Through The Years

                                     With Frederick, Katharine

                                          And Their Children

"I Was Told, I Remember;"  by Clara Belle Ethel (Helle) Palmer

The daughter of Anthony, Frederick and Katharine's second son, Clara Belle Ethel was reared less than one-half mile north of the Helle Homestead built in the late 1870's. She was ten years old when Grandfather Frederick died and twenty-four years old when Grandmother Katharine died. Her memories of what she was told and observed were edited from a history which she wrote in January, 1964. Some anecdotes from letters to family members the past twenty years have also been incorporated into her story.

In addition to the business enterprises mentioned by the Prairie Rambler , early in their marriage Frederick traded one of his bakery-saloon businesses for a farm between Macomb and Bushnell, . land that today is of the best black soil, but what was then only muck for it was before the practice of tiling."

Times were hard for Katharine, a city-bred girl, as Frederick tried to make a farm wife out of her but she was so recently from the Old World culture that it never occurred to her to question his domination. She learned to till the soil where it had never know a tile. Frederick, too, had always lived in town and just had to be among people so they traded the farm for a bakery and saloon back in town again. The family always lived over these businesses.

Following the birth of Mary in Louisville, the doctor advised Frederick to take Katharine back North because her lungs were infected and it was too damp and low in Louisville or her. Since Katharine's mother had died in Germany from tuberculosis when Katharine was ten years old, the family soon returned to Illinois, settling in Bushnell. Again Frederick ran a bakery and saloon, but times were unbearably hard, what with the postwar slump, so he closed the business, sold the fixtures, and then did day work.

By now Frederick was commonly known to friends as Fred" and Katharine was usually called "Kate." However, they continued to sign legal documents "Frederick" and Katharine."

Finally, in 1869, the opportunity came whereby they could purchase eighty acres of unimproved heavily timbered land ear Spoon River four miles west of Smithfield in Cass Township. The family found shelter in a cattle shed on a bluff over looking Spoon River to the West (later part of the homestead of Fred, Jr.) and from this place walked every day to the east side of the eighty acres and erected a cabin on a hill overlooking the Laswell Branch of Put Creek to the east.

Both Frederick and Katharine worked in the woods clearing the land for the plow. They gathered nuts and berries, made and sold maple syrup and sugar and cut railroad ties and fence posts to all. Katharine's ability to balance heavy loads on her head served her well for she often carried three buckets -- one of them on her head -- of their wildlife gleanings into Smithfield or Sevill to sell. Every minute that could be spared was spent in clearing the land, burning brush and stumps and planting fields and gardens and orchards. In their eagerness they over-plowed on the thin soil along slopes until huge ditches resulted. They were very frugal in their living and truly wasted not a thing!

In the spring of 1873, while Frederick was at Spoon River where he operated a sawmill and Katharine was down on the bank of Laswell Branch sugaring off a huge black iron kettle of maple syrup, the children came running down over the hill yelling that the cabin was on fire.

Katharine hurriedly raked the coals from under the kettle and raced up to save what she could. She managed to save a few meager possessions, including her trunk and featherbed, which she had brought along from Germany. But the cabin burned down. (Another was soon built across the deep ravine to the south, with the shallow-flowing spring water between the two sites.) The next day Katharine returned to her duties with the maple syrup only to discover that some boys from beyond the immediate neighborhood had come along, apparently to watch the cabin burn, polluted the contents of the kettle, then raked the fire back under it. The contents were a charred mess; the season's only cash crop destroyed along with the hard labor. Worse, still, the kettle had been borrowed and now had to be placed in the creek and days and days spent scouring it with sand and gravel, all the while, the new cabin was being built and the family was once again bedded down in a cattle shed.

The second cabin also burned (a chimney builder Frederick was not) and another was built farther west of it. After the two story house was built, this last cabin was dismantled and moved over to the new homestead and rebuilt and used as a stable. Those first cabins were just one-room affairs, with a loft and ladder where the older children slept. Their earliest recollections were of getting out of bed in the winter and shaking the sifted snow from their clothing and boots before dressing and descending the ladder. They were outside before dawn to hunt and milk the cows, carry up wood for the open hearth and fill buckets and tubs with water, after first using the maul to break the ice which had formed over night. After breakfast they carried their books and slates, along with black bread baked in honey or molasses -- always frozen in winter --and walked the woods to a one-room schoolhouse built of logs and later covered with sawed lumber when sawmills came to that part of the country -- one of the earliest being Frederick's sawmill on Spoon River near White's Ferry.

