These are pictures of my father Levi Gilbert Rockhold in the early years of his life.

My father, while teaching me to drive a car, told me he was born into the poorest family in the poorest community. I’ve decided that how poor someone is must be relative to who is making that statement. Those pictures do not look like the poorest to me.

My father started borrowing money from the Mt Victory bank, through the bank president Henry Dickerson, at the tender age of nineteen.

I don’t know the names of the first four men. That is my father standing on the right by the saw.

This was his first little adventure. Going from farm to farm with the area farmers joining to supply the labor. The wives made dinner for these working men.

In the early 1900’s tractors were just beginning to be used by farmers, replacing teams of horses with tractors.

The first tractor operator Roxie Vance is ploughing the ground, the second tractor operator Burl Rockhold is discing the ground and the team of horses operator Carl Rockhold is planting corn! Time goes on to completely replace the horses with tractors. My mother took this photo.

Here my father has a thrashing machine

And again as he sent his thrashing machine from farm to farm to thrash their wheat and oats the neighbor farmers gathered at each farm to help and again the wife would make what became know as the BIG THRASHER’S DINNER. I believe each wife tried to out-do the others. How those men went back to work after enjoying that delicious bountiful meal remains a mystery to me.

I never witnessed a ‘thrashing dinner’ but my mother explained it so vividly it was as if I had been there and seen it with my own two little eyes. She could bring her words to life.

A few years before I was born he had his first two little stone quarries and contracted to build roads from horse and buggy dirt roads to crushed stone roads across the north section of Union County. For this he hired 100 area farmers to bring their teams of horses and farm wagons to hall his crushed stone.

The above photo is the York Center stone quarry before the roof and siding were installed and before he purchased the very large engines that powered the crusher and the elevator to bring the crushed stone to the top and drop into the holding bins.

My brother Carl Rockhold is operating the steam shovel, filling the
side dump wagons with broken rock.

The little boy sitting on the wagon is my brother Bugs, my sister Fannie is standing by a wagon and that is me on the bank.

I have no pictures or data on how my father’s first two little stone quarries or the one at Byhalia were operated. The above is his first setup for his fourth stone quarry bringing blasted-up rock from the pit up to the York Center stone crusher.

 Here is the process of making crushed stone into lime dust to be spread over farmers fields to sweeten the soil. A lime spreader was attached to the rear of the stone truck bed.

From this method of side dump wagons pulled by little train engines we called DINKYS, he progressed to side dump trucks after taking up the rail tracks so the trucks were driven down into the pit, loaded by the steam shovel operator then driven up to the crusher, backed inside the building and side dumped into the crusher.

Below is the crusher building completed.

That is my sister Bobbie sitting at the top, my sister Fannie in the middle and I am standing on the platform. My mother takes all these photo’s.

The structure above is a cement mixer and was owned by Burns Road Contractors who built the cement road from Marysville to Mt Victory and possibly Kenton Ohio. My memory is a smidgen off on this. Sorry!

I remember my father saying you have to continually upgrade your business just to stay even with the times or you will go backwards. And you see his constant business progression through his life time.

This picture of my mother, with eleven of her thirteen children, was taken at a family reunion some time after my father had died. My brother Burl was living in Florida and was not there and my brother Earnest died in the Columbus hospital of a fractured skull after falling off a truck load of corn stocks. A wire across the road was lower than regulation and caught him under his chin as the truck went on and he fell on his head in the road.

Mother and Dad took him to Columbus hospital and stayed there the few days he lived in delirium. I was 9 years old and still have a chill when I remember the phone call my sister Mabel took from the hospital telling us my brother, just two years older than me, had passed away.

This is my story of a poor little boy, my father, who lived a fascinating life. Hope you enjoyed reading!!!!!

FRF♥