Tiny Teacups

Glimpses of Family and Friends over 300 years

Diane Perrine Coon

2014

Dedicated to Alison, the bright, loving daughter I’m so happy to claim is mine, to my brothers George, whose passing in 2013 is still a hole in my heart, and Bill who shared so much of my life, and to my wonderful sister in law, Jane Myers Perrine, a genuine author and inventor of memorable characters. In remembrance of Ollie Conway Perrine and George Bierce Perrine, M.D. whose lives shaped ours and encompassed so much of America when it was special.

To the Simpson cousins, Nancy and Judy, and to the Bauman cousins, Dorothy and Linda, as our lives intersected at Grandma’s, with Anne, Ollie, and Hope, the three Conway sisters keeping us all a family.

To the pirate Conway who walked a plank, to the Huguenot Perrines, to the patriots, preachers and poets, farmers and carpenters, and above all to Naomi, the Lena Lenape Delaware Indian, we found after many years of searching.

And to Connor and Colin Runser, my grandchildren, who have no idea their ancestors were so weird and wonderful.

1930s, 1940s, 1950s…. Cincinnati, Ohio

Before there was Oprah, Ruth Lyons Reigned My grandmother Conway never missed the Ruth Lyons show. During the 1930s, the 1940s and until her death in 1952, Grandma put her dough to rise in the kitchen, finished churning her butter, pulled the quilt frame out away from the wall, and turned on the radio, readied her thimble and spent the next hour with her friends in downtown Cincinnati. There Ruth Lyons and Frazier Thomas hosted the Ohio Valley’s most influential talk radio show on WKRC and later WLW and its 50 watt clear channel station beamed the show all the way from Louisville to Indianapolis to Ashland to Chillicothe and Columbus.

She became the darling of Cincinnati when she broadcast non-stop during the 1937 flood, giving news and information and imploring citizens to give aid to those stricken by loss of homes and food and household goods and clothing during the great flood. And every year she hosted the Ruth Lyons Christmas Foundation gala to raise money to give toys to children in the area hospitals at Christmas time. When she was stricken with small strokes during the 1970s, her progress became front page news in the regional newspapers. Ruth Lyons was the female version of Arthur Godfrey, and the toast of daytime television in the Ohio River Valley. Every entertainer who passed through Cincinnati or its nightclubs over in Northern Kentucky, came on the show. And once Ruth Lyons started the 50 club on television, all the headliners like Bob Hope, Pearl Bailey, Nelson Eddy, David Letterman and Phil Donahue appeared so that the show became more a variety entertainment show than a talk show.

Today the signature ending of the show would be considered hokey – all the 50 women dressed up in their finest dresses and hats with white gloves, waving to the television audience as they all sang “The Waving Song.” But my grandma did not think it was hokey; she might have been all alone in a farmhouse 30 miles from downtown Cincinnati, but these were her friends. And there was a three-year waiting period to become one of those 50 gals.

Grandma would not tolerate any crudeness on radio or television. When Grandpa was home, the radio and/or television were dedicated to the Cincinnati Reds games. On Sunday afternoon, she always listened to the Grand Opera program out of New York City and found it very educational; Grandpa found lots of things to do in the barn or out on the farm at those times. At her monthly Coffee Klatch meeting in Norwood with several Cincinnati German/American friends, they would discuss the operas and major singers that month as they imbibed Kuchen and coffee with lots of cream and sugar.

She and Grandpa enjoyed Fibber McGee and Molly, and Lum ‘n Abner’s Jot Em Down store, and they loved Bob Hope chiefly because of his service to the country during World War II. I suspect Grandma never saw one of his movies.

But one of their major entertainments, believe it or not, was to turn page after page in the new Sears Catalog, when it arrived in the mail. Grandpa’s section was toward the end of the catalog where men’s clothing, smoking stuffs, farm equipment and fencing and hunting/fishing supplies were located. Grandma’s section was ladies’ clothing, household implements and kitchen pots and pans, fabrics and chicken brooders. They never purchased an item on time, and they always discussed the purchase together.

When I was little, I thought Grandma liked Ruth Lyons because Grandma’s name was Ruth. When I became older, I realized that Ruth Lyons was Grandma’s best friend. In the days when farms were two or three miles from each other and city center required three transfers of trains, trolleys and streetcars, those radio shows and regional television shows made people feel part of something greater than their own family. America had come through the Depression and World War II, in large part because Grandma and Grandpa Conway and all those thousands of other farm families believed that our citizens were kind and honorable and neighborly and the country was worth saving. Thanks Ruth Lyons, wish there were more of you

Photo: Ruth Peters Conway with grandchildren, Judy and Nancy Simpson, Dorothy Bauman and Diane Perrine. 1942, 1943

Cincinnati, Ohio

Henderson, N.C.

Coral Gables, FL

KEY West, Fl Clifton Elementary, 1942 First Grade, Four Schools, Three States

I started first grade in September 1943 in Cincinnati, Ohio, at Clifton Elementary School. We lived on Cornell Place in a rented house; Mom was a nurse at Cincinnati General Hospital, and Dad was overseas with the U.S. Navy as ship’s doctor on the U.S.S. Hobson, a hunter-killer destroyer. Because my birthday was in November, I started first grade at age five. I remember that beautiful school so well. It had a fountain in front that had developed a teal color patina, and when you entered the main doors a large lobby with a marble staircase that went up and then divided going both left and right. I think first graders did not go up the stairs. To get to school, we never had to cross a street because we walked through people’s yards. I distinctly remember the next door neighbor had a mulberry tree that had a lovely shape. I thought that the berries were good to eat when they turned from green/white to red. Not so. I had a tummy ache of major proportions. During World War II in Cincinnati, everyone looked out for each other, and walking to school was very safe. We must have had baby sitters because Mom worked as a nurse and my baby brother, George, was only two years old.

Then in the spring of 1944, Mom bundled us up and drove her old Chevy to her aunt’s house in North Carolina. Aunt Dorothy and Uncle Chub had purchased a motel in Henderson, North Carolina. It was one of those family style motels; each cabin had a tiny sitting area, a bathroom, and a bedroom but no kitchen, and an outdoor wooden bench. The motel cabins strung out along the ridge road so that every cabin had a view of the mountain valley below. The reason we were there was because Mom got word that Dad was being transferred to the U.S. Marines who needed experienced doctors for the Pacific theatre. While Dad was stationed at Camp LaJeune, I went to school for three weeks in Henderson, North Carolina. The only thing I remember about that school was coming home to teach my little brother his ABCs. The third school was in Coral Gables, Florida, in spring 1944 where my Dad, as 2nd Lt. in the U.S. Navy was in the process of being transferred to the Marine Hospital in Hawaii. But first he had to go to take special courses in south sea island diseases and surgical procedures for badly wounded soldiers and sailors coming off the Pacific islands. Dad had been taken off the Hobson about three weeks before the ship was engaged in bombardment and rescue operations for the Normandy landing in June 1944. However, he had already undergone substantial naval engagements at Casablanca landing, shepherding merchant ships carrying armaments and airplanes across the southern Atlantic route, going after the Quislings and Germans in Norway out of Scapa Flow, and running the Murmansk run more than once, so missing the big operation at Normandy was not something Dad regretted. How ironic, when many years later doing Dad’s genealogy, I discovered that the Perrine family were Normans and had originated in the Channel Islands of Guernsey and Jersey, just a short distance from where the Hobson was stationed at the famous assault.

I have only a faint memory of the Coral Gables school; as I recall it was one story and meandered among lush bushes. But I do recall very clearly the first day of my first grade at Coral Gables. I went to the corner of our street and I had my nice new satchel, a tablet with lines, and new pencils. No one told me that school buses were yellow; I got on the city bus instead and was a little surprised to find there were no other children aboard. Thank heavens the lady sitting next to me was inquisitive about a little first grader alone on a city bus. When she found out I was supposed to go to school at Coral Gables, she immediately got us off the bus and phoned the school, they in turn got a hold of my Mom, and I eventually got to school, but very late.

Then just a couple of weeks later, we headed for Key West, where Dad was taking yet more courses. I was in that school so few weeks that I can’t remember anything about the school. I just remember lush foliage and everyone watching a sunset.

All of my transcripts from the four schools in three states followed me back to Cincinnati, where in September 1944; my second grade started at yet another school, because we had moved to Union Street near Mom’s work as head operating nurse at Cincinnati General Hospital. There we made scatter paintings of fall leaves, made silhouettes of Washington and Lincoln, and pasted hundreds of war bond stamps into our stamp books. I guess we had a lot of reading, writing and arithmetic too.

By the time I had completed my MBA and was taking the second of a series of post graduate courses, I had attended 12 different schools. Thinking back on my education, I think four schools in the first grade is the reason why I am so comfortable with new situations and new adventures. But I can see where a shy person might have been traumatized by my early schooling. Of course career military families pick up and move all the time.

It’s funny what a six year old remembers apart from family lore and legends. Of our time in Florida, I recall the ocean on both sides of the roadway going south from Miami towards Key West. And I remember the wonderful sunset at Key West, Cincinnati had too many hills for great sunsets. But then we had the great river running by.

§

1964 to 2008

Middletown, Kentucky

My Mom, the Rustler

My mother was the most law abiding person I ever met; it was beyond any ethical positions in her beloved nursing career, it was beyond taking the AARP safe driving course every year between 55 and 90 when we took the keys to the car away because her peripheral vision was gone. And it reached beyond using both hand signals and flickers when making turns.

However, Mom was also the biggest rustler I ever met and I think I was the cause of all her lawlessness. One year after I’d moved to New Jersey, I gave Mom Peterson’s Field Guide to Eastern Songbirds, and she had my brother build three bird feeders and squirrel guards plus the metal cages to hold suet for the winter birds. She enjoyed the Field Guide so much, I gave her Peterson’s Field Guide to Eastern Wildflowers the very next holiday. And therein lies trouble, trouble, trouble.

You see, Mom’s property sloped downward in the back toward the creek that flowed through the subdivision. She and Dad had purchased a double lot, so it was about an acre and a half. And she fenced the entire lot so the dogs could run safely. She enjoyed planting flowers and never met a tiny tree she didn’t just love, right where it planted itself. So the property was abloom all spring, summer and fall. Although, as I mentioned to Mom, she had a tendency to plant the tall flowers in front of the small flowers so from the road, it was a little strange. But she looked at her birds at the feeders and her flowers from her windows in the house, so it made sense to her. Back to Peterson and his wildflower guide. Mom’s property had a steep fall away from her garden area down to the creek and it was very shady with old trees – walnuts, oaks, maples, elms. Her decades of theft began on a trip to Cumberland Gap in Kentucky. On the way home, she made Daddy stop five times so she could take a spade and dig up wildflowers along the road. She was very well prepared with plastic bags and wet paper towels. It wasn’t until five years later that I came to Kentucky in the Spring; in prior years I’d always come at Thanksgiving or Christmas. Proudly Mom showed me the delicate trillium, the snowbells, the jack in the pulpit, the dog-toothed violets, Virginia bluebells, tiny flowering grasses, coral bells, lilies of the valley, wild strawberries, and dozens of other gentle splashes of color as the sunlight cascaded through the budding trees.

Oh my God, my Mom had become a wildflower thief. “Mom, this is against the law,” I said quite self-righteously (having just received my 10th point on my New Jersey driver’s license for speeding across Princeton.) “No it’s not,” she insisted. “I’m reforesting.” “What?” I said with emphasis. “I’m taking the hillside back to its original Kentucky shade-lands.” And then she put her hands on her hips and tilted her head like a sparrow…subject closed.

There in the midst of a subdivision where most of the people poisoned the creek with lawn care pesticides so their lawn could gleam like a golf course, where all the house plantings were carbon copies of each other, where they hung planters of cascading annuals to brighten the greenery, my Mom had recreated God’s natural woodland. So I decided, since I was the one who gave her Peterson’s Field Guide, I’d simply testify to her innate goodness if she was every arrested for wildflower rustling.

The reason this all came to mind was this week when my daughter said she was starting to look for perennials for the shady part of her property. I almost sent her Peterson’s Guide to Eastern Wildflowers….No, No, No.

§

1956-1960 Cornell University Ithaca, New York

Finger Lakes Geology

I had many many interesting courses at Cornell University, but the one by far the most fun was Geology. Any student had to walk across deep gorges, the most spectacular Fall Creek gorge and ice skate on Beebe Lake, and the grand Lake Cayuga lay to the northwest no matter where on campus you walked. Field trips carted not only implements but also six-packs of beer, and we walked at least a mile up Tunkannock Falls, up Buttermilk Falls, and down to the morains south of Ithaca, and we walked along most of the southern and eastern shorelines of the great frigid Finger Lake.

