Continuing in her words. Living on the Colorado homestead, eight miles from that log-mill town, she indicates the financial state of her father (the word “poverty” is never used) and his ingenuity.
The first six or seven months we lived in an unused log cabin belonging to a rancher who let us use it rent free until we could get our own house.
One of the houses left behind [when the saw mill town closed down] was one that no one wanted so my dad got it for free. He tore it down and loaded the logs on a flatbed truck that he borrowed, moved it to our homestead and rebuilt.
It had three windows, probably three feet square. Daddy put them all together so we had a forerunner of a picture window. My mother was very proud of that.
It was really more of a cabin. It consisted of two rooms, the smaller one with a wood-burning range. Daddy built a cabinet about four feet long to hold dishes and pans. It was all the kitchen storage there was, no overhead cabinets. The top of that was for washing dishes. [No sink, of course.] There was a shelf where a bucket of water and a dipper and a washpan stood with a hook on the wall for a towel.
At the other end of that room was a square dining table. One side of the table was placed up against the wall and we used only three sides of it. There was room for six chairs but we had seven in the family. It was so crowded it was hard to get around.
We didn’t have any living room furniture.
The other room was for sleeping and just big enough for all seven of us.
Later my dad added a third room, not made of logs. “A frame room,” he called it. Just wide boards, one thickness, and no insulation and no heat. In cold weather we would dress and undress by the heating stove in the corner of the main room and RUN for the beds in the add-on room.
This additional room held three beds, a double bed where my parents slept and two three-quarter beds where three of my brothers and I slept, two in each bed. We slept cross-wise of the bed, our heads at one side and our feet at the other. There must have been a crib also, for baby Jim, though I don’t know where there would have been room for it. There was just room for those three beds, no dressers, mirrors, or anything else.
I slept that way until I was about 13 and then my folks got a metal army cot and I slept in the living room.
I didn’t think anything of all this. I thought everybody lived this way.
_______
Next: No gas, no money, no school. Still, a reading education.
Our Lives Together
Its About Life
12:03 pm
I love Grandma’s line, “I didn’t think anything of all this. I thought everybody lived this way.”
2:00 pm
It amazes me how the old timers “lived” in what we would consider very poor conditions.
When mother was a child they lived in a place that had a passthrough with rooms on either side – no luxuries either.
I recall, as a kid, we had running water in our kitchen – a pump! And for a refrigerator a cold spring in the hillside of the side yard!
3:37 pm
Despite the minimalist setting, it would be my bet that there was a level of contentment in that house that rose far above the majority here in Orange County. Three sleeping cross-wise on one twin space? She speaks of it as no big deal. Perhaps even with a soft chuckle.
8:27 pm
She makes it sound like camping! Fun!
9:59 pm
This amazing life-story of your family seems to have little connection with modern American life.
Interestingly I’m currently assisting my 93 yr father into a aged care home here in Australia, and have shared this with him. He tells of a similar sparse beginnings. His father was one of the first men of the area to carve a livelihood from uncultivated land and begin diary farming. His father had a USA made Willy’s Jeep of that era called a whippet. It served to take pigs and three month old milk calves to market.
My father was only able to go to grade 6 elementary school but was a life long learner even till today!