We lived on that farm for four years and were preparing to move to the Everly farm near Prairie City when, one sunny Sunday morning, Feb., 15, 1925 I heard noises upstairs which I thought was Marolyn throwing books around, as she sometimes did. I went to the stairs door and looked right through the roof to the clear blue sky. Our home was on fire and burned to the ground within 2 hours. Louis had been shaving on the back porch, while talking to a neighbor, who had called. They both thought I was crazy when I yelled, “The house is on fire!!”, but one look upstairs was all that was needed to have Mr. Lindsay start ringing the general call and shouting, “Louis Switzer’s house is on fire!!!”
Louis and I grabbed our three children and carried them to the backyard where I kept them on some chicken coops, while Louis ran back in to get our papers of value, which he stuffed into a flour sack and brought to me. The neighbors came quickly and carried all of the furniture out of the downstairs, but shotgun shells were exploding in the entryway to the stairs so we didn’t open that door, therefore Louis’s American uniform, a full five-foot shelf of Harvard classics books and our summer clothing, which I had packed in trunks upstairs all burned.
“Lish” Lindsay asked us to come to his house until we could gather our thoughts, so we were there two days then went to Louis’s father’s home in Macomb for four days until Louis could get things in shape to move. On top of this Ken, who was 13 months old, had the paratyphoid fever and we had to keep going until we could get to living in the Everly home at Prairie City. Romaine was six weeks old the day we arrived there.
The Everly home had been vacant a year as the land had been rented for a year by a neighbor, who did not use the house. We ran out of doors in terror many times when we heard noises like the ones we had heard upstairs when the house burned, but these gradually diminished so they probably were caused from the timbers getting heated up again after getting thoroughly cold. That two years stay was the best two years we have ever experienced together, as our landlord lived 1000 miles away and didn’t bother us other than to expect a payment of $250 every 4 months for the rental of the 80 acres.
We raised good crops as we had no one to bother us, but made mistakes, such as planting pie pumpkins and frying squashes too close together. We got lots of something edible but didn’t know whether to make pies from our pumpkin-squashes or fry our squash-pumpkins.
Viola was born there, 2 miles east and 1/2 mile south of Prairie City and four miles south, 1 east and 1/2 mile south of Avon. We were only one-fourth mile from another Pleasant Hill school, but this one was 22 miles from the one by Switzer’s place and in a different county. Marolyn, 3 years old at the time, wandered into the cornfield one summer day when the corn was at least seven feet tall. It came to within 50 yards of our back door, so it was easy for any of the children to get to it. She was gone for over an hour and I was frantic until she came walking out into the yard with the explanation, “I got losted and cried and cried. I sleeped and got up and kummed home.” It was just that simple — she got up and kummed home.
So, when Viola arrived we had four preschool children, twenty cattle, forty hogs of all sizes, chickens, cherries in the spring and apples in the fall, a Ford car 2 years old for which we paid a dealer $332.10 in cash new, and a yellow pup, but we were happy as we could follow our own solutions to problems.
Next: The Train Trip to Canada