Part two of Finger Lakes geology. At Treman Park, we studied hundreds of fossils, the rocks were extremely visible and gorgeous coloration. But the most interesting field trip was an hour trip north to the Niagara Escarpment, a unique geological formation that extends for hundreds of miles across northern NY State. We got off the school bus and followed the professor into a heavily wooded area with deep deep levels of pine needles so deep there was no sound except the occasional crackle underfoot. We got to an opening, and the professor told us to jump up and down all together and the ground swayed and bounced. This was where they discovered the remains of saber toothed tigers. Wow. Many many years later at LaBrea Tar Pits that sit in heavily concreted section of Hollywood, I remembered the wooded glen and solitude of upstate New York.

Tunkannoch Falls Park also served as a place to picnic. I recall one episode with some guys, graduates from Choate and Mt. Herman, and a steak cookout where we ate anchovies out of cans while the coals were heating. The few Kentuckians used to car pool from Ithaca to Kentucky and back. I recall coming back from Christmas vacation and we arrived at 5 a.m. in the morning before any of the dorms would open, so we went to Lake Cayuga’s shore and drank orange sunrise cocktails that someone had conveniently supplied until we could get into the dorms at 7 a.m.

§

Atlantic and Pacific Theatres

1942-1945 George Bierce Perrine, M.D. Lieutenant Commander, U.S. Navy World War II My Dad was a physician in Pewee Valley, Kentucky, from 1950 to 1985, and he built the red brick building in the center of Pewee Valley on route 146 where Central Avenue crosses the L&N tracks. Later that building housed antiques and then a dance studio. Although many people remember Dr. Perrine as a physician, a charter member of the Pewee Valley Players, and long time member of the Lion’s Club, few knew that he served with distinction in World War II and is buried at Zachary Taylor military cemetery on Brownsboro Road in Louisville. Dad served in both the Atlantic and the Pacific Theatres during World War II. George Bierce Perrine was born in the far Northeast section of Ohio in Hartford, Trumbull County, a few miles from the Pennsylvania border. Hartford was a town smaller than Pewee Valley (Population 650 in 1950). Dad was the first person in his family to go to college, but his father lost all the savings in the Stock Market crash of 1928, so Dad had to work his way through school. He finished his pre-Med program at Marietta College in Ohio in 1936 and began graduate studies at the University of Cincinnati. There he met my mother, Ollie Conway, who was finishing her BA degree by taking her fourth year at the Medical School at U of Cincinnati.

George and Ollie married on December 31, 1936. Mom finished the spring term 1937 at Cincinnati and Dad attended the University of Pennsylvania Medical School in Philadelphia. Mom gave up her medical studies and joined Dad in Philadelphia working as a private duty nurse. Mom said it was her first experience that far from home. Those were very busy times. Medical students and interns then had just as long hours as they do now, and Mom became pregnant with me. In late 1938 Mom came back to Cincinnati so she could work and her mother could help with me, the new baby. Dad continued with his three years at Medical School. It was the first major separation, Mom in Cincinnati and Dad in Philadelphia.

Dad finished Medical School in 1940 and came to Cincinnati to intern at Cincinnati General Hospital. The winds of war were sweeping through Cincinnati as it was one of the first places in the country to mobilize because of its leading skills and many machine and tool shops. We were living in very inexpensive quarters in Dayton, Kentucky, when my brother George Bierce Perrine III was born in October 1941. Pearl Harbor was December 7, 1941. By then Dad was in residency and decided to volunteer because doctors were among the first to be called up. While he was waiting for orders, he accepted a residency at the old St. Joseph Hospital on Eastern Parkway in Louisville, Kentucky, and we all moved near the University of Louisville.

On September 28, 1942 George Bierce Perrine, M.D. entered the U.S. Navy as a Lieutenant J.G.; much to his surprise, he was detached to the U.S. Marines since the Navy provided the physicians for the Marines. Mom and Dad dropped George and I off at our great Aunt’s place in Henderson, North Carolina, and they headed for Paris Island, and were quartered at Buford, South Carolina. Dad received about a weeks worth of inoculations and very little training. Then he was rushed to Norfolk to board the U.S.S. Hobson, a Bristol class Destroyer. (See the attached photograph and information about DD-464) The ship’s captain, Commander R. N. McFarlane, gave Mom enough gas rations to get her and her two children back to Cincinnati. Dad went off on the ship’s first mission.

Early 1942, the U.S.S. Hobson with camouflage for the southern Atlantic merchant convoy protection as part of the hunter-killer

pack of destroyers seeking Uboats.

The U.S.S. Hobson had been launched by the Charleston Navy Yard September 8, 1941 and was commissioned January 22, 1942. She was 348 feet long and had been outfitted with 5” guns, torpedoes and depth charges. Commander McFarlane had just returned to Norfolk from extensive shakedown and training operations in Casco Bay, Maine, and had received orders to act as an escort for the aircraft carrier Ranger. Their first mission was significant, because the Ranger was carrying seventy-two P-40 fighters to Trinidad; these planes were a vital cargo for the Allies in the early Atlantic air war. In August and September 1942, the Hobson underwent extensive anti-submarine training. Dad came aboard as the ship’s doctor September 28, and on October 3, 1942 the Hobson headed for Bermuda where she joined the Center Attack Group, assigned to screen the U.S.S. Ranger, for the famous Casablanca Landing of November 8, 1942. The Hobson’s guns pounded the shore batteries and turned back French ships, while the Ranger’s aircraft attacked Vichy French forces. It was a real naval battle. They had pinned down a Vichy French battleship, and were battering the shore fortifications. The most important task was to screen the Ranger so their aircraft could bomb behind the landing area and drop the first paratroopers of World War II.Dad, who had just two months under his belt and no real military experience, said in later years that the noise was incredible with the guns pounding so hard the ship shook. They were hit several times, but the destroyers had tremendous ability to take punishment and still keep fighting. Because of the Navy’s actions, the First Armored Division landed at Algeria and brought General Patton’s tanks into action. Over the next few weeks, the British attacked German General Rommel’s tanks from Egypt; the American tanks came at the German Panzers from the west. The success in North Africa permitted Churchill and Roosevelt to approve the Italian campaigns of 1943 that took the pressure off the Russians and the Eastern Front momentarily. On November 8, 1942 the Hobson limped back to Norfolk, arriving there November 26, but then immediately headed for Boston, for repairs and for training off the coast of Maine. Dad sent word to Mom to come up to Boston because they might be there for awhile. Mom packed two small children aboard a series of trains and arrived in Boston November 29. For all those months, Mom did not know that Dad was on such a dangerous assignment. Mom got to Boston just as the newspapers and radios flashed the news of the Coconut Grove fire that killed 490 servicemen the night of November 28th. She was terrified that Dad might have been in that fire, and she did not even know where the Hobson was

berthed. Finally she phoned Military Intelligence and was told the Hobson was in the Charles River, not at the South Boston Navy Yards. Daddy was not on the list of fatalities or wounded and would contact her at the hotel. I was only four at the time and remember mostly that George and I had wonderful new winter coats, dark blue, with military type gold buttons. Furthermore, trains had wonderful water fountains with tiny paper cups, seats that were great for jumping, and lots of things to see out the windows. My young brother, George, slept most of the time. We got a tour of the ship and met the Captain (very impressive) and my Mother was very, very relieved. The Hobson’s next major assignment was to provide convoy protection out of the Canal Zone. For those who don’t remember, in the early part of the War it was critical to get military supplies to England and the few Allies that had not been overrun by the Germans. The Allies, and particularly the U.S., had a sizeable merchant fleet, but the German’s preyed upon the shipping lanes of the Atlantic with their deadly fleet of U-Boats. Hundreds of merchant ships went to the bottom of the sea. The U.S.S. Hobson was one of the destroyers that sought out subs in the Atlantic “hunter-killer” packs and guarded the slow moving and unarmed merchant ships. These ships, moving in convoys sometimes as many as 200 ships, carried military equipment and also food, and clothing and medical supplies. They were shooting ducks for the German submarines and surface warships. The destroyers, named the “greyhounds of the seas,” were major factors in protecting the shipping lanes. In early 1943 the Hobson joined the Ranger in anti-submarine patrol duty. In March 1943, the crew of the Hobson rescued survivors from the S.S. St. Margaret off Bermuda. In April both the Hobson and the Ranger began operations out of Argentina, to provide air cover for the large convoys crossing the southern routes. At one point the Hobson was struck and had to pull into Argentina for repairs. In July 1943 Dad’s ship, the U.S.S. Hobson was given an honor, assigned to protect the Queen Mary when it took Prime Minister Winston Churchill to meet with President Franklin D. Roosevelt to coordinate war strategies at the Quebec Conference. Because the Queen Mary was so much faster than even the fastest military ship, the destroyers positioned themselves across the North Atlantic. Then very much like baton passing in a relay race, the destroyers would muster up top speed, race alongside the Queen Mary, and then fall away when the next destroyers on station came into view. Dad said every bolt and every bracket shuddered as the destroyer raced alongside Mr. Churchill, even more stressed than fighting through the gigantic winter waves of the North Atlantic.

Late 1942 U.S.S. Hobson refitted with new guns after

Casablanca Landing and removed camouflage since reassigned to North Atlantic duty out of Scapa Flow and the Murmansk Run.

In August 1943, the Hobson and aircraft carrier Ranger were ordered to Scapa Flow, Scotland, to join the British Home Fleet under orders from the Royal Navy. The next few months provided very dangerous and secret missions in the North Atlantic and Baltic Sea, to provide cover for vital convoys to Murmansk, Russia. As the Allies prepared for the major landings at Normandy, it was critical to keep the German Army occupied with the Russian Front. The Murmansk Run brought military supplies to the hard-pressed Russian army, but hundreds of U-Boat attacks sank tons of material and men. It was a time of constant tension and fear, days of silence, broken by hectic action if a submarine was sighted. On October 4, 1942 the Ranger’s aircraft and the Hobson’s guns and torpedoes made a devastating attack on German shipping at Bodo, Norway, in a top secret operation that helped clear a very nasty source of German intelligence and harm to merchant ships. In November, the Hobson screened the HMS Formidable in a major attack on German shipping, and then protected two convoys to Iceland. That fall and winter, the U.S.S. Hobson and its convoys plowed through the icy waters of winter on the North Atlantic. Dad said the biggest medical problem on the ship was bed wetting...from the constant fear and long exposure to frighteningly cold weather. Years later I took Dad’s huge “Greenland Parka” with the 6-inch wooden buttons and great hood up to Cornell University in New York State, because the weather was – 28 degrees with the ice so cold it no longer made a sound when you walked on it. Wearing that massive coat gave me some insight into the conditions aboard ship on the North Atlantic.

