1949 Holmesville Ohio

1949 Finding the Holmesville farm, description of house, barn and location; Amish districts and briefly buying a car; English neighbors and Mel Marquis; blicka, telephone office visits and Paul Jameson grocery, the Pennsylvania Railroad, tramps; the founding of state of Israel; Amish, Mennonites and Jews.   

Andrew and Mattie Miller were looking for a new farm during the winter of 1948 and 1949. First, they went down to the south and western part of the Holmes County, the Clark and Glenmont area, and they looked at several farms. These places seemed too far away from towns and isolated, similar to the Hummel farm. Then, they went to the northwest part of the county, several miles west of Holmesville and looked at a farm, not far from where my Aunt Betty and Dan Weaver now live in 2010. Again, although they liked the farm, it was too far away from town and neighbors. Finally, although it was dark, Robert Croskey the local Holmesville land agent and driver took them to a farm which was on the market for a few months, just east of town on the Holmesville Fredricksburg road. It was now dark, and they did not want to disturb anyone, so they only drove by and looked in the drive. Andrew and Mattie told the driver to turn around and let’s go home; it’s too late to disturb the people, but let’s come back first thing in the morning. They liked the location.

The next morning the Millers were back and saw a plain white clapboard house with the traditional symmetrical design, a large kitchen dining room on the north side and equally comfortable living room on south side. On the back side was a small bed room off of the living room and two small back rooms off of the kitchen, one a pantry leading to the basement steps, and another little room off the pantry. Andrew was probably already eying it for an office, library and bookstore. On the second floor were two equal- sized large bed rooms on either side of the winding stairs. Behind the house was a large cement spring house with a built-in concrete tank tub area in the back.

A white clapboard bank barn was again in the traditional symmetrical shape with two shed roofs along both ends. The front covered a shed and shop and the back covered the corn crib and machinery storage. At one time a silo had been a part of the barn, but it was gone except for the cement foundation. The barn floor was partly cemented with milking cow stalls on the one side and a water trough in the middle. Although the buildings had electrical wiring, not much else was updated on the house and barn. The barn had only one entrance at the west or front end, and the house did not have indoor plumbing of toilet and bath.

But the physical features of the buildings were not what attracted Mattie and especially Andrew the most. It was location, location, and yes the public location; here was a big front lawn with the house right along the road and right smack next to the little town of Holmesville.  “That’s our farm,” said Andrew quietly to his wife (and probably in Pennsylvania German as he often did in front of English-speaking store clerks and sales people) and Mattie heartily agreed. After all, it was a farm, a virtual requirement for any self-respecting Schlabach, and her husband was happy. But even if the buildings had not been modernized, it turned out to be a productive farm of 80 acres, about three-fourth of it the sandy loam and some gravel especially near the creek plain about the same level as Salt Creek which flowed along the back of the land. The buildings were safely on a flat rise of several acres safely above the flood plain, and a 20-acre woods was also on a hill above the creek level. The front of the property was the Holmesville Fredricksburg Road and through the back third of the acreage, several hundred yards behind the house ran the Pennsylvania Railroad and a switch track.

And for Andrew, there was the public road. The Fredricksburg Road not only ran in front of the house and barn, it  also ran to the bottom of the flat Salt Creek Valley farmland, turned left and headed to the Salt Creek itself and a bridge where the road continued up the valley to Fredricksburg. Andrew and Mattie bought it from Cliff Edwards, and a little earlier the Nickolas (Nick) Yoder family had lived there. The moving started soon with Andrew taking wagon loads before the actual moving date in March of 1949, the week of baby David’s first birthday. Paul was in first grade at the Sharp School, and Roy went along on these trips with the team.

One of these Berlin to Holmesville moving trips became memorable in family lore because little Roy peed in his pants by the time the team Dick and Bob got to Millersburg. Andrew went to Gensemers Department Store and bought Roy some dry shorts and socks and continued the rest of the five-mile trek to Holmesville. Okay, dear reader, if scatology bothers you, skip the rest of this paragraph because we’re going to sample the many little pee stories from this period. Another one before we moved happened at a wedding in the winter where the guests’ boots were all lined up on the porch, and Paul watered a good number of them. Somehow, Paul managed to blame it on his two little brothers, but eventually the truth prevailed. Then after the move to Holmesville, our upstairs bedroom window was an inviting opening for me, a persistent little bed wetter till about sixth grade. This al fresco approach into the shrubs and grass below generally worked fine except for two major exceptions. The upstairs window was right above the kitchen window where mother Mattie held court, so it was unwise to do it during daylight hours or when she was in the kitchen. Second, I soon learned that it was equally unwise to do it in the winter when there was snow on the ground.

