TAPED BY FLOYD ASHBAUGH SEPTEMBER 17, 1969
Jessie Garren: Jacob Ashbaugh married Catherine went in wagon train from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania to Ohio where they cleared land during the time there used to be carrier pigeons. It used to be like a cloud when they would settle over the woods at night to roost. I can remember my dad telling me all about that. Of course there were wild animals there too. He didn't tell me much about that but when they needed some meat they could go out and kill most anything - wild turkeys and other things that were good to cook. They had a big farm - I don't know exactly how many acres but they had a big orchard. All kinds of apples and they also had a maple groove and they had a shack where they boiled the syrup and made the maple sugar and the candy. Well they used the sugar as candy and also cooked with it. And then they made the maple syrup also. I'm not sure but I think it was after my granddad died that Grandma sold the place and moved back to Indiana. Moved to Greenfield I think. She lived there the rest of her life with my Aunt Emmaline and her husband and children. That's about all I can think to tell you about right now.
Here goes a little more: My dad who was Jeff Ashbaugh - William Jefferson by-the-way but he was always called Jeff. Was the only son of a family. He had three sisters - really 4 but 1 died when she was just a tiny child. And the others I don't know exactly about their later years because we left Indiana when I was about 11 yrs old - 10, 9 or 11. I think it was 9 and then we settled in Ohio for a year or 2 and then went on down in to Virginia. But Grandma wanted him to stay and take care of the farm and he stayed while some of them were born there but it was a double house and one of the aunts, Aunt Emmaline, lived on one side and - no- Grandma lived on one side of the house and our folks lived on the other up until I was about 4 years old I guess. That's about as far back as I can remember, 3 or 4. I used to go in and ask for bread & jelly. Of course I always got it. Grandma would wiggle my hair and smooth it and say "Oh you little strugel head you". And the bread & butter always tasted so good. Especially cause she had given it to me. And after we lived there for a while, I can't make sure just now, I would have to think it over a little bit where they moved to next, but I think we left there and went to Indianapolis probably because I wasn't very old when we lived in Indianapolis and my dad worked there at one of the stores. Wassons store and a couple of my brothers were cash boys there. Then we got the idea we wanted to go south so we started on a trek with a couple covered wagons and our horses and all of us except Lillian and Wert who stayed in Indiana. And I can't really remember how long we stayed in Indianapolis but probably 2 or 3 years. Then we moved to near Cambridge City - East Germantown to be exact. We lived there until I was about 11. And then we started to go towards the south and got as far as Portsmouth, Ohio or a little valley near there and stayed there a couple of years. Then we went on down into Virginia and lived there for 3 years. All were so sick that we were glad to get out of there although we had good luck with our crops and things. From there we went up to Philadelphia and stayed there until 1918 (in the mean time I was married). We moved to Baltimore after having lived with my mother-in-law, not exactly lived with her because we had our own apartments but we were all in the same building. It was a big old stone house near, not too far from, the center of Philadelphia and my children were born there. So since then we have become Marylanders and are very happy here. That's about the end of my story I guess. My children are Vi (Violet Jessie) (Violet after myself). The next boy Earl Maris he was named for his dad, and then Albert Stuart Hadden who was our youngest and who has since died.
Well now we get in to the Garren end of it. Earl's children - my grandsons - I mean he had 3 children, 2 boys and a girl and then I have 6 great grandchildren because one brother. Well first of all Earl's children are Earl III, William Rogers who was 4 years younger and then Linda their sister who Linda Gayle who was about 3 years younger than Billy or William Rogers I should say. By the way we all had dinner together tonight. About a year and a half ago each of the brothers - that is Earl and William, each had a little son so now I have 2 grandsons, a great grandson and 2 great grand daughters because Earl has 2 little girls. One of them was born while he was in service in Germany and her name is Charmaine Vernica, I think it is. Then she had a little sister a year or so younger and her name is Janice. Then the little brother's name is Roger. He was born 3 weeks later than his little cousin who is Bill's, William's, son and so they are very close and get along fine together and have lots of fun. Charmaine's name was Valerie instead.
