This was sent to me by mail by Julie (Zimmerman) Ellicott of Abbeville, GA.  Written by Emery Ernest Zimmerman about himself  



When I Was A Boy

    I have had it in mind to write a brief biography of my life.  I was born in Bedford County, Pennsylvania, on a farm not far from the little town of Hopewell.  I only weighed about 3 and 1/2 pounds or a little less.  I have heard my mother tell about carrying me around on a pillow and that they could easily get a coffee cup over my head.  I do not know how long I was permitted to suck my bottle, but I can remember doing it.  I might guess I was well advanced past the 3 year goal.  A very strange thing to me that I was allowed the baby practice so long, when I remember how careful mother and father were to do things for us at about the proper time.  Anyway I am grateful for a loving hand that fondled me and brought me to maturity.

    There were many incidents in my childhood that hang in my memory.  Every child has some things to cherish and to help him through hard places and to guard him against sinful habits.  I remember the old log house and the log barn and a springy muddy barn yard and lane that led to it; fanced with poles, some mortised and some of it stake and rider or old rail fence.  I can see the old red clover pasture and imagine its fragrance as I think of its sweetness and its beauty.  I can see "Mollie" the new young mare who had to be hobbled front foot to back with a strong chain in order to keep her from jumping the fence which here and there may have had some sags in it. I could not have been more than 5 years old when father was breaking her to drive.  She ran away when the old dump-cart dumped after a lively sprint down the lane, throwing father out and freeing herself; ending her wild race at the end of the lane where she could scarcely turn the clumsy thing around.  No one was hurt and the mare was about ruined in the fracass, for ever after she wanted to run off.  Mother made father sell the fine animal for fear she would kill father.  Old blind "Jim" with a large white face could not hold the lively brute in place, and she must leave the old hilly home along Yellow Creek.  Old Jim met his fate by lying down to roll, and being blind laid down near a small ditch and rolled in on his back to be found dead the next morning.  We children cried, for we could ride old Jim though his old backbone was sharp.  He did not work hard but he was too old to keep in good flesh.  A memory in a boy's life.

    Not so long after that Uncle Jerome Zimmerman, father's youngest brother (half brother) took us out into the old pasture where Jim and the white calf used to keep company, and we gathered chestnuts.  Poor Uncle Jerome passed away when about 18 years of age.  He was a great man, as he seemed to us wee tots, my sister Myrtle was about 14 months older than I and Irven about 2 years younger, I think he had to stay at the house with Lillie and Eli.

    One day long before this experience I was up on the hill with Myrtle rolling stones down the hill east of the house, bck of the old spring house, through which a fresh sparkling stream from a spring near by flowed into a trough and on out into the lane,--the cause of a springy and often muddy lane.  Well to our great sorrow Lillie came out into the lane in time to be caught by a nice flat plate-like stone I had just sent skipping down the steep hill.  It hit her squarely in the back of the head--mother thought she was dead--oh, the terror of my anxiety.  Father was at the coke ovens at Riddlesburg where he worked.  But thanks be that she recovered soon and carried an ugly scar to her early death--reference to which will be made later.  Father did not like to farm the hills very well and hired a man.  That was not satisfactory.  After a few years Grandma Snyder who owned the farm and lived with us sold it and we moved to Eichelberger Town a little nearer his work on the north side of the mountain like hill from the old farmstead.  My first memory of going to town was before the farm was sold.  Myrtle and I was sent one late November day to a little store in Eichelberger Town to get a gallon of coal oil.  I watched the store keeper draw it from the barrell and pour it foamingly into our can.  It was fine to have coal oil lamps to read by, they were so much better than the old tallow candles that we always went to bed by.  I can remember faintly something that mother said about getting to be like rich folks who had had lamps longer than we had had them.  How dull it would seem to have to figure our problems now by a flickering candle.

    I can remember the old candle mold into which Grandma poured the tallow around a well adjusted wick.  When they were hardened she would slightly beat the container and out would slip 12 beautiful white candles.  A heavy wind storm in Nebraska blew the top of the log house off and the serviceable old candle holders, snuffers and all were never more seen.

    Volumns seemingly could be written into this life that must be left out.  For all our thoughts are not needed on paper even if we could recall them all; and all our deeds, though vivid in our minds are poor history often and misleading or valueless for others, unless they are seriously bad enough to be guide posts past which others go without hurt, or good enough to be inspirationally effective in causing others to want to excell.  However I continue a little in detail.

