I don't know how old you were, Don, when our Grandpa died. I guess I knew him longer than any of the grandchildren because I was the first. One time when I was living with them, about age 11, I was sad about something and he tried to comfort me. He told me I was special because I was his first grandchild and although he had others, no one could be first but me !

I don't remember ever hearing him talk bad about anyone. He was kind to anyone he dealt with. He had a hobby of picture-taking and he developed his own pictures in a "dark room" in the basement. You ask me what he did for a living. He was a carpenter and cabinet maker and a good one. He did some carpenter work on his own. He built porch swings, library tables, cupboards, clothes presses, barns, etc. But in the twenties after the First World War, work was scarce. At one time he worked for the Clinton "Water Works" in the boiler room. Then he worked for the people that owned the "Cilnton Ice Co." in the engine room and the "ice" room. My mother took me to the ice-house one day and I saw the big room where he was taking 200 pound cakes of ice out of the big tanks they were frozen in. Then they slid down a ramp into a storage room--ready to be sold at the plant or delivered to the customers. He even finally drove the team that pulled the ice wagon up and down the street delivering ice to homes that had their ice cards showing in the window. The ice wagon was followed by a bunch of little and big kids waiting to get handsful of ice chips when he cut the 200 pound chunks into 25 to 50 pound pieces to deliver. Someone told me he worked six days a week for 20 years for the Ice Co. for 15 dollars a week! Grandpa Bill and Granma Minnie lived for 20 years on Water Street and paid rent. When I lived with them there in the early twenties, Uncle Carl Lunger, their only son, was living with them. He was a fireman at the local Electric Co. Carl had a car and Grandpa drove it some. They took me to the farm at Silverwood and to Aunt Myrtle's. I loved it. Uncle Carl was killed while driving a wrecker to pick up a wrecked car. He was struck by a miners' train at the Crompton Hill crossing. The train carried his truck a way south of the crossing. Carl was killed instantly. After he died, Granma and Grandpa knew a man owed Carl money. They didn't know where to find the Note. Granma had a dream after she prayed about it. She dreamed the Note was in a trunk Carl owned. Sure enough, when she looked, she found it and could collect the money. Sometime after Carl died, they moved back to Silverwood and rented a home near the store for a while. I'm not sure when they moved back to Silverwood. I had to go back and live with my Dad and Step-mother and wasn't around them much. I did see Mamie at school. Before moving, Grandpa had tried to earn a living running a slope mine. Uncle James even moved to Clinton, when Rosalie was a baby, and worked in the slope mine, too. It might be that Aunt Myrtle and Uncle James went back to Mac Whitford's farm from the mine. When I first visited Aunt Laura and Granma Nancy at age five or six, there were the remains of a two-storey house east of the log house at the farm. It had been in that two-storey house that Grandpa had lived when he was first married and where the first of his children were born. I have a book of Bible stories that was given to Hallie Lunger in 1908--living then at Waterman. That little town was west of Uncle James' home. It was across the swamp and near the railroad and grainery. At one time it was a busy place.

Granma Minnie Lunger was a Luper. Hallie was my mother, their oldest child. The other children were Myrtle, Ellen, Carl and Mamie. Dates are in the genealogy. - You ask about "Aunt Laura's house"--it never was hers! Granma Nancy was a Marshall. She came in a covered wagon with her family from Kentucky. 'She met and married Harrison Lunger. The genealogy shows that Harrison had been married before to Rebecca. Rebecca died in 1856. In 1857, Harrison married Nancy Marshall. The record shows a child, Henry, was born and died in 1956. He must have been Rebecca's. Nancy had Ira in 1857 and he died in 1858. Then Nancy had 3 stillborn children. Then in 1864, Laura was born. Then Alex; John; William, "Bill" (our grandpa); Silas Gilbert, "Uncle Bert"; and Dora. See dates in genealogy. Harrison Lunger had the farm where Granma Nancy and her daughter Aunt Laura lived. There was also some acreage in the river bottoms where they raised corn. Harrison died in 1873 at 42 years of age, leaving his wife, Nancy, to raise five children, ages about five, six, seven, eight and nine. The farm was to be hers as long as she lived and then to be sold and divided with the five children or their heirs. Nancy somehow had the land farmed out until her boys could work the land. Granma Nancy always raised pigs for a money crop. All the children married except Laura. She was at one time engaged to be married to Barton Hensley. Her younger sister, Dora, came home from her job in Rockville and charmed Aunt Laura's "beau" away. The family didn't know for years what had happened. Uncle Bert told us after Aunt Laura died. I know, when I was visiting there in the summers, that Aunt Laura talked a lot about Bart Hensley and his sons Clyde and Harry. The daughter. Lora, died T.B. in early 1901 and her mother, Dora,. died of T.B. in 1904. Clyde never married and in the 1920's was in a sanitarium somewhere in the West. Aunt Laura received mail from him. Harry was married and had two sons. He and his wife and sons lost their jobs during the Depression in the 1930's. They came to the Silverwood area and bought a farm. Aunt Laura helped them a lot with canning and preserving food. Harry and his wife had another son but he choked on a peanut and died young. The son is buried in the "Island Cemetary." When I first went to spend the summer on the farm with Aunt Laura and Granma Nancy In 1922 or '23, they still had a big trunk in the smokehouse full of Lora's clothes. They used to let me look at them. They were fancy because her Dad, Bart Hensley, had been a successful businessman. One year at Christmas he had a beautiful new buggy sent to them by railroad freight. Aunt Laura was still driving it with a horse we called "Old Molly." In 1916, just before the First World War was started, Grandpa Lunger, Carl Lunger, Jesse Lunger and Bert started to build a new house. Everything they needed cost more! Food rationing was on and Aunt Laura had a hard time feeding the men-folk that were building.