The Holmesville farm was an excellent fit for our family, and took on special meaning because we always called it our family home in the sense that the earlier places were called the Lapp place and the Hummel farm. Andrew and Mattie settled in at Holmesville, raised our family there, and we lived there until the early nineties when my father Andrew died. For Andrew it provided a new public location, but I think it also provided some freedom from the closeness of his Miller and Mattie’s Schlabach families, even if he may not have wished to say it at the time. In church two Amish districts were being established during these same years, one on the east and one on the west of the town; again church had some social freedom in that we had no close relatives in either of these districts. My parents even tried a brief fling with owning a car and joining the Mennonites during this year, and my father wrote to his sister Nora, quoting verses by “Max Reich, a converted Jew who left all to follow the Savior.”

            “In the light no sin can sully

            And no earth-born mist can dim.

We shall joy—not in our blessings,

We shall joy—alone in him.” 

The poetry did not impress his sister Nora. Her answer was for Andrew and Mattie to remember their vows and obedience to their parents, God and the church. In any case, by the end of the year, Andrew and Mattie were back in the Amish church. 

For us boys, there were the new neighbors, so many new English-speaking neighbors in Holmesville. Now, within a half mile were 350 residents with new names such as Stallman, Umstead, Lecky, Hites, Myers, and Jameson.  One of our first acquaintances was the elderly Mel Marquis, our nearest neighbor who lived on an acre between our house and town. Marquis was elderly (the 1907 Atlas of Holmes County had him serve on the Holmesville school board forty years earlier), and my mother would send a pie or bread to him whenever she did weekly baking. I was sometimes the baked goods delivery person, and this was an introduction to needing to speak English. We spoke Pennsylvania German or Dutch at home and heard German at church, so most of our English was to hear our parents speak English at stores or to peddlers, rare at our Berlin Township Hummel farm. In our old neighborhood even many of the non-Amish people were bilingual at that time; it was not unusual for a livestock or milk truck driver, a town merchant or a public school teacher to speak Pennsylvania German. 

But at Holmesville, we had only English-speaking neighbors, and when I would take a pie to Marquis, Mattie would tell me what to say. I don’t recall it all, but she said you can say “Here is a pie,” and he will say “Thank you.” And then you say, “You are welcome.” Marquis whatever his biological and social origins lived up to his name as a French nobleman; he seemed a formal gentleman, and sure enough the conversation would go about as my Mother had stated. I later thought I had an advantage in learning Spanish, because I had already learned a second language in childhood. 

As children, we often repeated Marquis’ speech patterns which were clearly spoken in a mix of Shakespearean and King James English, aphorisms such as “neither borrower nor lender be.” When we boys visited Marquis with my father, the conversation would soon turn to a religious topic, at my father’s urging, of course. Andrew would make some discreet inquiry about our neighbor’s eternal salvation. To this Marquis would have a ready reply spoken in eloquent tones. “Now, Andy. I was booorn and raaaised a Presbyterian.” Then came the clincher. “And I prefeeer to make no changes.”  I may be overstating (perhaps in part from hearing my brother Paul later in life repeat it charmingly to audiences), but we loved to hear him enunciate these words. Anyway, it seemed to answer theological and biblical issues for Marquis, although I’m not sure my father was totally satisfied. Still Mel Marquis and my parents were good neighbors and friends, and it was an early introduction to religious pluralism.

On language at Holmesville, during the summer my mother also used a Pennsylvania German word frequently which I never forgot: blicka. It was my mother’s word for preparing freshly picked fruit and vegetables for edible use; we’re talking strawberries, cherries, peas and beans. In the early mornings, we were out in the patch or up in the trees, picking vegetables and fruit. Next, when we got them home, the project was sitting around in a circle and blicking: the process was removing the peas from a pod, pinching the caps off of strawberries, cutting the ends off of beans, or taking the seeds out of sour cherries. It was all blicka, and you could do it from your pre-school years on up. None of us were ever as fast as Mattie was in doing this, but she never insisted that we keep up with her; but she was insistent and cheerful that we help with the activity. I’ve never seen the term in a Pennsylvania German dictionary, but it was a common Holmesville term. Abpetza means pinching off, and maybe Mattie did not use it because petza (to pinch) was a negative term. For my mother, the term blicka was always positive.

