George and Sarah circa 1922

The Spring of 1922 we sold our home at Vicksburg for $2,400. We paid $800. We rented an old farm close by in the Spring of 1922. George was working in Altoona by this time. We had a Ford auto. Charlie Ringler, my sister Edna’s husband, was the first in the family to get a Ford auto. Not many people had autos yet. One Sunday afternoon he took his family, George, me and family to Hollidaysburg. Then the roads were still just gravel and dirt. We were on our way home when a drunk man in another car hit us and the car turned against the bank. My sister Edna had her arm hurt. A neighbor came along and took us women and children home. The men came later in Charlie’s car. That was my first car ride. Well that Spring we bought two horses, wagon, farm machinery and cows. I made butter that summer from the cow’s milk. George tried to work in the shops at night and farm day time, but it was too much, so he hired a man someone told him about. Well when he put this man on the corn cultivator George watched and he plowed out half the corn. He called the man and said he couldn’t have that, so he fired him. We got along for awhile. Not long after that there was a strike at the railroad shop, so George wasn’t there when the men walked out, but he never went back to work.

Carl and Thelma

Then he and his Dad started to look for a farm to buy. They got one close to Woodbury in November 1922. We moved there, put our furniture on a wagon. There was others helped for they drove our cattle all the way from Vicksburg to Woodbury, a distance of 20 miles. They started early in the morning and it was late at night when they got to the farm. So there we were the good and bad for 19 years. We had our kitchen in the basement of the house for several years till we took out some partition for the second floor. We moved our kitchen to the second floor. Later on when the one-room school became one central school at Woodbury, we bought one room of the school house, took it apart, brought it home and built a kitchen and back porch and a big chicken house. The year after we moved there in July Mary Hidessa was born. We had an old lady with us to help with the house work. She was a good Christian lady. She had come from Denmark when a child. They were always very poor. We called her Grandma Anderson. She stayed with us for several years. When we moved there George was told he would starve his family there, but we worked, bought more cows and shipped milk. He planted a big apple and peach orchard, and we didn’t starve, but we sure didn’t get rich.

Old farm in Woodbury above dam