Kingsbury School House
We moved here from Division Street
We moved to Division Street from Main Street
This picture, I think I've already used before but I
thought I'd put it here to because it shows the front of the house.
You can see on the front how it was made in to a home
instead of the school it was originally built to be.
The mismatched boards show where the entrance used to be.
I wonder what it looked like when it was a school. You see old schools with
bells on the roof but this one doesn't look like it had one.
The story was that all the neighbors got together and
built it themselves. There were no contractors.
Out in the woods there were many trees with initials
carved into them.
I took that photo and some others one fall day. This is only one of the trees at that time that had carvings in them.
The house in winter.
We had a really bad snow that year.
When I look bad there have been an awful amount of really bad snow storms in our
lives.
Beside the front you can see a small fold up wooden chair
covered in snow. I have memories of both of our parents sitting out there
sometimes. I think they watched for mailman.
The mail was delivered by a rural carrier of course. At
first our address was the Bentley Road. That would be this side of the house and
the box was on the opposite side of the road in front of the woods.
We made a path through the woods down to the garden area.
It was just a patch on the edge of the field that Grandpa Hayes owned. He let us
use it because he didn't and he really liked to see people growing their own
food.
There was an apple tree here and yes I climbed it. I
don't have any memories of apples on it. Maybe the tree just didn't produce many
and the ones it did were gnarled up and inedible?
Just beyond the garden but up and out by the road was an
old barn where Grandpa Hayes kept a real sleigh inside. I would write stories
about that sleigh and dream of going for a real sleigh ride but I never did and
the sleigh never left the barn.
I need to clarify something. I said "up and out" that's
because the garden plot was on land that was lower down than the road. It was a
good five feet lower. When we said we were going down to the garden we were
really going DOWN.
After a number of years there some rearranging of mail
routes happened and we had to move the mail box to the long side of the house
onto the Farley Road. This was a problem, especially in winter.
The mail box was one of those regular rural aluminum
boxes. I don't think it was steel or tin. It sat on a heavy wooden post thing
that Dad built for it. The post was put into an old galvanized milk can with
rocks around the post to hold it upright. It was mostly fine in summer but more
often than not in winter the snow plow would hit it and you wouldn't find it
till spring when the snow thawed.
It really bothered dad. Someone would have to stand out
there in winter to collect the mail. The driver never got out of his vehicle for
anyone's mail. Usually, if Dad could find it he'd go down and dig it out and
bring it back up. He thought someone on the highway department did it
deliberately. He did work for them while we lived here but not all the time. As
with any job, I'm sure he had "enemies" or people who just didn't like him.
Sometimes the reason would be as simple as they thought he shouldn't have been
hired over their kid or their brother-in-law, just stupid reasons like that.
Dad said when they plowed the corner they were supposed
to push the excess snow to the sides of the road. There were plenty of places
there with no houses because it was just our house at that time.
Once, he filled the can with cement and still it wound up at the bottom of the hill or buried in the snow. The last thing he tried was digging a hole as deep as he could in the rock bed, half burying the can with a wheelbarrow full of cement around it. That time the plow just sheered off the wooden blocks the mailbox was nailed to at the time. Nothing worked.
I drove by there a few years back and the place has
changed so much. The woods I loved so much are now piled with long trailers.
They aren't even in rows. Some go in one direction and others turned another
way. It’s sloppy and looks like somebody tossed them up in there air and where
they fell is where they stayed. These are all up and down the hill and in the
woods beside the house.
The original school house is long gone now. I don't know
what Dad paid for it originally but he sold it to an old woman and her young son
for about five hundred dollars. I don't know if they were supposed to pay more
or not but Mom said for years that Dad let her cheat him out of it and never
paid all she was supposed to. A few years after they bought it, it burned to the
ground. I don't know why but I suspect it was deliberate. Mom thought so as
well.
I think I took all these winter ones but it may have been
Mom.
Dad put plastic over the windows each winter to keep the
drafts out.
That's the screen door you see propped open permanently
all winter. We didn't have a storm store. Mom wanted one but we just never had
one. That snow covered mound on the left side of the photo is an old car of
Dad's. It didn't work and in the spring he would fill it with old iron and tow
it to the Cohen's scrap metal place to sell it.
In the deep back of this photo is an old shed that we
kept animals in. At one time it was double this long with the chickens in the
part closest to Mom's upper garden next to that side of the house. She kept
rabbits in this part but they were pet rabbits. Later there would be two pigs
she kept here. That little bit beside the shed is the outhouse. Dad had to dig
it all out every year and bury it in the woods. I think once he just moved the
whole out house and shoveled a lot of dirt and gravel in and over where it had
sat before.
The pigs mentioned back up there were bought later after
Millie had married Allan and they'd moved somewhere else. One of the pigs was
named after Millie. I don't know if it was spite or Ma named them because she
loved Millie. You never know what your sisters are thinking or doing or the
reasons behind naming a pig.
The pigs were supposed to be raised till they were old
enough to slaughter for meat. However, with us kids feeding them and caring for
them they soon became pets. When it was time nobody including Dad could even
think about eating them. The best he could do was sell them so off to auction
they went. Most of us had a tear in our eyes whenever we looked at the empty
shed.
We usually bought a Christmas tree while we lived here. That looks like one of them sitting in the snow out there. We'd take them outside and stuff them in the snow to use to feed the wild birds.
All this snow came in one night. Then it kept coming. The
highway crews continued to shove most of it in our driveway and then we'd all
take turns shoveling it out.
I'm not sure if these photos are taken while dad worked
for the Highway Dept. or not. I think this storm was much later when I was
working at the Catheter place and yet I don't see the rest of the sheds that
housed the animals.
Try to picture this. I was driving a car, maybe this one,
maybe a later one that looked the same. I wore white nylon dresses to work most
of the time. Sometimes I'd get a pant suit. They were nurse outfits because
that's what we had to wear to keep hairs out of the tubes. We all wore hair nets
too.
The snow would come a lot of times in the night. I'd have
to get up early for work and shovel out the drive. Usually, just Dad and I were
up in those hours. He'd keep the fire going all night to keep us warm.
This one morning I finished shoveling it all out and ran
inside to warm up while I grabbed my lunch and whatever I was taking to work
with me. Back outside I jumped in the car. Dad, more often than not started it
up early to let it warm up before I took off. Just as I reached the road to
leave the driveway the plow came roaring around the corner and plowed down the
hill dumping over a foot of snow in my freshly shoveled driveway. I was really
mad. I was downright irate.
I revved up the motor and sped out as fast as I could
over that big hump of snow. It worked and I was out. I'd never looked to see if
anyone was coming and luckily there were no cars coming up the hill.
Later Dad would give me hell for this saying I could have
torn off the muffler or did a lot of other damage to the car which was in all
fairness true. But I was elated that I'd made it.
That tall thick tree you see in most of these was both a
blessing and a terror. Most of the time it held the other end of the clothesline
which was the blessing part. You'll need to go to the next page to find the
terror part.