Vi's dialogue: Mother has told you about Earl's children and I think you know his wife is Evelyn - Evelyn Bowen - and now is Garren and now as you remember they had Earl and then Billie then Linda. Linda is away at college now - Bible College in South Carolina. Then she hasn't told you about Don's wife. Don died when he was 42 of a heart attack and we have been very close to his wife Laverne who lives in Roanoke, Virginia. Laverne has 3 daughters the 1st was Evelyn, 2nd Donna - named after her dad, Don, and then Nancy - Nancy Vi - who was named after mother and then after me. None of them is married yet but they are doing a lot of dating and I kind of think courting.
They've asked me to say something about myself. I'm kind of fat and I used to be called Vice-Principal. I think that means they need somebody who is in charge of the vice in the school but this year they have changed that to Assistant Principal. I'm teaching in a school with 50 other teachers and we have about 25 white teachers and 25 Negro. But we have close to 1400 boys and girls. Out of those 1400, 12 of them are white. All the rest are Negro. The Negro children are really much more fun to teach than white children. They are harder to get used to. You never know what they are going to be doing next. But one thing they will do if you are white is come along and feel your hair. That's disconcerting sometimes.
I was working with some boys who had been fighting and they were talking about the whiteies they were going to beat up. I said "Well now I'm a whiteie". They stopped and looked at me and said but you're not very white.Aunt Jessie: Vi keeps our groups laughing all the time. She was a nurse. First she taught for 10 years and then she became a registered nurse at John Hopkins Hospital. So we have a group of people and if they happen to be student nurses why she tells tales about her student nurses because she used to be the teacher in Roanoke Memorial Hospital and later on 2 years in Abington, Virginia, then her dad died so she came back to live with me. If the group happens to be interested in hospital work or nursing, why of course that's the subject we get on. But if they happen to be teachers why then of course she has more tales than you can imagine about the children and about the funny things that happened. It's really a lot of fun to be with her and people really do enjoy her because she makes them laugh and she will sit and tell crazy tales like that with tears streaming down her cheeks and of course that makes us laugh at her too. So we have big times here every now and then with different visitors and then somebody will tell about so and so. If it happens to be about one of the girls she has worked with and she will tell something like this: She had 2 Little girls from the mountains of Virginia - regular little backwoods girls - 2 sisters. They were really a lot of fun. They used the language the same as they did at home and one of them - the doctor was talking to her and he was trying to give her a lot of instructions and when he finally got through she had asked him some questions and he wasn't sure whether he knew what she said or not so she said, "Well Doctor you know I don't know a word you said and I know you don't know a word I've said." Anyhow they finally became very good nurses but they certainly caused a lot of laughter and one of them - here's one of the tricks she did. She asked what they wanted her to do with a certain woman who was ill and they explained that they wanted her to have a sitz bath. She said then how do you do that when the woman is in bed. They said well you take a stool and you put the bath on the stool and then when she is through you take her out of it and dry her off and put her back to bed. She thought that the bath had to go in the bed because she didn't think she could get the woman out of bed , I suppose. Anyhow she put the stool in the bed and the woman in the bath, then she couldn't get her out so she said, "Hey lookie, what do you do?" She was asking on of her supervisors I suppose. "What do you do next?" And so the woman was sitting there in the bath laughing her head off which wasn't very good for her either but they went in there and were amazed to find her sitting up in the bath in the bed. So anyhow they took 2 of them to get her out of there because they were all laughing by that time and they had to explain the thing all over to her. She was supposed to put the bath on the foot stool on the floor and then get the woman in it but she did it the way she thought it ought to be done. That was a mighty funny thing to the rest of them. So that was just one of the stories and there is many others even more funny than that. I can't think of them just now. Then funny things happened at school too. She tells us all those things and it really brighten up an evening when you have a group of young people here or sometimes even older people.
This is sort of a disjointed recording but you have to consider that I am 83 and while I am still going strong in one way, a lot of other ways I am slipping a little. So I tried to get Vi to do the recording but she would probably mix it up so she is making me do it.