Hobson sailed with Ranger and other ships 5 August 1943 to join the British Home Fleet at Scapa Flow. Arriving 19 August 1943, she operated under Royal Navy orders in northern waters, helping to provide cover for vital supply convoys to Russia. While at Scapa Flow 21 September 1943, she was inspected by US Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox and Admiral Harold Rainsford Stark. Hobson accompanied Ranger on a daring raid 2–4 October 1943, as carrier aircraft staged a devastating attack on German shipping at Bodø, Norway. Following this operation, the destroyer continued to operate with Home Fleet. She screened HMS Formidable during flight operations in November and after two convoy voyages to Iceland, returned to Boston and U.S. operational control 3 December 1943. From Wikipedia “U.S.S. Hobson”

Because of his wartime experiences on the Murmansk Run, my mild-mannered father developed a pretty bad attitude toward the Quislings of Norway and Sweden that gave positions of our ships to the German Navy. He also greatly favored the Scots since the U.S.S. Hobson sailed out of Scapa Flow, Scotland, and the people there treated our boys very well. He remembered that the King, Queen Elizabeth’s father, came up to Scotland to thank the U.S. seamen for their service. On December 3, 1943 the battle-hardened Hobson came back to Boston for a new assignment. From January through April 1944, the Hobson joined the escort carrier Bogue and other escorts in a pack that patrolled the Atlantic and Caribbean as far as the Azores. The Hobson’s guns helped sink U-575 as part of these missions. On March 8, 1944 Lieutenant George B. Perrine, M.D. was ordered to leave the Hobson DD464 and report to the U.S. Naval Hospital at Key West, Florida. Dad got a house and sent for Mom and Butch and me. We arrived at our own expense only to find in April that Dad was ordered to the V-12 medical unit at the University of Miami. Off we went to Coral Gables. Meanwhile, Dad’s ship, the Hobson left southern waters April 21, 1944 and assumed position in Rear Admiral Moon’s Utah Beach Assault Group. At 0140 on June 6, 1944 the Hobson, Corry and Fitch blazed away at German shore batteries, the first shots fired in the Normandy Landing. The Corry hit a mine and sank, but the Hobson and Fitch gave fire support and picked up survivors from the water, heading back to Plymouth that night. The Hobson returned June 8 to continue the bombardment, jamming glider bomb radio frequencies, and providing convoy protection in the Channel. On June 25 destroyers Hobson and Plunkett screened the battleships Texas and Arkansas at Cherbourg, France. The battleships were dangerously straddled, and the two destroyers laid down covering smoke to allow them to retire. A few days later the Allies occupied Cherbourg. Dad missed the biggest battle of the Atlantic theatre, the Normandy Landing. What irony, because the Perrine family is Norman in derivation and the Hobson would have passed right by the Channel Islands, the Perrine ancestral home. The Hobson sailed to the Mediterranean taking part in the invasion of southern France as spotter for the Nevada. In January 1945 she sailed through the Panama Canal to serve as destroyer mine-sweeper during the greatest Pacific amphibious operations, Okinawa. In November 1944, Dad was ordered to the Marines Medical Field School at Camp Lejeune and then assigned to the Pacific Theatre, Headquarters of the 17th Services Battalion, Fleet Marine Force. So off we went again this time back to Cincinnati. I started first grade in Coral Gables, getting on a city bus rather than a school bus because no one told me about yellow buses. Then I was whisked into first grade in North Carolina, and then to Norwood and to another elementary school in Cincinnati....four different schools in the first grade. Although Dad’s headquarters base was San Francisco, he actually was assigned to land duty at the Marine Hospital in Hawaii. After the nightmare of destroyer convoys on the North Atlantic, Dad was pretty happy with his Hawaiian tour of duty. He learned to play the flute and had a pet goat. And he got a lot of practice as a young doctor. Mom says that the doctors seemed to have time to frolic on the beaches of Waikiki, but Dad said they were taking severely wounded from the Pacific islands. On October 6, 1945 Dad was promoted to Lieutenant Commander, U.S. Navy (Marine Corps). He was released from active duty April 29, 1946 and was accepted for a two year residency at Cleveland’s Western Reserve, a famous research facility. He was thinking about moving us all to Hawaii, but then my great uncle, John Peters, M.D., who had been in World War II as a psychiatrist caring for airmen of the B-52s and fighters in the European theatre, decided to move to California. He asked Dad if he would like to take over the house and his practice at Pewee Valley, Oldham County, Kentucky. The first week we came to Kentucky, Dad made a green sign and named our house on Maple Avenue “Stitchhaven.” And with that he set up his medical and surgical practice, really hanging out his

shingle. A few months later he came home with a red 1926 Ford convertible with green wire wheels, black interior and a rumble seat. We kids thought that car was the best thing about Kentucky. My Mom almost divorced him on the spot. Dad was not too fond of oceans after his World War II assignments, but he did love his motorboat and for a man that never took vacations, he really enjoyed the few hours putting that boat into the Ohio River, the Cumberland, or even to the Lake of the Ozarks. I sent to Saks Fifth Avenue in New York and got him a captain’s hat with all the gold braid. But my brother Bill sank the boat in the Ohio River by getting it too close to the paddlewheel of the Belle of Louisville. Dad’s boat went to the bottom of the Ohio River. His ship, the U.S.S. Hobson, was cut in two by the Wasp, an aircraft carrier, during exercises 700 miles west of the Azores April 26, 1952. The U.S.S. Hobson, this gallant destroyer that had participated in so many engagements in the Atlantic and Pacific, rolled over and sank. The North Atlantic swallowed up 176 crew including the commanding officer, Lt. Commander W. J. Tierney. The crew of the Hobson that fateful day is still listed on active duty. The Hobson received six battle stars for World War II service and shared the Presidential Unit Citation given the ships in the Bogue antisubmarine task group in the Atlantic. Many people remember Dr. Perrine as the somewhat eccentric fellow that rode his motorcycles around Oldham County and Middletown until he was 75 years old. He had a Harley and a Yamaha. The Harley had a sidecar, and he often took “Pup Dog” a motley terrier for rides. But what most people don’t know is that he really, really wanted a helicopter. But my Mom was not too enthused with that prospect.

Submitted by: Diane Perrine Coon, November 4, 2005

Ancestors of Dr. George Bierce Perrine that served in the military:

William Perrine, Revolutionary War, Perrineville, Monmouth Co, New Jersey

Conrad Haag, Revolutionary War, Militia, Westmoreland Co, Pennsylvania

Daniel Perrine, War of 1812, Perrine Corners, Mercer County, Pennsylvania

George Alexander Hawk, 139th PA, Civil War, Armstrong Co, Pennsylvania

§ The Coo-Coo Clock and the Captain’s Hat 1968, 1970s Middletown, Kentucky

Dad was always difficult to shop for presents for Christmas or birthday or Father’s Day, first because he never really wanted anything small. He liked motorcycles, helicopters, and speedboats, not ties or socks, although he accepted them graciously. One Christmas, however, I outdid myself in innovative “Dad” presents by giving him a Black Forest Coo Coo eight-day Clock. He was delighted. Within 15 minutes of the grand “opening presents” event in the living room, Dad had disappeared with his new clock, still in its box.

When Mom and I went into the kitchen to get coffee and cake out for a late dessert, there was Dad at the kitchen table with the Black Forest Coo Coo Clock in many, many pieces. He even had the inner clock assembly apart as well as the pull knobs. The next morning the Coo Coo Clock was back together, and Dad was very pleased with his new toy. But I do think we found an extra tiny spring at some point. Perhaps it was an extra. I always thought that Anatomy must have been his favorite Medical School subject, because he sure wanted to see how things worked. My daughter, Alison, inherited that trait. Never saw a new vacuum cleaner that she didn’t have it apart just out of the box.

Captain’s Hat, Dad’s Boat and the Belle of Louisville paddle wheeler steamboat on the Ohio River.

Dad just didn’t take vacations. Because of World War II, he did not start his medical practice until he was 40 years old, and he hesitated leaving any patient under his care. However, during the 1970s he bought a 16-foot motor boat that he would trailer down to the Ohio River or to Lake Cumberland or even out to Lake of the Ozarks when George and Jane lived in Missouri. So in late October I went to New York City to Saks Fifth Avenue to buy Dad a captain’s hat with gold braid for his birthday. Of course Saks Fifth Avenue had put all its summer stock in warehouses and all I could see was skis and snowshoes. But they are a classy store, so the department manager sent for the exact captain’s hat I wanted. It took about an hour but I was extremely pleased with Saks. Dad got his hat. That next summer, my younger brother Bill and his friend were water skiing and got the boat too close to the paddle wheel of the Belle of Louisville steamboat and the boat sunk to the bottom of the Ohio River. “You have insurance?” I asked Dad on the phone. “Oh, yes,” he said, “the salvage company will pull it out, but it is a total loss.” “Well you can always buy another one, then,” I said. “Not until Bill leaves home,” was his reply. And he didn’t….leave home that is for a long, long time.

§

1938-2014

Ohio, Kentucky, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania

East versus West

I know I’m an Easterner, having lived East of the Mississippi my entire life. I am used to many broad rivers laced with hundreds of creeks, lanes that wind along old Indian trails, mountains that prefer ice precipices rather than broad snowfields, broad-leafed Oaks and Maples and Elms that turn vibrant colors in the Fall painting a scene against the deep green firs behind them, seacoasts pulling a north wind nipping in the air even in August, lakes where the frigid cold layer hits the bottom of your feet in July, and houses that date back to 1680 and are so firmly built they will last another two hundred years. The riverbanks in the East are thick with lush vegetation and small wildlife, the fields swarm with game, and the lakes jump with fish unless some industry dumps its wastes into the streams. As a child I watched Grandpa’s Airedale dig into the clay bank after groundhogs and when his tail disappeared into the hole, we ran up to the farmhouse to tell Grandma the dog was lost. “He’ll come home with the cows,” she always said.

However, I have traveled extensively in the West, and I am always awestruck by the hugeness of the Western sky. I loved the majestic Rockies at Boulder, the sea otters and kelp at Monterey, the enchanted harbor and hills of San Francisco, the vastness of the Nevada desert, the great cactus gardens of Tucson, bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush of the Texas hill country, the amazing smell of freshness of Mount Shasta.

But of all the contrasts, it was at Bryce Canyon, in southern Utah, that taught me the most about East and West. Tucked high above the rock face of the canyon wall was a tiny tuft of grass serving as a bird’s nest. All around me was dryness and rock. A guide stated that water from the infrequent rainfalls seeped down through the rock taking hundreds of years to reach that little outpost of avian life form. And I envisioned the broad Ohio River with its placid waters over 20 feet deep passing cornfields and hayfields and barns and houses and horses and cows, coons and possums, bear and deer and flooding over into nearby fields in the spring freshet. Up in Wyoming they told us it took five acres to support the water and feed needs for one cow.

And now I’m worried. The last three winters in Kentucky were extremely warm. Both 2011 and 2012 Springs were unseasonably hot, and the early summer has posted temperatures over 100 degrees for two weeks, I have become very nervous that our water-filled East was becoming like the West. Of course we think we have hundreds of years before we become a desert. Right now it is just steamy. We need snowfall like those wonderful two-foot snows in Connecticut, we need those old March rains in Cincinnati when it was raining when you left for school in the morning, raining when you came home and pouring down rain on the roof all night. We need summer lightning storms that save the corn and soybeans from damaging heat. We need the deep, deep soft snows of Vermont and Maine that start in late November and go through to April. We need to replenish the earth around our enormous cities.

I like to visit the West on vacation, but I really, really want to live in the water world of the East. p.s. three years later it rained all Spring and into the Summer, drenching rains, producing green, green grass and trees, and the Ohio River was high all year.

§

1946…….2012 Chillicothe, Ohio

The Shrinking Serpent Mound

My cousin Dorothy Bauman Hacker is the same age I am, although her birthday is in June and mine is in November, but we both were born in 1938. As youngsters we were both horse crazy and Dorothy had two palomino horses that we used to ride. All the family gatherings in the Cincinnati area were held at the Hackers after Grandma Conway died, because in addition to Dorothy’s five children, her mother, Aunt Hope, and Grandpa Conway lived with her and Jack. We kept in touch with each other even though the Hackers moved out to Las Vegas when their children were grown. And I had spent 35 years up East in Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Mom and Aunt Hope were our life-lines for all family happenings.

Strangely enough, I had retired and moved back to Middletown, Kentucky, so Mom could stay in her house after Dad died in 1996, and then Mom died in 2008. Middletown is an eastern suburb of Louisville. Meanwhile Dorothy moved to Fern Creek, Kentucky, to live with her son Bobby after Aunt Hope and then Jack died. Fern Creek is a southeastern suburb of Louisville. So in the early summer of 2012, the two cousins, born in Hamilton County, Ohio, were living within 12 miles of each other.

In July 2012, our oldest cousin Nancy Simpson Cowan called to say that she and John were going to be in Lebanon, Ohio for a Cowan family reunion and would love to see us if we could drive up from Louisville. So, on a beautiful summer day in early August, we drove up to Chillicothe talking the entire way non-stop. We had a lovely meal, thanks to John Cowan, at the Olive Garden, and talked through the entire meal, but with many, many photographs

“You know,” I said, “The Great Serpent Mound is on our way back home and we still have a lovely afternoon. I haven’t seen it since I was a kid, maybe eight years old.” Dorothy agreed that she hadn’t seen it since childhood and remembered it as being pretty spectacular. “I remember it being huge and wondering how the Native Americans could build such a large structure. And I remember standing on the edge of the cliff and seeing the Ohio River spread out down below.”

And so, as we veered off into the back roads of southern Ohio, we talked and talked and talked, and around 4:00 p.m. we arrived at the Great Serpent Mound. “Wow, this parking lot looks a lot smaller than I remember,” I said, and there was only one other car in the lot. We went into the Visitors Center and there were lots and lots of books and artifacts about Indian culture in southern Ohio. I looked at the big map on the wall, and the first of my childhood memories was torpedoed – the Ohio River was at least 40 miles away, so whatever river I remembered, that wasn’t it. We were laughing as we headed up the hill toward the Great Serpent Mound.

