, I had all four grades, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th.

The first year I taught was in 1928 in a little West Virginia school. I was still in college ... I never finished college until quite late in life!... I’d get enough credits to teach and then I’d get some more to keep my certificate going and then I got married and it was the same thing because little mouths had to be fed, you know. I was in college in 29 and 30. Then in 30 and 31, I taught in Crown City in the school there. Then I don’t remember if I dropped out another year and took more work, or if I took work in summer times until I had in three years. That gave me what they called a short-term elementary certificate. You didn’t have to graduate from college at that time in order to get a certificate or teach.

Transcribed from tape made by Rolland Rose on Aug 6, 1983 at request of Sarah Gorsuch Rose family history:

Dad was 18 years old when his father died of a stroke. He was left with raising the family of 5 brothers and sisters. He took his father’s blacksmith tools and set up shop in a rock house. He worked for the public to earn a living for his family until he was married at the age of 26. He met his wife, Willie Ann Moore, at the Mt. Olive Church and asked her to marry him, having taken her home a few times. They decided to get married around 1900. There were two boys and six girls, the oldest, a girl, died in infancy.

They set up housekeeping in a two-room log cabin and lived there until the first child was born. Then they moved from there over onto another creek, Georges Creek, two miles away. He set up shop again and worked for the public for a year. Then I was born in the log house there on George’s Creek in 1907. When I was just a few months old work was slack in the country round about and he thought he could make better money if he went to the railroad shop. So he went to Huntington, WV and stayed a year. The railroad shop shut down and he came back to approximately the same place we had left. He set up shop again and continued to work there for the next 5-6 years, and then they moved to Crown City. When we moved it was quite an interesting thing. The blacksmith tools were taken in the day before and the next day we were loaded into a couple of wagons with the furniture and the children. We had 2 milk cows, and 2 horses. My brother, older than I, rode one of the cows. The rest of the kids sat on the various parts of the furniture on the wagon. I was fortunate enough to get to ride behind my uncle on horseback. There were four of us children at that time. After we moved to Crown City the three other girls were born in 1914, 1917, and 1921. We moved in there in 1914 and there were already 3 blacksmiths in town. Of course the blacksmiths were just sure the new blacksmith wouldn’t last very long, and they could just drive him out of business. But as the years went by all those other blacksmiths went out of business and disappeared and Dad was the only blacksmith. So over his lifetime he worked for the public and shod horses and built wagons, and fixed plows, and whatever work was to be done for 52 years. He worked there until he was 70 years old and then he had a stroke and then he died within a couple of years. It was a combination of heart attack and stroke.

When we moved into Crown City there was probably 390 population. They were building a new school. My father was interested in getting into town because he wanted his children to have a better education. He had had very little chance of getting any beyond the 3rd or 4th grade. His dad was old when he was young and he did quite a bit of farm work when he was just a kid, about 12 years old. So his schooling amounted to almost nothing.

The town of Crown City at that time had no paved streets, just some gravel put on maybe in the fall of the year for the winter. It was a river town. It had wharf boats, 3 blacksmith shops and probably 3 stores. It was the center of trade for the surrounding country because no one had automobiles at this time and had to drive in there with horses and wagons, or ride horses or walk. There was also a grist mill. There was a tobacco receiving warehouse where the farmers around could bring in their tobacco and sell it and deliver it there at that warehouse. Most of the tobacco would be shipped by boat. It would be packed into hogsheads and taken down to the river, loaded on the boats and taken to Maysville or some other tobacco market in Kentucky. In the wintertime when the tobacco would be being delivered, the streets in the town would be almost knee deep in mud. The wagons would cut down in that soft dirt with rain or snow. The sidewalks were not paved. It was a real trick to go anywhere in town in January or February, or especially in April when the spring thaw was coming. We usually had a doctor. We bought our property from the town doctor, Dr. Martindale. He’s the one that delivered me, by the way. We had some quacks from time to time who claimed to be doctors. A lot of the times we didn’t have a doctor and when someone was sick we depended on old women who knew some remedies and looked after such things as measles and scarlet fever and whooping cough. There’s a number of different things they’d use. They were great on onion poultices for pneumonia condition and used a lot of mentholatum and Watkins liniment. Turpentine and lard were good for chest colds, sulphur and lard were for the itch; a cold, wet cloth around the throat was good for croup or laryngitis. A little whiskey here and there was used to take care of certain things. Whiskey with sugar and hot water was recommended by the doctor who said when a man was young he was foolish to drink but when he got old he was foolish if he didn’t.