Holmesville was convenient because now we had access to a telephone in town. We could not have a telephone at our home, but we could go to the telephone operator in town. These were adventuresome night walks with our father Andrew lighting the pressurized gas lantern. Sometimes my father hoisted me on his shoulders as we walked, crossing the railroad tracks, passing Albert Myers where the chickens and bantams were now roosting in the  coop between the house and garage, and then along Main Street to the square. The telephone operator was located one house down old state route 76 along Millersburg Street. Grace Firebaugh’s telephone office had a little lobby where we would sit until she would signal for my father to enter into a little booth for his call. Meanwhile, Firebaugh would answer calls, and then plug the wire connections into the wall behind her.

When we were finished, and my father was in a good mood, he would stop at Jameson’s Grocery for ice cream bars (chocolate covered ice cream). The store was closed for business, but this did not seem to bother my Father. The grocer Paul Jameson lived next door, and would come out and go over the store, unlock the front door, and treat Andrew and his little sons to ice cream bars. Paul Jameson was the consummate small-town merchant, affable and good natured to young and old alike, even to treating these new customers to night service. My father loved to treat his children to ice cream, and this was only an early sampling of a pattern which would continue to his treating the grandchildren at every opportunity. The Jameson grocery store was a house of charms for a small boy; here was all kinds of gum, life savers and root beer barrels along the counter; Jameson had toys, and here was where my grandpa Moses Troyer took us to buy a kite in the spring, and in the back was a dry goods and clothing section where you could get store-made denim pants with little copper rivets in them. Jameson kept a billing tablet where he would mark down when people would purchase but could not pay for it immediately.

Finally, Holmesville had the newness of the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks behind our house. Each day we could hear and then see the big black coal powered locomotives go past our place. The smoke would billow out of the engine, and one could hear the choo—chooing  coming from a distance, only a slight sound and then the rhythmic drumming that seemed to come right up to our house, and then it would fade again as the train made its way on to Millersburg or Fredricksburg. Sometimes we would go back the little trail and watch the train cars go by, waving to the engineer, fireman, brakeman, and the switchman as they went by. I was especially fascinated when there were livestock cars carrying hogs or cattle. And sometimes one could see someone sitting or lying on top of a car; it was a tramp. We would put pennies on the track and then find them squished larger after the train had passed; another favorite pastime was simply to count the cars.

But the main tracks were not by themselves; there was also a rail switch right behind our house, so often the train would slow down and park on the railing. There was even a little house (with stove) for the train operators. For slowing down, the brakes made a whistling steam and screeching sound and when cars were hooked or unhooked there would be a tremendous kerchunck sound. You could hear that kerchunck echoing over the Salt Creek valley and then all quiet. They seemed so huge, and often the engineer or switchman would get out and make a telephone call from the box which was also stationed beside the switch. Now, we could get a close up look at an engineer and brakeman who though friendly, I don’t recall being open to visiting; they seemed to have such great responsibility and the huge speed. In all the time the trains ran, I do not recall one accident which happened near our home, although I often hear stories of train accidents.

The switches slowed down the trains, and that brought other visitors to our farm, hoboes or the tramps, as we called them. We knew these travelers were around, when we would see smoke coming up from behind the tracks beside our field. They would sit around a fire behind the tracks, but we generally watched them from a distance, visiting the scene after they left, checking out the empty sardine tin cans, paper bags and cigarette butts. I don’t recall ever approaching the tramps, however, at the same time I do not recall them ever being unfriendly. What I do recall is that when the weather was cold, the tramps would come up to the house and ask for food or to sleep in the barn. My mother would tell them to wait, and then she made them a warm scrambled egg sandwich, and then Father would take them to the barn. Andrew would ask them to turn over any matches and that seemed to be the extent of any overnight requirement for lodging. In the morning the tramps were gone.    

On the other side of the world, Israel elected its first president Chaim Weizmann in 1949, having become a nation the year before. Weizman had been named provisional president in 1948 and the prime minister was a fellow Zionist and Labor party leader named David Ben-Gurion. The Israelis moved the capitol from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the western section of which was under the new nation of Israel while the eastern part of Jerusalem was under Jordanian rule. This was the first Hebrew nation in 2,000 years, and a strong influx to the Palestinian Jewish population came from European Jews who had survived the Holocaust in Nazi Germany during the Second World War. For these Jews who escaped the European pogroms and crematoriums having their own homeland meant life, freedom and hope.