Cousins: Nancy Simpson Cowan, Diane Perrine Coon, and Dorothy Bauman Hacker

We read the historic marker for the Great Serpent Mound.

Then we started toward the mound itself. We seemed to be at the head of the snake section or maybe the tightly wound tail. We walked along the pathway for a while and there were wooden structures where you could climb up to see a bird’s eye view of the mounds, but my arthritis would not permit any of that. And it was getting to be late afternoon, and we still had a long drive to get back to Louisville.

“This mound seems to be much narrower than I remember, ” I said. “Do you think it has shrunk?” Dorothy laughed. “It does seem to be much smaller than I remember it.”

We went over to the edge of the cliff next to the snake’s head and looked down. First the cliff was not that high. Secondly that was not the Ohio River. It was not a river at all. It was Brush Creek, and Brush Creek had a lot of stones and not much water in early August 2012. “So much for the scary cliff,” I muttered. We began to laugh and headed back to the car taking back roads until we hit a recognizable way home.

The Great Serpent Mound is clearly a wonderful part of American history and Native American culture, but I swear that it had shrunk since 1946, and Dorothy thinks it got smaller too.

§

1996-1997

Schnecksville PA to Middletown KY

An Ending

Ollie Marie Conway - 1936 – George Bierce Perrine A Beginning

She was 82 the year Dad died. They were the same age, born in 1912 a week apart in early November. Mom was born first in Hamilton County, Ohio, in North College Hill just outside Cincinnati. Dad, a week later was born in Hartford, Trumbull County, Ohio in the far northeast county of that state, just across the river from Sharon, Pennsylvania, where they moved when Dad was in elementary school. His dad was an accountant with Westinghouse, and his Mom taught High School at Farrell. George Bierce Perrine, M.D., died the Sunday after a January snowstorm that cradled Louisville with unfamiliar depth and crisp silence, a child’s version of the 24 inch snows we had in Connecticut in the late 1960s. Mom gathered all the guilt into herself. Because of the snow she did not go to the retirement home to see him all Friday or Saturday. He died early Sunday morning. Mom, the old nurse, was not with him at the end. No one was, just the staff who phoned with the news. The truth was that dementia had taken so great a toll that Dad, the doctor, probably triggered the heart attack by fretting at the restraints. He would not have wished to exist there tied to his bed at night at that retirement home. He chose to exit quietly and quickly. He was so deaf by then, everything was quiet. The last things we recall Dad doing was eating, walking around the fenced in yard in his slippers, and sleeping. He had fallen in the hallway to his bedroom, and Mom did not find him immediately. He was too heavy to lift, so she covered him with a blanket and called 911 and made arrangements at the retirement home. He was only there a couple of weeks before he died. Would Dad have rather died at home? Probably not. He was really beyond caring about those little things. His world had shrunken into a small silent place, perhaps like the snow that covered Louisville. But she was devastated, less because he was dead, but rather because she did not drive there through the snow. It was a complicated reaction. She phoned me in Pennsylvania to come home and help with the funeral arrangements. I don’t recall many details at that time. I just packed the dog in the car and left water and food for the one cat still left at my house. I’m not even sure I locked the door or turned down the heat. George and Jane had just returned to Texas from Louisville that week Dad died, and did not plan to come to the Memorial Service, but they gave input over the phone. Dad was going to be buried at Zachary Taylor, the federal military cemetery at Louisville as Lt. Commander U.S. Navy, WW II. And there was a space for Mom, if cremated, on the other side of the marker. Dad would have approved this choice, chiefly because there was little cost, and of all things Dad tended to be cheap. The memorial service was held at Middletown Christian Church at the old site on Old Main Street. Mom chose the hymns, and her Prayer Breakfast folks and her Bible Study group helped a lot with support. Bill and I were on either side of her as she wept through the service. They had been married 58 years. There were more people in the congregation than I expected -- some patients, some old timers from Pewee Valley, and some from the neighborhood and Mom’s friends from church. It was a lovely service, quiet and dignified, and the graveside service at Zachary Taylor was dignified too. There was an American flag. I stayed two weeks. Mom gave most of Dad’s dress suits and clothes to my brother Bill, and years later I found that she gave him Dad’s military ribbons and his shotgun. Thus most of Dad’s physical remains went to Clarksville, Indiana. When I returned to Schnecksville, Pennsylvania, the old cat, Samantha, was dead, so I buried her out on a friend’s farmette. There had been a major ice storm while I was gone, and the melting water had cascaded down the walls in the living room and the dining room, ruining the wall to wall carpet. Two months later, the 80- gallon hot water heater burst and poured water down the bedroom wing of the house, ruining the wall to wall carpet in three rooms and the walk in closet and the bathroom. What a mess.

I planned to retire in May, having put in my 23 years, and taking advantage of a cash buy-out, I bought a used Camry for cash. Most of the rest of that year was taken up with insurance claims and repairs to the house. When I contracted with a realtor, I discovered that many of the codes had changed since I purchased the house eight years prior. I had to put in a new septic system, a new radon protection system that involved two sites because of the long wings in the house, and I had to dig trenches to take the rainwater away from the foundation of the house. About $1,800 of landscaping was necessary to cover the trench damage. Dead animals were found in the space above the attached two-car garage, so the Critter Control people had to get rid of them. Altogether $30,000 went into fixing the house for sale. My brother Bill came up in the fall to help put up wall paper and doing interior painting. I stored almost all my furniture in storage. In December, my son-in-law and Bill loaded my furniture in a U-Haul and started for Kentucky. They did not like each other at all, and it was a very uneasy ride. I had Jamie, my Keeshond, and a car full of stuff. I left my house in the care of my realtor-friend, arranged for a landscape company to mow the lawn and trim the bushes, dropped the price to a nearly give- away level and hoped for a quick sale.

I had left a modern one-level house with lovely gardens and outdoor patio and modern furniture and suddenly was immersed in a 1960s raised ranch with small rooms all broken up by windows and doors, a kitchen that had no dishwasher and very little space to cook or prepare food. Mom decided to move downstairs where there was a large room with windows overlooking her gardens in the back that she could use as a bedroom, a very large room that served as living room, study and storage, and she installed a small bathroom underneath the kitchen. I had the same contractor knock together two small bathrooms upstairs and installed a gorgeous jet stream tub with Mexican tile surround and a garden window at tree top. The toilet, sink, and corner walk in shower all matched the tub. Within weeks I was bored and went down to University of Louisville to begin a masters in history program. We fell into a routine. I had class work and library and research, and worked at the university archives to pay for tuition. Mom was very active in Middletown Christian Church; she taught Sunday School (her old ladies) and attended Church on Sundays. Her over-60 group, the Frisky Folks, met on Tuesday. She usually made a garlic cheese grits casserole once a month for that group, and at least once a month the Friskies traveled in a bus to see a historic site or to take in a luncheon train trip, Her Women’s Prayer Breakfast met on Wednesday at 7 a.m. and she taught a Bible Study Group (her girls) on Thursday evening. Then on Saturday, she had an hour phone chat with George and Jane down in Texas.

Bill came over from Indiana at least once a week to help with yard work and have dinner, and Mom hired a woman to clean on Mondays. We shared household expenses; Mom had the property taxes and water, and I did the telephones and electricity, and we shared food costs and cooking. We both were addicted to books and often read the same series – Georgette Heyer, Agatha Christe, although Mom adored Hercule Peroit, and I liked Miss Marple. I had discovered the great fun of being an historian, almost like a detective solving murder mysteries, and among my top joys was interviewing Mom about her childhood growing up in North College Hill and its early 20th century village life. I brought my wonderful Keeshond, Jamie, from Pennsylvania, and he quickly adjusted to an acre of fenced in woodland and gardens and lawns, but he loved to take trips out with Grandma and Mom out into the countryside where we could find black and white cows; he would bark and bark at them trying to get

the cows to move. He absolutely refused to bark at Angus, at Charlerois, at horses, at llamas or chickens. Mom’s old dog, Birdy, died, and I took her down to the Louisville pound to choose another dog. Mom’s history was to select the ugliest dog at the pound, one that no one else might take.

1994 to 2000 Ohio River Valley

Expeditions

Finding Shoo-fly, and several other hysterical historical events

If my Dad had not claimed he was an Indian, I never would have found Shoo-fly, Kentucky, a town lost to all but locals since about 1913. And I probably would never have gone back to my first love, history, on a full-time basis.

My Dad was a perfectly sane, wonderful doctor in Pewee Valley, Kentucky. But he had always claimed that his mother had named him “burning bush” and told him that because of his Indian ancestors, he had fishing rights in Lake Erie. Mom said, “I knew his mother, and she was no Indian.” But of course, Mom always huffs a little when we discuss the Perrine side of the family. She prefers talking about Conways, her family, and she claims that they were much more refined, whatever that means. Of course, to a budding historian, the Perrine eccentricities were far more interesting. My daughter claims that no family is interesting if they don’t have at least one pirate and one horse-thief in them. I did find her the pirate, one of those refined Conways, but I’m still looking for the horse-thief.

Perrines were so easy to trace as they moved westward, because they had a tendency to name towns after themselves….Perrineville, New Jersey,, Perrine Corners, Pennsylvania, Perrine, Florida, etc. Dad was getting up in years and became quite forgetful. Since I lived in Pennsylvania at the time, I decided to go find Dad’s Indian. After several months of genealogical digging and traveling all over New Jersey, Staten Island, and Pennsylvania, I did, indeed find the Indian, not more than seven miles from where I lived. Her name was Naemi, the date was 1752, and she was a Lenai Lenapae, part of the Delaware Indians that lived on the first Indian reservation in America, founded by Thomas Penn in Indianlands, Pennsylvania. Naomi met and married recently arrived Thomas Willems, the father-in-law of Conrad Haag, the ancestor of Dad’s Hawks, his mother’s side of the family. They all moved to Westmoreland County traveling via the first Conestoga wagon to cross the Alleghenies. Grandmother Perrine’s maiden name was Katherine Lucretia Hawk, and as I remember her, she was a stiffly erect, formidable Victorian school teacher, the spitting image of Queen Victoria’s statues. Grandpa, on the other hand, had a bit of the old nick in him. At the age of five, I got to ride in a steam locomotive going around the big Westinghouse rail yards at Sharon, Pennsylvania, because Grandpa, a cost accountant at the main plant, thought it might be fun. “You don’t have to mention this to anyone else,” he cautioned.

My daughter, Alison, loved to listen to her grandmother Ollie Perrine and her great aunts, the Conways, as they told of growing up in the early 20th century north of Cincinnati, Ohio, and she would spend hours going over old family photographs with her Grandma. However the rest of the family was (pick one) relatively… frequently….usually….totally disinterested in my genealogical tracings.

In fact my brother George and his wife Jane would become woodenly transfixed, simultaneously tuning out my great new family discoveries. George, only three years younger than me, did not recall one single story of our childhood and youth the same way I did. Often he claimed events I related never happened, or worse that I had embellished them. However, dear people, historians always remember correctly, that is unless the public record says something else. Then we adjust our stories gracefully.

Once George discovered that our Perrine family came to America as Huguenots, he began to study that great Protestant out-migration from France. I kept telling him our Perrines were Normans from the Channel Islands, from the Jersey and Guernsey islands. Also George discovered that his middle name Bierce came from Sarah Sophia Bierce who had married Oliver Perry Perrine in 1851 and from that moment on we had George Bierce Perrine, Lewis Bierce Perrine, George Bierce Perrine, M.D., and Reverend George Bierce Perrine. For some reason, George decided that he was a descendent of Ambrose Bierce, one of his favorite authors. Not so, perhaps fourth cousins most distantly contrived, says the family geneaologist…me.

So here are some stories of history field work in Kentucky and Indiana with some weird and wonderful folks we met along the way.

Finding Shoofly

After Dad died, I took an early retirement and came back to Kentucky so that Mom could stay in her house. I signed up to take a master’s in history at U of L. Mom, who was then 82, was hospitalized with pneumonia shortly after I started class work. One day when she was somewhat recovered I suggested taking a ride in the country with Jamie, my Keeshond, then still very much a puppy. I needed to find Shoo-fly, Kentucky. So armed with my 1913 map, the last to show the whereabouts of this hamlet, I headed across Oldham, Henry, and Trimble and into Carroll County. It began to snow. Very large flakes. Flakes that stuck to the ground quickly making a white carpet everywhere. “Turn back,” Mom whimp ered. “It’s just a flurry,” I said cheerfully, thinking of my five years in Connecticut and fifteen in Pennsylvania, so I headed along White Creek, a tributary to the Kentucky River. But the snow kept falling, and then the light got dimmer. “I’m on the down side, we’ll fall off the road and go into the creek,” Mom said, insistently. “There’s an five acre pasture between the road and the creek, and I don’t intend to fall off the road.”