After we got to Virginia - I mention that in passing - telling how we went to hither and yon and so on we finally landed in Virginia where we stayed for 3 years and we were on an 1800 acre place. We were briefly on a couple other places. One was called Jockey's Neck and the last place was Neck of Land which was next door or just separated from Jamestown by what we called the thoroughfare which was a small body of water rather deep and that's the way we got to Jamestown unless we went over a small bridge because we were on the farm adjoining Jamestown. We were down that way about 3 years ago and I couldn't recognize a bit of the farm because in the first place the boulevard from Williamsburg to Jamestown goes right through one part of the farm and then there are several buildings where people live. They've built nice houses along the road where our house used to be. By the way ours was a log cabin. It was a rather large one but it was quite comfortable because we had such a nice fireplace there. Then we used wood burning stoves. So we lived there for a couple of years and I went to school in a little country school house along with my couple of sisters and one brother and got part of my education. They had a very good teacher who used to come out from Williamsburg and would stay in the house near this school. She brought her brother and sister along so the 3 of them stayed in this house. Her mother had a grocery store so she would send a lot of food and on a rainy day she would have ginger snaps. Would put them in the oven and if it happened to be a cool day and heat them up and did we ever gobble those things down. But we lived on this farm - 3 different families of us and then a colored family who were there to help with the gathering of the peas and things which we sent to the Baltimore market. We tried New York and Philadelphia but we found that we could do better in Baltimore and that wasn't as far to ship the things. We had a long pier at the Jamestown... I can't think which direction it would be. It seems south to me but there was this long pier where the boat from Richmond and Newport News used to stop every day and we would put our peas which we shipped by the way in May. That's quite early but of course with the land being sandy and rather warm along there peas grew very well and we put them in 1/2 bushel baskets with pink netting over the top. It made a very pretty thing to send to market and they seemed to sell like hot cakes. So we not only had the peas but we raised chickens and turkeys and ducks and we had our own cows and horses and calves of course. And we had lots of fruit. We used to dry that. Some of it was dried in the oven and then we had so many peaches one year that we spread them out on sort of a shed we had with a good sized roof and we would lay papers and we would put cloth over it - old sheets or something like that. Then we would cover them over with the netting so the flies couldn't get to them. Then we would put them away in bags and have them for winter time. We would also dry corn that way because we liked that a lot. And I think we dried corn in the oven. We raised quite a lot of peanuts and learned to like them even though they were not cooked. But in the evening if we felt like a snack like kids do now days we would put a big pan of them in the oven and roast them until they were just right and then would take them out and of course pile in to them. Because we always had a group of the boys and girls from another family about a mile away. They would come and play croquet with us Sunday. The boys, my brothers, would make a nice croquet court in the edge of the woods which was just across the road from us. Big pine woods and they put seats along it from on tree to another. They hauled in some of the best sand they could find, rolled it until it was just like a table, almost. And of course it was a good court to play on and we would have different ones to come there to play, on Sundays usually. We were quite a distance from church, well we were 8 miles from Williamsburg and that was a very sandy section then we didn't have hard roads like we do now. Some of them were what we called corduroy roads. That was pine, small pine saplings, I suppose. Not saplings either, they were larger, then they would put sand over that because some of the land was quite wet. That would make a good road. (Tape turned over)... and trade them for flour and meal. We take them to the stores and some of them were traded for flour and meal and others of course for groceries. We couldn't even get more than 10 cents a dozen for eggs. Just imagine that now. Well on this - I started to tell you about not recognizing any of the land around there but that was partly because during the 2 wars, that is world wars, the cypress which was in this wet part of the ground along the