Florence E. Carlson March, 1995

The old house was set right on the ground. Granma Nancy's bedroom was a "log" add-on with walk boards laid down to walk on I have a copy of the picture for you. They never had electric lights nor water in the house. They always had a rain barrel for soft water. They had a good, deep well for drinking water. At the time in the twenties that I went there, Aunt Laura had one big number three galvanized tub. Morning and evening it was the watering tub for three cows and Old Molly. I helped by pumping water in buckets and carrying It down the lane to the barn yard. Or wash day or bath night, that same tub was scoured clean and put to use. We had a big stump in the side yard that we set the tub on to "rub-a-dub." Then we took the clothes to the well and rinsed then in buckets of water. No water was wasted. The rinse water was used to water flowers. Aunt Laura grew a lot of flowers! The soapy dishwater and laundry soapy water was carried in buckets and flipped on the foliage to kill bugs. Like I said, they were poor but they never stopped going and never wasted anything.

Aunt Laura canned fruit and vegetables and meat. She raised chickens, too. When company came, she set a meal fit for a king. Always they ate good because they raised their own food, separated milk, made butter and cottage cheese. Aunt Laura baked bread, cakes and pies. She taught me a lot about housework and cooking. I even got so I could drive the horse and buggy over to Lodi. The covered bridge that we used then was burned down by arson, I think, in 1992 or 1993. When Granma Nancy got skin cancer in about 1926-27, Grandpa and Granma Lunger moved to the farm to help take care of Granma Nancy. She died the spring of 1928. Before she died, her son Alex found out she was real sick. He had not come around for years.! He and his wife came to "help". Just as soon as the funeral in the "Island Cemetary" was over, Alex asked for his share of the farm! Aunt Laura and Grandpa Bill Lunger needed a home. They worked out an agreement. I guess they had to have the place as sessed t o g ive him a fifth of the value. What they did was sell the acreage in the river bottoms and pay Alex. This left them with only the few acres near the house. Grandpa raised watermelons, cantaloupe and sorghum for syrup. These were the money crops. Aunt Laura still raised chickens, milk cows and sold butter and cream. I didn't stay at the farm after Granma Nancy died. Before that in the summer of 1927, I stayed at Aunt Myrtle's during May, June and July. I helped take care of Viola. She was one year old that March. Then In 1928 I went to Detroit, Michigan, to work at Holland Park Hospital. I had a half-year of High School to get done, so I came back to Clinton and finished school and got a Job. In 1929 I roomed with a family named Townsley. They had relations near Aunt Laura. When they went to Mrs. Townsley's parents for Thanksgiving, they dropped me off at Aunt Laura's. Your mother was there with her first daughter, who was Just a baby. In January of 1930, I went to Detroit, where my husband was working. We came back to Clinton in 1931--out of work and no job here. Floyd, my husband, did get work in 1933 in the coal mine. We didn't have a car until 1933 so we didn't know how they were getting along at the farm. We did go there some and in 1941 Floyd bought a garden cultivator or tractor and Grandpa used it and had a good melon and sorghum crop. After that summer the gas rationing and the Second World War happened. We sold the tractor and our car because we wouldn't be able to get gas. We found out too late that coal miners would get gas because mining was an occupation needed for the war. About this time, we learned later Grandpa just wasn't able to work like he had. He went to Rockville and tried to get the Parke County Commissioners to buy gravel from their farm. Grandpa had a place where a road would go in and there was a good bed of gravel. He was the wrong politics! They wouldn't buy from him. I wasn't close enough to know much. We went to see them about 1944 when Granma Minnie had a heart attack. She died in 1945. After her death, the farm went up for sale at auction. It was 'a shame--not many people came. The neighbor east of them, a Mr. Paul Ray, bid and got the farm for $2,500. In less than a month he was selling the gravel from the farm. He was an auctioneer and the right politics! After the sale, Aunt Laura with her trunk, went to Uncle Bert's and Aunt Nettie1s. She said Aunt Nettie had always told her she had a place to live with them as long as she needed it. Well, Aunt Nettie very quickly told her no. She said her daughter, Elsie, was doing their laundry and they weren't able to have Aunt Laura.