Because of Mom’s front seat driving, I almost missed my landmark, and had to back up a few yards, which wasn’t hard because we hadn’t seen another car or truck in the last half hour. I turned where the old road was supposed to lead from Easterday to Shoofly. Whoops, there was a big sign. “Road Closed. No Outlet.” With a chain across for emphasis. “Let’s go home,” Mom said. Now it was getting dusk and the tires were making recognizable ruts in the snow. The roadway was just barely visible at the edges.

I referred to my semi-trustworthy map. “Look, there’s another road, we just have to go up this creek, cross a little bridge and come down the other side of the creek,” I said happily. I slowed down to 20 miles an hour and slid along the narrowing roads. At least I could still see the creek bed. When I came to the Y in the road, I couldn’t see a village, just one house with a truck in front of it. A man was just about to get into the truck. “Hello,” I shouted through the snow. “Is this Shoo-fly?” “Sure is,” the man came over to our car and peered in to see the dog, the very old lady and the somewhat determined historian. “The houses were up there along the creek.” I looked back and he pointed out the foundations of the cabins and sheds and told me which families lived there. “I was born up in a tenant farmhouse on the top of the hill,” the man said. “Now I live in Carrollton.” “My map shows a much shorter way to Shoo-fly,” I held out the 1913 map for him to see. “Oh, that,” he laughed. “My cousin plowed up the road in 1965.” “Let’s go home,” my Mom repeated. “We found Shoo-fly.”

The very next summer, I decided to explore along both sides of the Kentucky River looking for roads and trails that paralleled the river. I drove along the road on top of the bluffs from Franklinton to Drennon’s Springs and noted a dashed line going off toward Lockport, down on the river. I was using an old map once again. “What are you doing?” Mom cried. “That’s a dirt road. It’s only wide enough for one car.” Jamie had his head out the window. He liked the idea. We had not gone more than a half-mile when the road narrowed considerably and at the same time it sunk well below the meadows on either side so that it was impossible to turn around. Then another half-mile a forest appeared on either side and the road actually stopped. Only a narrow trace went forward, studded by rock outcr oppings. In those days I was driving a Toyota Camry that made an interesting sound when its bottom hit rock. Mom was praying out loud by this time. Another half-mile and the trace definitely started to go down the hill on a rather steep descent. Then I heard the unmistakable sound of men shouting to each other over in the woods. “I’ll go ask if we can get through up ahead,” I suggested. “Don’t leave me in this car alone,” Mom said. “They’re probably growing marijuana. They’ll eat us alive.” And my family thinks I’m the dramatic one! So I crept slowly past the trail leading up into the woods and tilted my Camry down the slope. About a half-mile further, the road reappeared and near the bottom of the hill blacktop actually surfaced. We passed two cars, and just ahead lay the main street of Lockport and its two main churches. Back to civilization.

Jamie, the history dog

For those of you who noticed, Jamie, is featured in many of these stories. Jamie, who died in 2007, was my very first companion dog. My former dog Kita was a Norwegian Elkhound, the world’s greatest hunter. My dog before that was Charlie, a Puli, a Hungarian Sheepdog, the world’s greatest herding dog. Jamie was a Keeshond, a Dutch barge dog. I have yet to find what a companion dog does other than demand constant attention, in fact I used to call Jamie my shadow because he followed me everywhere. But Jamie loved to go anywhere in the car and especially if we were doing “history.”

Shortly after I began historical field work, Mom and I were scanning very old cemetery markers in Vigo, Indiana. Jamie gingerly sniffed along the edge of the meadow nearby. All of a sudden I heard his bark from the bottom of the hill. I looked down, and there he was barking out a message. “Ducks. Mom. I found Ducks.” They were not ducks, they were geese, and they paid Jamie absolutely no attention. They just kept swimming in their pond.

Now my sheepdog would have rounded them up. My elkhound would have beheaded one of them. But Jamie, no indeed. He wanted to play with those geese. His barks became more frustrated, because the geese would not come out of the water and play. Finally I opened the car door. Like a roaring train, Jamie came tearing up the hill, past the cemetery markers, jumped in the back seat, and said, “that was fun. Now let’s go.”

Adventures with the Venards

I met Paul and Pam Venard of Trimble County about seven years ago. They are the last of the 1960 hippies. Historic relics both of them. They are graduates of Cincinnati’s art institute, and claim to be very artsy. For the last twenty five years they have been involved in trying to reconstruct a 3,000 acre plantation, the Preston Plantation. It has been a struggle to stay one step ahead of the subdivision developers. I certainly applaud those who seek to restore, refurbish and renovate the magnificent old homes and barns of Kentucky and Indiana. The historian’s work is easy in comparison. When I visited the Venards, I noticed a hulk of a very large house set against the hillside. Paul explained that it was the old Frank Lee mansion house and was about to be destroyed when the power plant was built, so he had it moved onto his farm, intending one day to turn it into a Bread & Breakfast. A few months later, Pam happened to mention that the Lee place was called Freedom Home. The house sat right across from Marble Hill, a known U.G.R.R. station, and within easy travel by small boat to the Saluda Ravine, again a known fugitive trail.

I checked on Frank Lee down at the Filson Club in Louisville, and they had some of Lee’s business letters from the 1870s and 1880s showing him to be a progressive farmer. The census from 1840-1880 showed Frank Lee to be very wealthy. But it was not until we were in the Cincinnati Public Library looking up Ohio antecedents that we hit paydirt on Frank Lee. He was not a Virginia Lee at all; he was a New Jersey Lee, linked very much to the Gershoms, VanCleaves, and Perrins, early settlers with Judge Symmes, founder of Cincinnati. All of these families were absolute anti-slavery people. Next we found that Frank Lee was one of two votes for Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 presidential election in Trimble County, and Pam found a newspaper clipping from the 1870s saying that Frank Lee was an unabashed Republican living in the heart of Confederate territory. And that he was the best farmer by far in the entire county. I put a check mark by the name of William Francis Jefferson Lee. Bears close attention, I said to myself.

Pam Venard and I went out one day to examine potential river crossings in Boone County, Kentucky. This time we were following a map from 1883 next to the current state atlas. We’d been navigating down every possible road to the Ohio River, as we studied and photographed several old private and public ferry crossings. We were especially interested in the Aurora and the Lawrenceburg ferry sites.

Toward late afternoon, we came to the old Lawrenceburg Ferry Road and started toward the river. We passed a farm, then saw a rambling house with some out buildings and just beyond that the road went into the forest. I saw a young man and a young woman near the house and backed the car near them. “Can I get down to the old ferry crossing down this road?” I asked. “Yes, but it’s all grown over,” the young man said. “You can’t see much but trees, and you can’t turn around, you’d have to back out.” I thought for a minute. “Could I see the ferry landing if I went across into Indiana and shot across with a telephoto lens?” “You wouldn’t be able to see anything but trees,” he said. Then in a somewhat interested tone, he asked “Why do you want to find the ferry landing?”

“We’re historians,” my friend Pam said proudly,” we’re investigating the routes of the Underground Railroad.” The young man gave us a blank look, “there wasn’t any railroad around here.” The young woman spoke up then, “It was escaping slaves, not trains.” He still didn’t show much interest. Then I said, “If we can prove this route was used by the Underground Railroad, maybe we can put an historical marker up there at the road.”

All of a sudden a light-bulb went off inside the young man. “Tourists?” he asked. “And I could charge them to go down to the old ferry crossing?” He turned to the young woman, “I could go take those trees down!” We waved as we headed back up to Burlington. We found a budding entrepreneur. He might even start the ferry operations back in service.

The Henry Bibb Trail – Trimble and Henry Counties

I certainly can’t forget to tell you about the Henry Bibb trail. Henry Bibb was one of the most famous slaves to escape from Kentucky; his 1850 narrative of his life in slavery is now in the umpteenth edition and probably was the second favorite story of abolitionists behind Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Pam went with me to find the Sibley plantation along the Little Kentucky River. Somewhere near where it was supposed to be was a neat looking farmhouse with a dogtrot between two rooms. We stopped, and Mr. Coleman-Sibley and his wife greeted us and invited us inside. The house was delightful. “This was the Greenwood house originally,” he explained. “I descend from the Greenwoods, the Colemans, and the Sibleys.” Oh great, I thought, we really lucked out.

“We’re documenting the Henry Bibb story,” I told them. “He was the most famous fugitive slave in this region, and we will someday have a heritage trail here, from Abbottsford to Bedford and then to Milton. We’ve been searching for the Sibley plantation along the river here.”

“Oh no,” Mr. Coleman-Sibley said. “the Sibley place is over on the other side of the river on the hills. I bought it several years ago.” What good forturne, I thought. “Does the old plantation house still stand?” I asked eagerly. “No it’s been gone a long time. There was a house built in the early 1900s but it too went down in a storm. It is just land.” That plantation where Henry Bibb worked and cleared fields and cut timber, that place where the Sibleys were among the patricians of the county, all that is now just land, I thought. Henry did well to go to Canada.

Several years later, Bob Young, a retired school teacher and excellent local historian, did some research into the Old Sulphur Road and Henry Bibb’s likely paths to reach his wife at the Gatewood plantation in Bedford.

My Cousin Joan and the Moving Church

Joan Conway Hayes is a real cousin to my Mother and therefore to me. She was born and raised in Hunter’s Bottom, Kentucky, a very significant place for the Underground Railroad. One lovely late spring day, we drove along the Ohio River road, and Joan narrated all the old antebellum homes that once stood there and who lived in them. Many of the folk were related to her by blood or marriage. She talked about the Ohio before the dams raised the water, and going down to Louisville on the packet steamer that would stop at their landing if they signaled. “But you really ought to go to Locust,” she said. “That’s where they took the church.”

Baptist Church at Locust………1878

“What are you talking about?” I puzzled. “The old Baptist Church at Hunter’s Bottom sat right next to the river, and it flooded very often. So Uncle Henry and Uncle James Conway took the church up on a big wagon and drove a team of horses up the river and up the hill to Locust where it stood to this day.” “Did they take it apart?” I asked. “I’m not sure,” Joan said. “I think they just moved the whole church.” I looked carefully at the foundations, the walls and roof, and wondered…. Four years later, I met a man that was an expert on the White’s Run Baptist Association. I asked him about the “movable church at Locust.” “Not so,” he said emphatically, “the records show clearly that that church was built right there by local families in 1878.” Now my very good story was a major mystery. I wasn’t until I interviewed the deacon of the St. Peter Lutheran Church at Hunter’s Bottom, Kentucky, that the mystery was solved. “The Lutheran congregation goes back to the 1850s, when the Detmar family moved down the Ohio

Methodist Church 1840, 1896, 1912

River from Lawrenceburg and found other German families living nearby. For forty years, the Lutherans shared the Hopewell Methodist Church at Hunter’s Bottom until the Methodists moved that church up the hill to Locust in 1896. Then the Lutherans built their own church here at Hunter’s Bottom.” “What?” I exclaimed. “The Methodists moved their church?” “Yes,” she answered, “it had been flooded so often by the Ohio River, they just picked it up log by log and moved it.” “My cousin Joan sure doesn’t know Baptists from Methodists,” I muttered. I went up to Locust early this Spring to get a photograph. Sadly, the old log church is long gone and in its place is a beautiful neo-Gothic brick church set in the only flat area next to Locust Creek. The sign says Hopewell Methodist Church, 1840.

Hat’s Off to the Preservationists

Some of the most interesting and dedicated people I have met during the last five years have been those preserving old homes and buildings.