rivers was overflowed by the tides overflowed by the tides. The James River there was 3 miles and a 1/2 across and the tides of course came in. We had about 6 miles of real nice wide beaches so we would go bathing there. The house we lived in sat on sort of a rise and we could look down to the river and watched the men fishing for salmon - not salmon - sturgeon and rock and other fishes according to the season. And here were 2 brothers, well there were 4 brothers that owned this place and 2 of them were fishermen and they had their little shack along the river where they lived and they would come up to visit the other brothers and have a meal with them when they felt like it and then would haul in these big nets. They during the winter time they would make nets with meshes about 8 or 10 inches square and there would be piles of them made of heavy twine. And they were about 12 or 15 feet wide and they would fasten floats to them made of cork and they would take their boats out - 2 big boats - and they would throw the nets overboard and they would drift along with the net until they saw the floats move and then they would take a halter made of a grapevine and they would throw it over the big fish's head. The fish might be well from 6 to 8 feet long and a huge thing. You'd think they would be scared to death of it but after they pulled it in the boat it just laid there like it was dead or something. It wasn't quite dead but anyhow it laid there very quiet and they would bring it to shore and take the eggs, the roe, from the fish and put it in kegs and I think at that time they got about $25.00 a keg for it. Of course nowadays that wouldn't be a drop in the bucket for what you would get for it. But sturgeon in the meantime has gotten scarce and they don't get nearly as many of them as they did. My brother who was just learning to talk had seen my dad and brothers butcher some hogs and they are real white after they are scraped. They dip them in hot water and scrape the hair off of them and he had seen them hung up. So when he saw all these big fish hanging up he said, "Hmm a big hog." That was Virg. " A big hog" and that's what he really thought it was. So you can imagine how big the fish looked to him. Of course we all helped on the farm - my brothers Clarence and Ralph and Arch and then I came next. Then there was Perna, then the little sisters of course didn't grow up to help pick peas and things like that but we did. We helped plant tomatoes and sweet potatoes and my dad would take a pointed stick and he would have sort of a hill or a ridge rather and then he would have this pointed stick and he would poke a hole in the ground and one of us would come along and drop a plant in that hole and somebody else would come along and pour water in it and then someone else would come along with a stick and hit it on both sides to cover the plant and to cover the water so that it would stay moist for some time. And that's how we planted sweet potatoes and tomatoes and things like that. Cabbage too and well we used to have very good seasons there. Sometimes it would get awful hot but this last year that we were down there was the best one we had because the first year we were so sick, all of us, that sometimes one wasn't able to wait on another so we just laid there and shook with malaria and we just had quinine on the table like you would have sugar now and it was about the only thing that would do us any good. So that's part of the tale of Virginia. But that's the reason though we were glad to get away from there because my brothers were getting old enough to start thinking about going to the city. So Clarence was about the same age as one of the boys in this other family that was near us. The other boy came home to see his parents and sisters and he said why don't you go up to Philadelphia with me and look for a job. Then maybe you can find a place for the folks to live. And that is exactly what he did. And he found a real nice home for us at Willow Grove. We stayed there about 6 months. Long enough for the boys to each to find something to do. We sold, we took our chickens and turkeys and ducks up with us and sold them after we got up there because we wouldn't have gotten anything much for them at Williamsburg because everybody around there had their own chickens. That helped us over the time until the boys could find something to do because by that time my dad had pneumonia and he was never quite his best after that. He was beginning to get up in years a little bit and it was hard for him to get a job. So they took charge - the boys did. When I was out of school of course I found a job and helped out too because the boys had been taking care of things for all these years that they were growing up and I felt it was time for me to help out a bit. Then when I was about 18 I met my husband.