The tobacco business played out; they quit receiving tobacco there and things just changed gradually over a number of years. When the automobile came along that demanded better roads. But even then the mudholes were sometimes axle deep and it might take a couple of horses to pull them through a certain spot when they got hung up. I was probably 14 or 15 before ever I saw a piece of paved road. That was about 15 miles away down Rt. 7 at Proctorville where there was about a 3- 4 mile stretch of cement road. That was quite a treat to get on that strip of road and ride in an automobile. It was a lot different than riding in the chuck holes! Going up Rt. 7 the first paved road you came to was at Gallipolis, the county seat of Gallia Co.

To make a living around there, some of the people would work on sand and gravel boats and dig it out of the river to ship it by barge to Huntington. To get out of town you had to cross the river and catch the train or ride the steamboat. As I said, people made a living there – I don’t know how, looking at it from this time – but they fished and raised gardens. They would gather coal out of the river because a lot of the barges coming down the river with coal out of the Kanawha River would lose coal off the barges as the men worked and shifted them around. The coal would drift up on the sandbars. Driftwood along the river and coal on the sandbars. Some would do a day’s work for a farmer who had work to be done in his tobacco or in his corn patches. They’d hunt for skunks and muskrats in the wintertime. You wonder now how it would be possible for those people to live, but everybody did. Quite often people would have a cow. They’d pasture it on someone’s land outside of town and they’d go out morning and evening to milk their cow. They’d pick blackberries and in the fall, they’d gather apples and store in their food cellar. Usually they’d have a pig or two in the back lot, chickens, and they’d use them for meat. At that time there were lots of game, rabbits and squirrels, and there wasn’t anybody too good to eat rabbit. They’d take a shotgun and go into the woods and there weren’t very strict game laws at that time, so if you got hungry for a mess of squirrel you went to the woods and killed it. Later on the game laws restricted hunting to a certain time. So that’s pretty much how life was there around Crown City until 19... well, to the first World War, and that changed the picture quite a bit. A lot of the boys went into service and then when they came back things had changed, and the standards seemed to improve as time went on. Of course when the Depression came in the 30’s it was almost back to where it was in 1920.

Kids didn’t have much meanness to get into, you just played. You had the river there and the surrounding country. There wasn’t any farmer that would object to your going on his land and picking berries and hunting rabbits or squirrels. The woods were wide open and of course the river was free. At school we weren’t very well organized. We played marbles. We played mumply peg. We played kickball or soccer, and sometimes the teacher would take a ball or two of twine and little bit of gum or rubber and wrap that up good in the center. Then you’d take a darning needle and sew it good all-around and we’d use that for a ball. Someone that was clever would pick the right kind of stake and we’d use that for a bat. We played with that twine ball without gloves. We didn’t have ball gloves, that was too expensive, and we didn’t have baseballs, that was too expensive. Sometimes the school itself did well to get two boxes of chalk in the wintertime and about the only books we had were our textbooks. We didn’t have a library. And that’s about what we had for school.

When they set that school up, it had been a grade school with two rooms for the eight grades. Well, times had changed somewhat by 1914 and they had gone into debt the tremendous amount of $12,000 for a new school building. They built a 4-room brick school building with a basement. They had to bond the town and a lot of them really kicked up a storm because of the increase it made on the taxes on their property. But in probably 15-20 years they got the taxes and paid it off. The school building had two rooms for the grades and two rooms for the high school. The two upstairs rooms were for high school and the two downstairs for the grades. So the first room had four grades and the second room had four grades and the two high school rooms took care of what subjects were taught at that level. We all played together on the same playground, big and little, and we had outside johns, no inside plumbing. There were two coal furnaces in the basement that had to be fired. And that was the way the school there was until I’d gone through and came back and was teaching there, almost to the time in which it was closed down. First, they closed the high school part and sent the older kids down to Rome High School in the 1930’s. Sometime in the early 50’s they moved the grade school out, too. So there’s no school now in Crown City.