Sheri Chappo and her husband bought a historic farm along the Deputy Pike in Indiana. They are running a sawmill that specializes in fine woods for cabinet work and furniture and house restorations. When they bought Bennett Nay’s old 1830 federal house, it had all kinds of claptrap that had been added. They tore it all down to the original brick and magnificently restored the interior. There they found the trapdoor leading to a small fruit cellar just in front of the main fireplace. “We were told that there is a tunnel leading out toward the barn,” Sheri told us. “The fugitive slaves could be hidden here or in the barn or the big cornfield over the creek.” She continued, “The woman that inherited this farm was afraid of burglars and had the tunnel filled in. We have the name of the contractor and intend to tape record his description of the tunnel.” Another very enterprising restoration specialist was Eric Johnson. He had completed a huge job over near Montgomery, Indiana. He and his school-teacher wife then purchased an

80-acre farm, the very historic Hicklin settlement. This Underground Railroad station was one of the earliest in Indiana, going back before 1834. The Reverend Thomas Hicklin and his three brothers were among the earliest abolitionists; three became preachers, John a Baptist, and Thomas and Lewis became Methodist Protestants. To restore the 1833-4 federal house with its beautiful hand-made bricks, Eric had to literally take the house apart and rebuilt it using as much of the old materials as he could. When he tore the main floors off to expose the cellars, we went out to see the old double-dug cellars, side by side but connected only by a narrow tunnel across the back of the cellar level. The good Rev. Thomas Hicklin, when confronted by Right Rea, the most notorious slave-catcher in the area, and his posse, could tell Rea “There are no fugitive slaves in this cellar.” Technically the good preacher did not lie, because the runaway slaves had already gone over into the other cellar.

The saddest restoration was one that could not happen. Martha Cain, a widow since 1956, had eked out an existence on the historic Abraham Walton farm. Martha simply never had the money to restore or even keep up the house and outbuildings. The farm was settled in 1815 and the original house was log; the stone house was built in the early 1830s. Walton befriended both fugitive slaves and Native American Indiana.

Fugitive Slaves and the

Indians

I did a major oral history with Martha Cain of Walton Creek, Indiana. Way back in a remote area of Graham Township, lay a very old stone farmhouse, built by Abraham Walton about 1830, but the homestead went back to 1815. Martha Cain had lived in that farmhouse for 53 years and was a widow since 1956; although she was not related to the Walton family, Martha had contacted the family genealogist and found out a lot of oral traditions. “Abraham Walton came here from Massachusetts with 12 other families in 1815,” she said in the sing-song voice characteristic of oral story-tellers. “He planted corn for the Indians that came through in the spring and the late fall. When the Indians were massacred in 1823, Abraham Walton buried them on his property, men, women, and children. He said it was the saddest day in his life.” “Who killed them,” I asked. “White settlers,” she replied. “He buried the two fugitive slaves that were chewed up by dogs,” she continued. “The Indians are on the other side of the creek down from the old saw mill. The slaves are over the hill by the cave.” “When the Indians come, Abraham Walton told his women to stay upstairs, because he let the Indians sleep downstairs and in the barn.” “When the fugitive slaves come, he hid them upstairs, there’s a trap door in the closet leading up to the attic. Of course, the closet was added later.” She added for emphasis.

Well, that was quite a story. I just had to find that saw mill and Indian grave sites. I talked to Eddie Kidwell, a local historian that had a lot of experience with old mill sites and had contacts with a local Indian family. I knew there were sensitivities about disturbing Native American grave sites, so I would rather have an Indian family with us on the expedition. A bright, beautiful autumn day and I joined Eddie [Grab your reader’s attention with a great quote from the document or use this space to emphasize a key point. To place this text box anywhere on the page, just drag it.] , a native American family, two local historians, and a neighbor who just happened to be passing by to find and document the massacred Potawamanies. The Indian man from Lake Erie, Iroquois Indian Nation started with a cleansing, purification ceremony that involved praying to each of the four winds, then burning small amounts of tobacco, herbs, and weeds in a rock with a small indentation. He then took an eagle feather and waved the smoke onto each of us that were going into the area. Eddie, and two of the Indians got their witching wands out and we all proceeded to look for the Indian graves. There was a shout, and we all went to where Eddie and the Indian’s wands were bending toward the earth. Eddie stood still while the Indian walked slowly down the area. Then he stood still while Eddie walked down the same area. Eddie announced that there were 28 graves laid out in two even rows parallel to the creek and above the flood plain. Later we found five different pieces of evidence of the old mill site

Louis Munier and Eddie Kidwell on the Native American burial site. including flanges and bolts. In 2002 I saw Eddie at a meeting in Madison and asked him the name of the Indians. He said, “Snyder.” I guess I was expecting more. Eddie said that a tribal council from Lake Erie came down two summers ago to do a ceremony at the site. Meanwhile he had found the cave near the fugitive slave graves but had not yet found those two graves.

The Indiana County Historians

By the time I was into the fourth year of field explorations, I was taking five cameras along on the adventures, two APS and two 35 mm, one each with color and one with B&W, and a digital camera, all slung around my neck and wrists with various tethers. On a cold fall afternoon, I was investigating a site described as one mile south of Olean, Indiana, along with the president of the local historical society and the county historian. We measured the mileage exactly and it led where we believed it should have led, at the old Universalist Church graveyard. I parked the car down a ways so it wouldn’t get in the photos, grabbed my five cameras, and headed up the slope to the cemetery entrance. The other ladies stayed in the warm car. I had only a sweater

jacket on, but I figured that I wouldn’t be too long outside. This graveyard sat up on a knoll. A trench to carry off water followed the road, but there was an obvious entrance with two very old stones next to them. A small wooden rail aided people at the entrance. The entire cemetery was lined with a low stone wall. Originally the frame church had stood in the middle of the grounds. Today, the fall foliage shone brightly in the late afternoon sunshine. These were going to be terrific photographs. I was busy framing shots and reading the tombstones looking for names of local Underground Railroad workers. As I came out of the graveyard, I stumbled just beyond the entrance and fell flat on my front, down the hill, protecting my cameras as I tumbled. “It looked just like someone going down a bobsled, only front wards,” Helen Einhaus, the county historian told me later. “I never saw anyone fall out of a cemetery.” It’s a good thing the photos turned out so well. And it’s probably a good thing that I’m pretty well padded in front.

……………………….CHART #5……………………………………..

Chris McHenry, a former reporter for the Cincinnati Inquirer, now is reference librarian at Lawrenceburg, Indiana, and is also the local county historian. After several days doing archival searches, the two of us headed out to interview some descendents of Underground Railroad workers who still lived in the houses, and to search for the old Universalist Church in Manchester. It was going to be an all day event.

First we headed for John Collier’s homestead; he and his son Ralph Collier, ran a portion of the “Yorkshire” or Guilford line, named because these were all recent emigrants from Yorkshire England. The original cabin still stood, although the foundation stones – carefully preserved around a tree – had been replaced with concrete. We had a delightful discussion with two widowed Collier sisters who live in the old safe house. After some time had passed, one of the women said, “It was the custom among the Colliers that when the sons married, a small cabin would be built out on the land as a starter house. If you look at the side and back of this house, you will see three of these cabins that became additions to the main homestead house when the sons purchased their own farms and moved away.” The other sister said, “Nothing was ever wasted in those days. They reused everything.” About an hour later, Chris McHenry and I came into Manchester. It really is only three blocks along the main road. We could not find the Universalist Church, although people had told us it still stood. We found a Baptist Church and a cemetery, but no Universalist Church. I was carefully examining our 1873 map and noticed that Amos Noyes’ cabin seemed to be right where a small white house now stood on the four corners. Two women were walking out from the house to get the mail. “Hello,” I greeted them. “Was this the Amos Noyes house?”

“This is the first cabin to be built in Manchester and it dates before 1840,” the younger of the two women explained. I showed them the place on the map that showed their home. “That is the Strange Noyes house over there,” she said. Sure enough on my 1873 map, very faintly, it showed Strange Noyes. “He was the driver of the ominibus that went into Aurora,” they added. “It was pulled by horses.” “No, no, it was mules.” The other one argued. “Do either of you know where the Universalist Church was?” I asked hopefully. “Same place it always was,” the younger woman said. “Right across the street! The front fell off and so now it is disguised as a flower shop.” I couldn’t believe it. We had passed that building four times. Looking closely we could see the belfry and main entrance. It even had a red door.

Chris suggested we take the back road to see if any structures remained on Seth Platt’s farm north of Manchester. Seth was said to have managed the Underground Railroad line going north to James Angevin’s at Yorkville. There was nothing left at the Platt farm, but we decided to keep going along the road. “There used to be a Methodist Protestant congregation at Bonnell,” I said. “I haven’t been out here in 25 years,” Chris admitted. We were very surprised to find the little hamlet of Bonnell, stretched along a railroad tracks, was very much deserted. Buildings were left uninhabited. We had a strange sensation that someone was watching us, but no one came out to see why we were taking photographs. “This is strange,” Chris said. “I wonder what’s going on. Do you think its drugs?” We finished our photos and hightailed it out of there. About three weeks later, Chris called me. “It wasn’t drugs,” she said. “They were raising fighting cocks. Very, very illegal.”

Indian Creek and the Vanvoorhies

Elbert Hinds, a very distinguished local historian, went with me to Indian Creek, about three to four miles west of Vernon, Indiana. We were going to meet the Vanvoorhies family, two schoolteachers from Indianapolis who had for many years had a summer place that straddled Indian Creek and crept up the rough hillside. The Vanvoorhies were very excited to discover that an adventurous man named William Lee, half African-American and half Indian, had purchased land on Indian Creek in 1838 and built a cabin there. He and his brothers in law ran a very successful Underground Railroad operation that took fugitive slaves up the western side of Jennings County, Indiana. “William Lee,” served in the War of 1812, the Mexican War of 1840-41, and at the age of 65 signed up for the Civil War.” I explained. “He would have been an expert tracker, used to traveling long distances on horseback and would have known every inch of the terrain. Therefore, William Lee was justifiably an excellent conductor of slaves trying to get to freedom.” They pulled out their old deeds, and sure enough, there was William Lee with a deed that stated that he had to keep Indian Creek available as a pathway.

My map showed not only the footprint of Lee’s cabin in 1883 but also the connected lands of his brother in law and mother in law up on the hillside. “Our kids found a couple of old wells and some grave markers up on that hill,” Mrs. Vanvoorhies said excitedly. “Let’s go up there,” I replied. “You probably would need a jeep,” Mr. Vanvoorhies said. “Oh, my Camry goes everywhere,” I said convincingly. I had forgotten that my Camry goes everywhere with me and a dog, not with four adults. We started up a jeep track with my bottom bouncing off the high grass. Although the water was low, the first crossing of Indian Creek had a steep pitch. My general rule is to go slow on the downward side and fast on the up side. I think I left the entire protective under-coating on the creek rock as we hurtled up out of the creek. The next crossing was far less steep, but then I was made to understand that we had to travel up the creek bed for a distance before emerging on the western side.

It was far too late to think about flat tires, broken rims, or any of those things. Ahead of me lay a small mountain (a large hill for those who want precision) covered with wet autumn leaves. Ha! I’m a driver used to 12 inches of snow on Connecticut and Pennsylvania mountains….let’s go. I jammed the gear into 2nd and started up the slope at a relatively high speed…only to slow, spin wheels in deep mud ruts, start to veer off the roadway, then stop. The four adults piled out of the car and walked upwards. “I think we made it half-way,” I said. We found several very good artifacts…hand dug wells, flagstones, graveyard myrtle and footstones, a cabin foundation indentation, and what appeared to be an old footpath leading down to the creek. “The railroad men were buried on the other side of the hill,” Mrs. Vanvoorhies said. “Apparently there was an accident or a sickness that took several of the workers who were building the railroad.” We moved over there to investigate. It was a much larger site with sunken graves, small gravestone markers, footstones, and it was built on a relatively flat area on the top of the hill. “It looks like fifteen or twenty graves up here,” Elbert said, “either the railroad families were here for some time or else that was a humdinger of an accident.” As the late afternoon sun glinted through the leaves, we headed back to the car. I backed down until I could turn the car and we headed back. “Oh my Gosh,” I thought, “I have to go back down that creek bed.” That Camry went over 180,000 miles, but I know the trek up Indian Creek was the hardest I ever made it work.