About the brothers and sisters who went with us from Jamestown to Philadelphia. We took a boat, I think it was called the Pocahontas, from Jamestown and went down to Newport News and changed in to another boat there which took us out in to the ocean, out through Hampton Roads and up the ocean until we came to the Delaware River - Delaware Bay - then later Delaware River. And stayed on that until we got to Philadelphia and some of us were quite seasick. It didn't bother me because I happened to go out on deck and got the fresh air but it was really rough weather. It was about the 8th of October and the boat was going sideways and up and down too. So there were a bunch of young people on there - college kids - and they were having a grand time when the first evening we were on but by the time the next day came you didn't see anything of them because they were all seasick. So part of our group were seasick too but not too bad except for my little brother who said, "I thought when we left Virginia we wouldn't be sick anymore." But that's the way it happened. So we went to Philadelphia then. In the mean time Clarence had gotten himself a job - he was the older brother. The oldest sister stayed in Indiana and was the mother of 10 children. And then the other brother - Clarence was the older brother - and then Wert was the next brother. Clarence never married but Wert did and he had 5 children. And one of them is with me now on a visit and we enjoyed them so much. We managed to get together somehow every couple of years. And we went to Indiana last summer and so they came here this year to be with us. Well this is a long tale. Well Ralph - let me see - I ought to give you the names of my sister's children right now because I can't think fast enough and but Wert had 5 children and Floyd was first, the Margie, then Claude, then Fern and Iva. So then my next brother was Ralph. And he stayed in Pennsylvania until his death some years later. He had 3 boys. There was Alva and Earnest and Roy. And then Arch. Ralph's wife's name was Mabel. I forget to give the other wives' names. Arch married a Philadelphia girl and they didn't have any children of their own but they had a little adopted daughter and enjoyed her very much. And then I was the next one and I was married in 1911 and I had 3 children - Violet, Earl and Don. I gave those names last night in a little more detail. Then there was Perna who had 4 children - 3 boys and a daughter. And Minnie didn't have any. She was the next sister, she didn't have any children. And then Ruth had one son, Robert. And then my little brother Virg who was the biggest brother of all was married. They had no children of their own but they raised Eva's nephew and he has been just like a son to them. A very wonderful boy and pretty schooled. So that about ends our family I guess.
Speaking of Virginia. You may wonder how we arranged things, but when we went down there it was hard times everywhere. We didn't have any - you can imagine that with a big family like that you needed plenty of money but we didn't have money so we had our good strong brothers and my father and so my father being a farmer originally and by the way was a very good farmer because his father was a Pennsylvania Dutchman and they are very good farmers. So we did a good job on the place but there was - the place that we were on belonged to 4 brothers and 2 of them were fishermen as I said and the other one - the older one of the family he was a rather mild mannered man and was rather over bounced by younger brother. I imagine was very much spoiled when he was growing up and so he managed every time anybody was mixed up with them in a way of working he always managed to go to [c?????pers], he called it, on Saturday. Managed to get mixed up somehow so that he would - in the settlements he would never be satisfied - of course he always wanted the big end of it - and so he managed to take people, the workers, to court you know. Well he got a bee in his bonnet did the same thing with us. We sent watermelons - by the way we had 10 acres of watermelons on that place. They had a sloop that would take them to Norfolk and Newport News. They took a load down. It seems to me one load was all right. I think then they divided up on that all right. But the next after that they said they had to dump them overboard because the markets were flooded. So we didn't get anything our of that. Things went like that and we never were sure whether they did have to dump them or he was just telling a tale because he didn't have too good a reputation on that line. Well anyhow we only stayed at that place for a year because of trouble of that kind and he was nasty too. He was nasty to us children. I was about 8 or 9 then so we had trouble getting our furniture. We had shipped it and it took us about 3 months to find it because it went to Washington instead of Williamsburg. So we finally had to get a tracer on that. That's where they found it and it came on down. In the mean time this was one of the old mansions on the James River and there was plenty of room for us and the 2 brothers that owned the place. We had the upstairs and we had a basement kitchen and dining room and a wine cellar which of course we didn't use. Then there was another section of the cellar that was just used to store things like potatoes, and different vegetables that would last over the winter. So we were quite comfortable. We had about 3 or 4 bedrooms and the run of the whole place if you wanted it. In the winter time it was rather cold downstairs to cook so we cooked in this first floor kitchen. We used the kitchen at one time and the brothers used it another time although sometimes mother would cook for all of us, you know, just to make it a little nice for them. We got along fine with all the brothers except this young one. So in dividing things up after our furniture came this one mild mannered brother had given mother an old fashioned iron tea kettle which she had admired. He had 2 or 3 of them so he said if you would like to have that take it with you, take it out to your apartment with you. When we went up to get that after our things had come why this younger brother - Perna, sister next to me, had gone upstairs to get it because mother wanted to use it. He said, "You all can't have that." So she came downstairs crying - she wasn't used to having people speak to her like that and she was rather tender hearted and so she came downstairs crying. Mother said, "What's the matter with you?" She said, "Won't let me have that kettle." I said, "Well I'll get it." and I went upstairs and picked it up and he grabbed me by the arm and said, "You all can't have it." I said, "Oh yes I can."