That was what we had there when I was in Crown City. I taught there about 10-12 years before it closed down. They added two rooms to the back side of those four between 1920-1930. What they did, they used the 4 rooms of the main building for the grades and they used the two new rooms that they built for the high school. Remember it was a second-grade high school with only 3 years, not a 4-year high school. If they wanted a play or entertainment or community gathering, they could convert those two high school rooms with folding doors into an auditorium. But a few years back they sold the building and a man put a hardware and grocery store in there. So, it’s in use today for that purpose.

There were no school buses. High school kids from 3 miles back in the country rode in on horses or walked across the hills. The teachers the same way. I remember in 1917 and 1918 when it was so cold one teacher walked probably 2½ -3 miles from Federal Creek to that school and then walked back at night. It was really cold that winter because the Ohio River froze over so thick that horses could be ridden back and forth across the river. That was the winter I rode the horse across the river. A fellow had his horses on the other side of the river doing some farming and he neglected to bring them home. He had a motorboat with a flat big enough to haul a wagon on and he didn’t get his horses over in time. It turned cold and the river froze over and he decided one Sunday morning that he’d bring those horses over on the ice. So, we all gathered down at the river and walked across it. They tied a long rope on the one of them and a half a dozen men strung out ahead of the horse so that if it broke through they’d have a safety line, I had stayed with my father on the other side with the rest of the horses, and when he saw they got about halfway across the river and were going along all right and nobody breaking through the ice, he just picked me up and threw me on the horse. He led the other one across so I had the honor of having ridden a horse across the Ohio River!

Rose Ancestors

These are Rose relatives that should be added to the tree as data become available. I've added Rose Ancestors that I presently only have names and dates for. These are not currently sourced so they were not included on WikiTree. These are included on my Ancestry.com and/or my dad's old unsourced family tree.

Potential Siblings of Lewis Norris Rose Sr. (1818-1894) include: Walter (1830-1903) and spouse Sarah Thomas (1826-1886), Jehu (1832-1905), Thomas (1837-1918), John B (1838-1909) and Julia Yates (1865-1936), Debby (1841-1930), Charles (1843-1917), Lavisa (1844-1849), Andrew (1846-1849), Sarah (1849-1908), Benjamin (1852-1925), Harriet (1853-1905), Jessie, Permelia, Catherine (1812-1846), Elizabeth (1813-1884), Edward (1815-?), Mary (1817-?), William (1817-1897), James (1825-?), Charlotta (1827-1920), Bethany (1828-1918). Those born before 1829's mother was Mary Atkins (1789-1829). Those born after 1829's mother was Winnafred Neal (1810-1897))

Potential descendants of Walter Rose (1830-1903) include: William T (1852-1936) whose descendants are: Johah ((?-1943), Laura Mae, Verda, Eldon Walter (1883-1953) and Ora Hamilton (1883-1959), and Ollie (1889-1934)

Potential descendants of John B. Rose (1838-1909) include: David (1886-1966), James (1888-1950), Franklin (1890-1964) and Edna Sears (1890-1970), William E (1892-?), Jehu (1894-1968), Minnie (1898-1947), Albertus (1902-1987), Thomas (1905-1975)

Potential descendants of Franklin Rose (1890-1964) and Edna Sears (1890-1970) include: Thomas E (1924-2015) and Mary Louise Brown (1925-2008).

Some of the Rose family is still private: I have photos and information on them, but I'm not on the trusted list. These include siblings of Nellie (Rose) McCown which are: Ray Rose (1902-1981) and Eudela Scott (1901-1974), Roma (1904-1996) and Gerald Meyers (1900-1958), Rolland (1907-1985) and Alice Plummer (1902-1997), Opal (1910-1994) and Louis Sheppard (1901-1954), Janice (1917-1992) and James Gorby (?-1987), Geraldine (1921-1985) and James Smith.