……………………..CHART #6……………………………………

Finding Early African-American Churches

I met an interesting character named Benny Butler, who for some years headed the Northern Kentucky African-American Heritage Council. I was looking for descendents of Free Blacks that had assisted fugitive slaves and Benny was looking for the church as a potential African-American historical site. We agreed to meet in Carrollton, Kentucky, to talk with Deacon Brown of the local Second Baptist Church. So on a bright fall day, I came up from Louisville and Benny came down from Cincinnati. And we sat in Deacon Brown’s living room. “I need to find the descendents of the men and women that helped with the Underground Railroad here in Carrollton,” I explained. “I have the family names of the Free Blacks that were here at the time, but I need to find out a whole lot more about them.” “Miss Alice knew all that,” the Deacon said. “Miss Alice knew everyone in the county, who married who, and who they all came from.” Oh good, I thought. “Does she live in town,” I asked. “I’d like to get together with her.” “That’s not possible,” the Deacon continued. “She died in April.” “Well, did she have children that she told these stories to?” I asked hopefully. “Nobody listened to Miss Alice,” the good Deacon said. “She talked all the time, and people just ignored her.” “Well, maybe she wrote some of it down,” I suggested. “Nope,” the good Deacon said. “After she died, they threw her stuff away.” The Deacon took Benny and me over to the Second Baptist Church that dated back to 1875, but it did not get an inside bapistry until 1980. “They used the Ohio River,” the Deacon explained. The three of us then went touring around the county looking for Underground Railroad sites, and had a terrific afternoon. But I sure wish Miss Alice could have gone with us. My dog, Jamie, has taught his humans to take him for rides in the country. He liked the wind blowing in his hair and he loves to bark at cows. He was very specific which kind of cow. He preferred the black and white milk cows, tolerates young black Angus if they are running and jumping, and he is certain that Charlorois and other white or red cows are not really cows at all. One beautiful day, I took Jamie and my Mom for one of those “cow rides.” We were out in Shelby County and I came around a bend on Scott Station Road, just north of Simpsonville and west of Shelbyville. For many months I had noticed a very old frame church sitting rather forlornly in a triangle of about an acre where Antioch Road came into Scott Station Road. “Mom,” I said. “somebody is working on that old church. It’s been painted.” A few weeks later, I was coming back from Henry County and decided to take a short cut through Scott Station Road. Two pick up trucks were parked outside the old church. Someone was inside hammering. I quickly pulled onto the gravel and went into the church. A small narthex was just big enough for a table with various folders and bulletins. I picked up a bulletin, it said Shiloh Baptist Church. I stepped into the church. The wide plank floors sank into the center aisle, and the church pews were so old they had burnished to a chestnut color with age. If you could fit 50 adults in there I’d be surprised. “Hello,” I shouted. A young man came through the church from a room that had been added in the back. That’s where the men were working. He looked surprised to see a old, fat, white lady walking up the aisle. “Hi,” I said quickly, “I’m a historian and want to know if this is the old black Baptist congregation from Simpsonville.” “You want to talk to Brother Simmons,” he said. “He’s the oldest one here.” A minute later an energetic man, about 55, came up to me and I repeated my question. “No, no.” He said. “That was the Greater Baptist Church that moved out to Montclair (formerly Evansville) and became the New Greater Baptist Church.” “Have you ever heard about a very old church called the Colored Methodist Church at Simpsonville?” I asked. “Sure, it was just up the lane from my house right by the railroad tracks,” the man explained. “Did you say you were a historian?” he asked. “This church is the old Harrington church; it was moved here when the white folks gave it to us, and we need to find out its history when it was a white church.” “I’ll be glad to look it up for you,” I replied. A day later, I went over to the New Greater Baptist Church but it was locked up and no sign who to contact. A Ford Explorer came by and two young African-American men pulled up next door to the church. “Are you members of this church?” I asked. When they nodded yes, I continued, “Do you know how far back this congregation goes? “No,” the one man replied, “You have to talk to Miz Lou.” He told me she lived just down the lane, so off I went. The cottage had a wheelchair ramp leading up to the front door. A neat flower garden and freshly cut lawn made an inviting entrance. I rapped on the door and a voice cried out, “Come on in.” Miz Lou turned out to be Miss Mary Louise Bailey, now crippled by arthritis so badly she was confined to bed or one of her chairs. But she was a live-wire lady, talking a mile a minute, and remembering everything. “The old church was where the loading dock is now in Simpsonville,” she explained. “We came out and built this church in 1946, but the congregation goes back to 1830 during slavery times. We’re meeting in Simpsonville now because the church roof leaks and it costs too much to repair it now.” What a gem. Miz Lou knew it all. “Are there any photographs of the old church?” I asked Miz Lou. “Just one, taken just before they moved out here. It was in the church history book from 1980.” When I said I really wanted to get a copy of that photo and the church history, Miz Lou, got up on her crutches with difficulty and set out toward the kitchen. The history was stored up high in a cabinet above the kitchen table. She used a long extension fork to grab the book in question and bring it down. Miz Lou is quite resourceful, I thought to myself. When I asked if I could borrow it long enough to get copies made, she graciously said, “take it for a week or more if you need it.” When I brought the booklet back on Monday, I brought her a blown up photograph of the old pre-1946 congregation standing in front of the old church. She was delighted to get the photo, a small price for making friends with a most interesting custodian of local history. It wasn’t a week later that Mom and Jamie and I were cow searching in Shelby County once again. I drove over to the spot Brother Simmons had mentioned as the site of the “Colored Methodist Church” at Simpsonville. Sure enough there was a building along the railroad tracks now used for storage. But you could still see the outlines of a narthex, and the tall windows on the side. It had originally been shaped like a house and then added on in sections. A man came up the roadway. There was Brother Simmons coming toward us and as soon as he saw me he waved and came up to talk. “You have to meet my wife,” he said, “she knows much more about this area than I do.” For the next hour or so, I listened to a most engaging history of the families in the area. It turned out that the road running from Shelbyville Road past the white Methodist church did not cross the tracks until the 1960s. Black folk that wanted to go to church at the “Colored Methodist” church or to the Black elementary school across the road had to walk down the railroad right of way. The road was not expanded across the tracks until both the black church and school had closed. “That makes a whole lot of sense,” I thought. “Put the road in after people don’t need it anymore.”

How the McCoy Boys Got Married

My last story is actually one of the earliest. I met Irene McCoy when I was searching for the trail coming down Broadway Hollow to the Ohio River on the Kentucky side across from Madison, Indiana. After we finished talking about the area, Irene told me how she and her sister happened to marry the McCoy brothers. Irene and her sister Betty lived in Mercer County, Kentucky, and moved to Frankfort on the Kentucky River. They were teenagers and didn’t know many of their classmates. One day Betty’s class decided to send messages in bottles and drop them in the Kentucky River. A few months later Betty got a letter from one of the McCoy boys who lived west of Milton on the Ohio River. The two teens were so surprised they agreed to meet that summer. The rest was a romantic story. Betty got married, introduced her brother-in- law to her sister Irene, and they too got married. “We lived next to each other here near Milton, Kentucky, for over fifty years,” Irene said. “They are all gone to rest, but me, and I still tell the story.” A few weeks ago I went to take photos at Shoo-fly to illustrate this talk. Can you believe it? Shoo-fly is still lost to all that don’t have that 1913 map!” ------Of the characters in these stories, my beloved Jamie died in 2007, my Mom died one week from age 96 in October 2008, Paul Venard died in 2012 and my brother George died March 2013. My Keeshond, Finnegan, now accompanies me on historical field trips.

Chasing the Perrines 1985-1992 Across America Sharon, PA, Hartford, OH, Shooting Star, Staten Island, Perrineville, NJ, Perrine Corners, PA, Westmoreland Co, PA, Indianlands, PA, Guernsey and Jersey in Channel Islands

(left) When the Vikings became Normans…

Chasing down details of family history leads to interesting encounters with geography. Most of our ancestors were born on farms or small towns in the hinder lands of America or Europe or Asia or wherever. Although the internet is helpful, most of the time you really need to visit these ancestral places. Often the search for these home places and cemeteries encompasses several years, much unexplainable interest, and substantial gas and cash. Oh, yes and a goodly supply of old maps. My Dad’s ancestors were Norman Huguenots. They originated at least since 1335 from the Channel Islands -- specifically Guernsey and Jersey -- just off the coast between Normandy and England. Investigating the Perrin/Perrine family history meant chasing them across the Atlantic Ocean and then across America for three and a half centuries.

There were many Perrines with all kinds of interesting spellings, but they The Normans descended from Vikings in the period 900-933 seemed to cluster in certain A.D. when Viking leader, Rollo, won so much land that he recognizable geographic areas and was named the first Duke of Normandy and granted large they seemed to like tiny towns, territories in northern France including Rouen. The treaty villages, hamlets. with France was signed by King Charles the Simple. The Perrin/Perryn/Perine name dates back in church records to 1335 in the Channel Island of Jersey and Guerney and to 1440s in Normandy geneaologies. A major geneaological study of the Perrines by H. Delano Perrine had been completed in the early 20th century. My Perrine side of the larger family was delineated to my great grandfather, Lewis Bierce Perrine, at least as names on a page. In spite of some family geneaologists claiming that the Perrin/Perrines were French, they were not part of the Bourbon French history, but rather the Norman/Viking history culminating in 1066 when William Duke of Normandy won at the Battle of Hastings and granted lands in Yorkshire, England, to a well placed Perryn who rendered military service during that war.

Daniel Perrin, the Huguenot 1669

According to this family history, the progenitor, Daniel the Huguenot, had entered the colonies in 1669, arriving with Governor Philip Cartaret on the ship, Philip, settling first in the Amerindian “Smoking Point,” that became Cartaret, New Jersey. He met and married Marie Thorel of Rouen, who also came on that same ship. They apparently worked off the passage fare, and then purchased an 80 acre farm on Staten Island.

From the Perrin/Perrine/Prine web site In 1664 James II of England granted patent to territory "New Caesarea" (the present state of New Jersey) to Sir George Carteret, John Lord Berkley, and Lord Stratton. Setting out on the ship "Philip," Philip Carteret, representing his cousin Sir George, set out as appointed first governor of this territory in April 1665. The "Philip" eventually arrived in New York harbor on July 29, 1665, after first landing at Chesapeake Bay for repairs following a very difficult crossing. A painting of the landing was done by Howard Pyle and now rests in the Circuit Court in Newark, New Jersey.

The thirty French and English passengers on the "Philip" included the emigres Daniel Perrin , probably an administrator for the governor, and Maria Thorel. Both of them are in the painting by Pyle.

Daniel was from the Isle of Jersey and "was of gentle birth, of Norman descent, and a Huguenot." (H.D.Perrine) The Perrins, originally from the French mainland, had apparently lived in Jersey a long time as an ancient tower on the island bears the name. The family name appears as early as 1440 in old pedigree charts of families on the Isles of Jersey and Guernsey. These islands have at various times been in the possession of both France and England, finally coming under English rule about 1500, where they have since remained (though Jersey has retained its Norman influence and culture). However, Daniel's father, Pierre, seems to have come from La Rochelle, France. It is not documented where either were born. [sic] Note: Dominique Perrin was the Seur de Guernsey after Rosel and before Cartaret and Perrins married into both these landed and titled families. The baptismal records for the Perrtins go back to 1335. It was common, among Norman families to have the sons serve in various European armies and even as far as the Norman strongholds in the south of Italy. LaRochelle was a walled coastal city that held out against imposition of a Bourbon governor 1572-73. The second siege, known as The Fall of LaRochelle, took place during the Counter Reformation after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1625-27 by Cardinal Richelieu who confiscated Huguenot property and businesses if they would not covert to Catholicism. Pierre Perrin, Daniel’s father originally was said to have been born in LaRochelle; however later genealogists have said Pierre was born in Rouen, Lyons, another of the walled Huguenot cities and could well have returned to the family holdings in Guernsey as thousands of Huguenots throughout France sought refuge in England, Amsterdam, and to Virginia, Florida, Boston and New Jersey in the Americas.

Maria Thorel's family was originally from Rouen, France. [Another Huguenot city] Whether Daniel and Maria knew each other before the voyage is unknown. They were married the year following the landing, on February 18, 1666, in what is believed to be the first marriage licensed by Governor Carteret in the new settlement. Daniel and Maria were granted an 80 acre tract on the western shore of what is now Staten Island, called Smoking Point (later included in the boundaries of the current area of Rossville). Their stone house, built in 1688 on Richmond Road, still exists.

On this farm, Daniel and Maria raised six children - five sons and a daughter. Maria died some time before 1687. Daniel later remarried a woman named Elizabeth, with whom he had three daughters.