Ally, who was the other brother, gave it to mother. He said, "You all can't have it." I picked up a stick of wood and said, "I will have it." I would have batted him with it if he hadn't given it to me. In the settlement - when the court case came up - he said, "One of these little daughters fights like a $57.00 dog." That was because I downed him, you know. I would have hit him with it. I was so mad because he made Perna cry. We got a lawyer. They had their own lawyers in Williamsburg. They would win almost every case that was brought up by different ones. We got the history of the family and so we got a lawyer from Newport News who was very well recommended and we won the case and got our things settled up. Then we left there and went to another place and that was nice except it was too far from school. So we decided to - we found this other place near to Jamestown and we had known some of the boys and girls that lived there and they begged us to move over because they wanted some company of their own age. So my dad looked the place over and he decided that was a pretty good place to stay. There was plenty of wood to burn. There was a nice little stable. Then my one brother, Arch, the one next to me, decided that he was going to raise the young chickens that year cause we had some room for them - some nests - in the hen house. So he decided that if Dad would buy a little incubator he would take care of the little chickens. So there was a little bank along side of the road across from the house and he dug back in to that and made a little room and left a bank of dirt that he could put the small incubator on. It held 60 eggs. He took such good care of - oh he built a roof over it of course and a front on it with a door. It was nice and warm in there for the chicks. He raised every chick. Every egg hatched for him and he was real proud of himself cause of course he was just a young boy then and had never done anything like that before. He watched, sprinkled them at the right time and turned them at the right time and did all the things that were necessary. As I say they all hatched. So then of course the hens in the hen house were hatching other eggs so we had a very good year that year. We also had the turkeys and the ducks. And they all got along very nicely. We youngsters did our part taking care of. One thing wasn't very good though. The water was brackish in the summer time in the well so we had to carry our drinking water and the water we used for cooking and washing dishes from the spring which, oh, I would say, 3 or 4 blocks away. As we would say in town. So we had a little yellow dog there and he would always go with us because sometimes we would see a snake on the road and if we did why he just hustled up to it and grab it by the neck and give it a jerk and that was the end of it. So we being afraid of snakes, oh, I guess the reason we were afraid of them was I went out to the hen house one time to gather the eggs...
[Broderbund Family Archive #110, Vol. 1 A-L, Ed. 5, Social Security DeathIndex: U.S., Date of Import: Oct 13, 1997, Internal Ref. #1.111.5.20876.7]
Individual: Binkley, Ray
Social Security #: 275-09-2161
SS# issued in: OhioBirth date: Jan 19, 1897
Death date: Mar 1984
Residence code: OhioZIP Code of last known residence: 45801
Primary location associated with this ZIP Code:Lima, Ohio
ZIP Code of address where death benefit payment was sent: 45801
Primary location associated with this ZIP Code:Lima, Ohio
[Broderbund Family Archive #110, Vol. 1 A-L, Ed. 5, Social Security DeathIndex: U.S., Date of Import: Oct 13, 1997, Internal Ref. #1.111.5.20875.5]
Individual: Binkley, Mary
Social Security #: 302-03-0663
SS# issued in: OhioBirth date: Nov 26, 1900
Death date: Feb 1995
ZIP Code of last known residence: 45801
Primary location associated with this ZIP Code:Lima, Ohio
ZIP Code of address where death benefit payment was sent: 45801
Primary location associated with this ZIP Code:Lima, Ohio