During these early days children could not run barefooted from April to November as they did after the land was cleared and more free of snakes. Many other wild varmints inhabited the land. In the winter the boys trapped mink, weasel and fox for the pelts; another means of ready cash.

Now that Frederick owned a sawmill, he could plan and build a more adequate frame house for his expanding family. However, he needed a more dependable water supply for household and livestock needs. In addition, he wanted more direct access to the sawmill. So he dickered with politicians both in Lewistown and in Springfield. By donating a roadway along his western line and persuading Oliver Miller and Joe Murphy to do likewise, and buying a strip himself to the south, he finally got the road rerouted to Buckeye along his boundary to the west. Then he bought ten acres on the west side of the road for a homesite for himself, since there was a good year round water supply there. In time, a road was built a half mile west over Goldsmith Hill and another a half mile east over Polecat Hill. The road Frederick got rerouted to Buckeye has been closed for a number of years and once again a road -- the Smithfield - Midway blacktop -- runs along the east line of what was once the family farm.

Frederick now proceeded to build his new house, buying pine only for the siding, shingles, doors and windows. A new barn of sawed timber was erected near the new roadway. A grainary, machine sheds, woodshed, chicken houses, hog barn, corn crib and cattle barn with a milking shed were added to the homestead. In the 1880's an addition was built on to the north side of the house consisting of a large kitchen with a door to the well on the north, a door on the east leading into a screened porch with a door leading outside to the cistern and the west kitchen door led to the garden, downhill to the chicken and wood houses and to the toilet. A board walk ran around the three sides and covered the well, all about three feet above the rapidly sloping ground level. A milk house was built off the northwest corner, which was down a few steps from the board walk. A water trough ran into the milk house and emptied into the large milk cooling trough. During hot weather the water was drained out twice each day and refilled with cold well water. An outside door of the milk house led into the barnyard and a watering trough for horses was placed to the east of this entrance. The board walk connecting the milk house was roofed and sided on the west and extra supplies of firewood were kept there.  the northeast corner  the large kitchen was a butlery with a window to the east.

There was a large attic over the kitchen addition. A heavy telephone wire ran the length of it and that is where the featherbeds, comforters, heavy underwear, etc. were stored in summer. In winter the quilts were hung there. Flour sacks of navy beans also hung in the attic in winter and were spread in black bread pans twice during the winter and placed in a slow oven to keep them free of weevils. A sack of buckwheat flour and one sack each of yellow and white cornmeal were also suspended from the rafters. Twenty-five pound bags of dried corn, apples, peaches and beef were added to the store before the cold winds of winter swept the land. Kegs and boxes of walnuts, butternuts, hickory nuts, hazel nuts and pecans were stored back under the eaves. The older children slept in this attic on their pallets of husks or straw for the five bedrooms were not sufficient for the ever-growing family.

 

Cane was raised and in the fall it was topped, stripped of leaves, cut and hauled to a nearby neighbor who had a sorghum mill. A barrel of sorghum molasses made from the cane stood in the cellar, along with huge 20 gallon stone jars of pickled green beans, corn, sauerkraut, pickles and apple butter. Then there were 5 gallon stone jars of peach butter, tomato butter, grape butter and green tomato pickles. Bins of apples, pears, squash, turnips and carrots were aligned along the north wall of the cellar with an extra huge bin of potatoes. Along the west wall heaps of parsnips, celery and cabbage were sand covered to preserve their crispness through the long winter months. There was no heat in the cellar as only the living area of the house was heated by a wood-burning cookstove in the kitchen and a room-heating stove in the parlor.

"I recall Grandfather making several barrels of vinegar every late summer. He had a large orchard and Uncle Will (Willie) carted apples to the press in the machine shed, then carried the cider by the bucket to the waiting barrels. The barrels were lined up on the east side of the house, near the cellar door. He and his sons, friends and sons-in-law had a high old time on hard cider until the barrels had to be rolled down to the cellar and racked up along the south side of the cellar wall. The married children came home on Sundays carrying their vinegar jugs and Grandfather filled them. None of the adult-----Continued