Though it is unknown where Daniel and Maria are buried, the most likely spot was the French Huguenot cemetery which is now under millions of tons of NYC garbage. However, a bronze tablet commemorates them in the French Episcopal Church in New York City: "Ile de Jersey - 1665 - Nova Caesarea Pour Honorer la memoire de DANIEL PERRIN et de MARIE THOREL son epouse Refugies pour motif de conscience Maries a Elizabethtowne la 18 Fevrier 1666 Certains de leurs descendants ont places ici cette inscriptions A.D. 1903"

Marriage License of Daniel Perrine and Maria Thorel

"Whereas I have recd Information of a mutual Interest and agreement betwene DANIEL PERRIN of Elizabeth Towne in the province of New Jarsey and MARIA THOREL of the same Towne Spinster to solemize Mariage together for which they have Requested my Lycense and there appearing no Lawfull Impediment for ye Obstruction thereof These are to Require You or Eyther of you to Joyne the said Daniel Perrin and Marie Thorel in Matrimony and them to pronounce man and Wife, and to make record thereof accoding to the Lawes in that behalfe provided, for the doing Whereof this shall be to you or Eyther of you a sufficient Warrant. Given under my hand and seale the Twelft day of february Ano 1665 and in the 18th Yeare of his Maties Raign King Charles the Second. To any of the Justices of the Peaceor Ministers wthin the Government of the Province of New Jersey. These Couple Where Joyned together in Matrimony the 18 feb 1665 by me. Ph Carterett

Many years later a friend and I visited Daniel Perrin’s 80-acre homestead (1692) on Staten Island near a place called Blazing Star, which in the 18th century changed to Old Blazing Star named for the ferry that once ran regularly to New Jersey across Prince’s Sound. By 1990 when I visited and took photographs, the nearby town was called Rossville. On the southern edge of contemporary Rossville, lay the historic early African American community of Sandy Ground which had both Underground Railroad antecedants and also a rich history of oystering off the southern Staten Island shoreline. Along the western river shoreline, on part of Daniel’s old farm, stood a large number of nautical wrecks rusting in the mud flats, part of a sizeable scrap iron yard. The historic Rossville had been ruined by a devastating fire in 1963 that took out most of the town. How ironic that Smoaking and Blazing were prior names for the area! Wandering around somewhat aimlessly, we fell across a very, very tiny one-road residue of old Rossville tucked away off the main road. It had a few lovely Victorian houses, all far too modern for my 1663 ancestors. The rest of Rossville was character- less suburban tract houses. Worse yet, the old French Huguenot graveyard where Daniel and Marie Perrine were supposed to be buried seemed in fact to be really buried deep beneath millions of tons of New York City garbage, the largest landfill in America.

Daniel Perrin (1642–1719) was one of the first permanent European inhabitants of Staten Island, New York. Known as "The Huguenot", he arrived in New York Harbor from the Isle of Jersey on July 29, 1665 aboard the ship Philip, under the command of Philip Carteret. He lived in Elizabethtown, part of the Elizabethtown Tract (now Elizabeth, New Jersey), for a while before moving across the Arthur Kill and settling onStaten Island. In 1692 he was granted 80 acres (320,000 m2) of land by Governor Benjamin Fletcher in an area along the south shore of Staten Island then known as Smoking Point. During the American Revolutionary War this area was known as Blazing Star, and is now known as Rossville.

The Perrin Homestead Staten Island Antiquarian Society 1692 – 1710 - 1764

The Perrin house on Richmond Road in New Dorp is the oldest house in Staten Island and the second oldest in New York City. Actually built by a Dutch immigrant, Billeau, in 1692 (stone on right) it was added on to by an English émigré, Stillwell, in 1710. Stillwell married Billeau’s daughter and built adjacently; there was no door inside between the two buildings. The property was then willed by Capt. Thomas Stillwell to Joseph Holmes, who in turn in 1764 willed the property to Edward Perrin who had married Ann Holmes and the Perrins added on to the property extensively. The national historic

marker gives credit to the Perrin family, the Billeaus and the Stilwells as early settlers of Although this is known as the Perrin Homestead, Staten Island. our side of the family, through Daniel Perrin’s son

Henri Perrin, had long since moved to New Jersey Another marker giving credit to Daniel Perrin, to Macheponix Brook, Jamesburg, Middlesex the Huguenot, is in the English Church in New County. So this house belonged to York City. cousins….Edward and his family who stayed on Staten Island.

Henri Perrine to New Jersey….

In 1711, one son, Henri Perrin purchased land from Cornelius Longfield of Somerset County, New Jersey, and moved to Machaponix, which was then in Monmouth County but later became Middlesex County, New Jersey. Henry, made a fortune cutting timber out of a very large swampy area, married a Dutch lady named Mary or perhaps Catherine or perhaps Mary Catherine; he changed the spelling of his name to Henry Perrine, and switched denominations from French Huguenot to become Presbyterian. The Perrines were then associated with Old Tennent Presbyteiran Church ( built 1692) and Catherine is buried there.

Revolutionary War soldiers – John, Lewis and Matthew Perrine – killed at the Battle of Monmouth, are buried at Old Tennent Church.

Henry then purchased property in Monmouth County that included an orchard which was located just to the west and adjacent to where the famous Battle of Monmouth occurred in the year 1778. Henry’s apple orchard apparently was damaged by British cannon fire during the Battle of Monmouth. Henry Perrine entered a claim with the brand new American Continental Congress to recover his orchard damages. Since the New Jersey militia was paid not in cash but rather in land grants for extreme western Pennsylvania, there was fat chance that Henry got any cash from Congress.

Old Tennent Church, Henry Perrine’s 100 acres lay about half a mile further east along the old post road from Englishtown to Monmouth Courthouse at Freehold, N.J. The early skirmishes of the Battle of Monmouth were fought on the Perrine ridge. Seven

British cannon balls tore through Henry’s apple orchard and damaged 12 of his trees.

Battle of Monmouth, June 28, 1778

Map showing the disposition of Patriot and British forces at the Battle of Monmouth, New Jersey. Three Perrine men – John, Lewis, and Matthew – were killed in this historic turning point of the Revolutionary War. And Henry Perrine’s apple orchard was damaged in the British cannon shelling.

Henry’s grandson, William, served in the New Jersey militia and was awarded a tract of land in far northwestern Pennsylvania for his service. Henry Perrine’s farm

Perrineville, New Jersey

One lovely summer day, probably about 1972, my daughter Alison and I went on a long bike hike starting at our apartment in East Windsor and winding up as a major surprise at Perrineville, New Jersey. “That’s our name,” I stated staring at the large sign on the Post Office. About two years later my Mom and Dad were visiting New Jersey and we took them over to Perrineville where my Dad, George Bierce Perrine, M.D., was dutifully impressed. However, in those days we did not know that our family actually had migrated to Pennsylvania from this very spot about 1790. We just thought it was odd. As we wandered around the cemetery, we noted a number of raised tombstones almost like those in New Orleans, and many of them were cited as Perrines.

John Perrine comes to the Millstone River and founds the town of Perrineville, New Jersey

Henry’s son John Perrine, settled just south and west of his father’s farm along the Millstone River where he and his son William planted apple and peach trees that later became a lucrative apple jack and peach brandy business with bottles of these concoctions sold in Philadelphia. John named his village Perrineville, New Jersey. The village surrounded a Presbyterian Church which was distinguished chiefly by a number of raised horizontal tombstones in its cemetery much like those you see in New Orleans. John’s eldest son, William Perrine, cashed in his Revolutionary War militia land grant and headed way west to Mercer County, Pennsylvania, almost to the Ohio border. There he settled in a tiny hamlet he called Perrine Corners. I was beginning to see that the early Perrines had a compulsion to name towns after themselves. That made it somewhat easier to trace them.

Perrine Corners, Mercer Co, Pa

A year or two later, I headed west to trace the Mercer County sites, and found that William’s son Daniel Perrine made a small fortune like his great grandfather cutting timber; he was paid $10 per acre of cut wood. Daniel was a member of the Pennsylvania militia that rushed to the defense of Lake Erie during the War of 1812. The story goes that the men stocked their guns just inside the church door. A messenger brought news for the militia to head north. Daniel Perrine and his cohorts picked up their guns and marched quickly to Put-in-Bay, near Sandusky, Ohio, where the American fleet was under attack by the British and Canadians. Daniel was so impressed by the American fleet commander that he named one of his sons, Oliver Perry Perrine. That O.P. Perrine was the next ancestor I followed across America. Oliver Perry Perrine married Sarah Sophia Bierce, a substantive force of nature who was so influential in the family circles that from 1870 onward, all the Perrine first sons in our family line had a middle name of Bierce, including my brother. Then O.P. and Sarah Sophia settled in Hartford, Trumbull County, Ohio, just across the Pennsylvania border from Sharon, PA and the Shenango River where Dad and his cousins learned to swim. The Perrine farm was on the edge of Hartford. O. P. and his son George Bierce Perrine farmed in Hartford, raised and shoed horses, and became clerks in the local Presbyterian Church. Sarah Sophia apparently ran much of the social and cultural events in the area, while George’s wife, Ella Clark from Brookfield, Ohio, was a quiet, docile person. From what was written in local newspapers, the Perrines were perfect Victorians, although quite rural. For example, they apparently drove a carriage the half mile from their house to the church. The next generation to be born in the tiny town of Hartford, Ohio, was Lewis Bierce Perrine, my grandfather. Lewis was a horse of a different color. Although he certainly learned farming and even horse-shoeing as a young man, he was aiming for a different kind of career. He studied to become an accountant. In my earliest memories of grandfather, he was a bookkeeper for Westinghouse in Sharon, Pennsylvania. When I was about four years old, he took me down to the Westinghouse switching yards and let me ride in the huge black steam engine up to the turntable and back out into the yard. I always remember that my grandfather Perrine had lots of unusual friends in low places, including locomotive engineers! Lewis Bierce Perrine married a formidable lady named Katherine Lucretia Hawk, whose ancestors were early settlers in Westmoreland and Armstrong counties in far western Pennsylvania. One of her ancestors, Conrad Hawk drove the first Conestoga wagon across the Alleghenies because he had been stiffed by typical pack-horse teams during an earlier trip. I guess that side of the family was very frugal. Lucretia was an educated lady; she had attended a Presbyterian teachers college, and taught high school in Youngstown, Ohio, and in Farrell, Pennsylvania, before and after her marriage to L.B. Perrine. The other unusual thing about Katherine Lucretia Hawk Perrine was that on giving birth to my Dad, George Bierce Perrine II, at home in Hartford, Ohio, she gave him a Native American name, “Burning Bush,” and told him he had perpetual fishing rights in Lake Erie. The burning bush came from the first thing Lucretia saw through the open window, Lewis was – you got it – burning brush. It took me 12 years to find that Native American connection in the Hawk family line through a baptismal record in the Jordon Lutheran Church just eight miles from where I then lived in Schnecksville, Pennsylvania. Naomi was a Lenae Lenape of the Delaware nation and resided in America’s first Indian Reservation in Northumberland County at a place called Indianlands. It had been set up by Thomas Penn, the oldest son of William Penn. Thomas was also associated with the nefarious “Walking Purchase” the first major cheat by our ancestors of the Native American tribal leaders. Naomi met and married Thomas Willems (Williams), an émigré from the Palatine, caught up in the religious wars and economic disasters of Europe. It was their daughter that married Conrad Hawk. Since Dad was the fourth generation Perrine to come from Hartford, Ohio, I decided to visit there. Dad was George Bierce Perrine II, later to become M.D.; he was born in Hartford on November 14, 1912. A friend and I drove over from Schnecksville, Pennsylvania. We got out of the car and looked around. Hartford seemed to have only one main road and one cross road. There was a small town square. Everything was kind of dusty, with the sunshine coming through a dust haze. There was a Presbyterian Church, a school, and several houses with acres of farmland pressing closely all around us. We found the graves of O.P. and Sarah Sophia Perrine but never found George Bierce and Ella. They have to be buried somewhere!!! I was using a 19th century plat map to locate the Perrine home-stead. Since there were only eight houses on each side of the main road, it was not too difficult to locate the right place. It was a large white frame farmhouse set back from the road. I asked the resident if he knew if that was the George Perrine farmhouse, and he claimed not to know anything. But since my plat map was pretty accurate and this house was the only house that fit, Last week, I put Hartford, Ohio, up on the Google Earth search map, and was shocked to see that 15 years after finding a sleepy 19th century small town, the suburbs have taken it over. No matter how hard I tried, I could not find the Perrine farmhouse on Google Earth. Nor could I find the farm. Only tract houses, jammed together like Rossville, Staten Island, New York. Now I am chasing my Mom and Dad through the 1940 census. Good grief! Dad may have been in Philadelphia finishing Medical School at U Penn, Mom might have been with his mother, Katherine Lucretia, ill with cancer, in Farrell, Pennsylvania, or she could have been nursing in Philadelphia or in Cincinnati. I at age two might have been living with my Conway grandparents outside Cincinnati on Boomer Road, or….. A year later, I had a baby brother, the last of the George Bierce Perrines, (he’s the III), born in October 1941 in Cincinnati, Ohio. And if you want to chase him across America, you will have to go to Cedar Park, Texas. I can’t find any of our Perrines that made it to California or to any gold rush. Mom’s family, on the other hand, had a pirate!