For the local Arab and Christian population who lived in the villages throughout Palestine, this founding of a Jewish state was a deep tragedy; the Palestinians would call it their disaster. Many of the Arabs were forcibly removed from their villages and homes where their families had lived for centuries. They were not allowed to return, and many would live in refugee camps provided by the UN. Aside from this local displacement, the neighboring Arab states did not recognize the state of Israel, nor were the displaced Palestinians integrated into neighboring Arab societies.

Yes, reader, I realize this is not the place to tell this story in all the Jewish and Arab hopes, fears and grievances at the beginnings of modern Israel. But the arrival of a state of Israel in the ancient biblical lands with Jerusalem as its capital was also of considerable interest to Christians especially to America’s conservative Protestants. Many believers including some Mennonites saw this development as a fulfillment of Scripture. Our Fredricksburg neighbor, the free-wheeling evangelist and music promoter Harry Weaver, made plans to go and talked the local Amish Mennonite entrepreneurs Emanuel and Alma Mullet to go along, financing the trip. Other Mennonites also headed for Palestine, including the conservative Mennonite bishop Harry Stutzman who took his camera for slides and an eight millimeter movie camera. What I remember most, however, in these Israel reports was one evening at Fryburg (between Benton and Mount Hope) where Harry Stutzman spoke and the Emanuel and Alma Mullet daughters sing the sad Hank Williams song “Little Paper Boy.” I never forgot it, nor heard the song again until February 4, 2013, in Sarasota, Florida, when my Brother Paul threw a birthday dinner for Levi Troyer and the Mullet twins Martha and Mary. By the end of the evening, the twins with sisters Lillis and Anna Catherine sang the “Little Paper Boy.” They said it was their mother’s favorite song; I always thought the little boy was a Palestinian.       

Andrew and Mattie however had little interest in Palestine and the formation of Israel; Andrew said that from his reading of the New Testament, we as Christians were already the new Israel. We did not need to travel to a geographic spot, nor were the Jews that special. Furthermore, Andrew was plenty busy in the near east of Holmesville: farming, reading, writing, and editing for Herald der Wahrheit. He wrote a meditation on “On not growing weary” which appears below. And my grandfather Levi L. Schlabach, also busy with his farms, told me as I grew up that we ourselves were already Hebrew Levites, of the priestly tribe of Levi.

Descriptions of the Holmesville move and property come mainly from memory and especially my mother’s Mattie conversations in 2010; my brother Paul also told me much of the background. My father’s December 2, 1949 letter exchanges with sister Nora Wingard and other members of his family are in the Andrew A. Miller Collection in the Archives of the Mennonite Church, Goshen, Indiana.  On the blicka section, in my personal 1998 file is an unpublished tribute to Mattie on her 80^th birthday June 29, 1998, entitled “Blicking.” Some of the background on Holmesville in the forties comes from David A. Stallman’s Our Home Town Holmesville, Ohio (2001). Stallman does an excellent job of describing his family and the town as he experienced it growing up in the 40s. Harry Weaver tells of visiting Palestine with the Mullets in the Herald der Wahrheit (September 15, 1952, pages 565-66).

On Not Getting Weary (Nicht Müde Werden)

“And let us not be weary in well doing, for in due season we 

shall reap, if we faint not.” Galatians 6:9.

Humans have a tendency to get tired in our work, both in the natural and in the spiritual. In the evening when we lie down to rest, we are tired from the day’s work. But then through God’s love, we get food and health and rest during the night, and we get the new strength we need for the following day.

So it is with our spirit also from day to day which must be renewed and fed. As the Apostle says in 2 Corinthians 4:16: “So we do not lose heart. Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day.”

Without this renewal of the inner person we get sick and lose strength. This renewal is promised for those who strive to do good, who wait for the Lord, and who keep their eyes of faith on what is not visible. Those people will get a kind of new strength which makes even the weak to be strong. 

Our Lord is our refuge and our strength and he is merciful. And through our Lord we will have harvest if we continue and do not lose heart. As it says in Isaiah 40:29: “He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might, he increases strength.

“Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young people shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”

So be it, may God help us to do good, and encourage each other to follow on the narrow way of life. May God be loved, honored and praised as we do good to our fellow humans through Christ. This is our prayer.

A.A.M. (Andrew A. Miller) wrote scripture-based meditation articles of this nature about once a month during the late forties and early fifties. This one appeared in Herald der Wahrheit (January 1, 1949). Translated by Ilse Reist of Scottdale, Pennsylvania, in 2010.