When my father was teaching me to drive a car he told me that he was born into the poorest family in the poorest community.  I didn’t say that was true, I only said that is what my father told me.

When he was 19 years old my father borrowed money from the Mt Victory, Ohio bank through the bank president Henry Dickerson for his first little business venture.  After making that venture profitable he went on to larger and larger enterprises until he contracted to build  “horse and buggy” dirt roads into crushed stone roads for the first cars that were being built.

For this venture he had a small stone quarry located at the north end of York Center, Ohio and another small quarry across the north end of Union County at Pharisburg.  After my father died in the year 1955 my mother showed me her family treasure, a ledger.  In this they had kept the names of one hundred farmers whom my dad had hired to bring their teams of horses and farm wagons to haul his crushed stone from these two quarries to build the roads across the north end of Union County.

From this my dad went on to a much larger stone quarry at the north end of Byhalia, Ohio.  That is when he contracted to build or rebuild stone roads.  For this he purchased trucks to haul the stone.  These first trucks built were big and cumbersome with hard rubber tires.  I have pictures my mother took of them.  One picture shows two trucks, one after the other, my oldest brother John driving the first one and my brother Burl driving the second one.  Burl was only nine or ten years old sitting in that second truck, his hands on the steering  wheel and you can see a little boy sitting there.  These trucks had no doors.  How I know his age is, my mother had my sister Fannie standing in front of the first truck.  She was very little, looked to be not much over 1 year old, so the picture must have been taken the summer of 1919.

These trucks couldn’t turn around in the road to go back for another load of stone.  So my dad purchased a turnstile the trucks were driven onto.  It did a one hundred eighty degree turn heading the truck back the way it had come.  My mother also took a picture of this in action, with my brother John in the truck sitting on the turnstile with Henry Dickerson, the banker, in the picture standing there watching.  He probably wanted to see what his money was doing.

 

Thanks to my mother we had many pictures of my dad’s continued business ventures.  He went to his fourth and largest stone quarry in York Center, Ohio, just across the bridge and south of his first little one.  When the stone quarries are abandoned, being spring fed, they fill with water.  The first one at York Center became what people in the area called the “swimming hole” and is where I learned to swim when I was seven years old.  It was a popular place.  Car loads of people came from towns around to swim there.

The one at Pharisburg in later years my dad sold to Gwinn Sanders, my dad’s attorney.  He built his family home beside the “lake”,  abandoned stone quarry.

This is my story of a “Poor Little Boy”.   He was my Dad!