    My father was a miller by trade.  He worked in his father's old stone grinding mill until awhile after his own mother died.  Grandma Zimmerman's name was Penner.  I do not know her given name.  I cannot even recall of ever meeting a Penner.  Probably I should look the name up to have some satisfaction of knowing something about this good woman that father called mother.  She passed away when father was about 14 years old.  Grandpa, Samuel Zimmerman, married a woman by the name of Reed.  I do not remember her very well, though I do remember that father took us children and mother down there one winter from the farm where I was born to visit.  It must have been during the holidays.  The sled pulled by "Tom" a fractious black steed, and I think old "Jim" before he went blind, crinched through the cold snow; the sleigh bells jingling in rather harmonious music with the frosty snow.  He had to drive carefully along the "top road" from which we could look down hundreds of feet on either side.  Every now and then he would apply brakes, brakes on a sled? yes, a pair of diggers on either side of the back bobs which would hold the sled back off the horses down the steep hills to the valley at "Six Mile Run" near the old furnaces and coke ovens in the iron region of Pennsylvania.  What glee it was to opened eyes youngsters.  I can feel the heavy wool comforters and the big old buffalo robe that was tucked about us to keep us warm.  Heavy home knit mittens and stockings and brown cotton-flannel under-clothes with the soft fluff next to our tender young bodies and all of the rest of the needed clothes, and brass toed boots with red tops and the picture of a boy or horse on the red--I have forgotten which was mine boys or horses.  Boy!  Those were some boots for a boy to wade snow in.  Grandma Synder kept them well greased with sheep's tallow so as to keep them soft and water proof.

    By the way, we boys wore dresses for a long time.  I can remember my first pants.  I don't believe my boys can do that well.  I can remember the custom was fastly changing when my youngest brother Grover Cleveland (Cleve) was given pants soon after he was two years old, I think I must have had my first when I was not far from five years old.  I can remember the pleated skirts I wore in bright colors.  "Believe it or not."

    I have not told you that my memory of my step-grandmother is not alive, for she too must have passed away when I was a mere boy.

    My mother's name was Margaret (Maggie) Anne Snyder.  Her father died before she was born I think.  Consequently as in the case of Grandma Penner Zimmerman we did not keep close association with the Snyders, but the Brumbaughs which was Grandma Snyder's name, were mother's closest relatives.  One of these, Martin S. Brumbaugh, a second cousin to Grandma was governor of Pennsylvania, and once was named in a Republican convention for the office of president of the good old U.S.A.  Father and mother "ran off" to be married on Christmas day which I think was in 1872.  Mother was the only child and her mother soon moved with them to make their home.  My oldest brother George passed away at 11 months before my syster Myrtle was born.  Here is a good place to record our births--

                        Maria Myrtle 27, 1874 - Feb., 1914
                        Emery Earnest, Dec. 27, 1875
                        Irven Samuel, Jan. 11, 1878
                        Lillie May, June 16, 1879
                        Eli David or David Eli, May 31, 1881
                        Clarence Snyder, Jan. 5, 1884
                        Grover Cleveland, Aug. 21, 1886

    Myrtle married Leonard Dout about 1895.  She passed away in the Nicholas Senn hospital after an operation in 1914.  She left Clarence and Irva.  Clarence.  Irva became a cripple and never married.  Clarence married Leona Prellan.

    Lillie married George Brown Jan. 24, 1906 and died childless in the winter of 1910.  Both sisters were good school teachers before they were married.

    I think you can get the data about the boys' wives and families.  They are in the western part of Nebraska and Eli in Wyoming.  I may have something to say about them later.

    We lived in Eicheberger Town a year or more.  I started to school when I was six while we lived on the farm before moving to town.  I had a man teacher, I do not remember his name or much about him.  He came by our house to go to school.  One morning Myrtle and I went before he did.  The snowed had frozen a crust during the night and we could not get up the hill between us and the school house.  We would get nearly to the top and then slip back to the bottom.  The teacher came and helped us pick up our spilled lunch and kicked holes into the snow into which we stepped and got to the top.  Strange a boy would not think to kick holes into the snow with his shiny copper toed boots, isn't it?  We learn by experience.

    The school had homemade benches and stood up on natural rocks for one corner.  It was built of logs.

    When we went to town we went to a brick school house, in fact, I think we went to the brick school part of our summer before we moved to the little town.  I went from town long enough to have some experiences that were useful.  We crossed Yellow Creek through a covered bridge.  One night a bad boy, nam Marshall took me under the bridge and gave me tobacco to chew.  He gave me a liberal supply and I shewed and swallowed some of the juice.  By the time I got home, only a few rods, I was deathly sick.  I threw up the tobacco and would have been all right but mother put me beside the base burner and put the old historic wool comforter around me and sweated me, oh say!  When I wanted to get up she said I was too sick and "sweated me out" sure enough.  But I never chewed any more tobacco, no never.  I was broke not in but out of the habit at once.  Thank mother for her good judgement and her keenness to detect that I had been "chewing."

    I had the measles that winter, after recovering I had a relapse and took pneumonia and nearly died.  They did not expect me to get well.  After weeks of illmess I recovered.  During my illness Alex Eichelberger used to come and bring nice things to eat and things to play with.  He was a big fat fellow and walked, stepping farther with one foot than the other.  I admired him so much that I thought that must be the proper way to walk; I practiced his gait until I carried it to the present in a minor degree.  I walk, stepping with one foot farther than the other.  Watch your step.

    Another think happened soon after we moved to town.  Father built a hen coop we called it.  Irven and I were given the job of seeing that the door was shut every night.  One night we forgot.  Father made us go out to shut it.  It was dark and the white board that held it open looked like a ghost to me.  I screamed and could not move and later could not speak.  Of course they came out to see what had happened.  Such a scare!  I can see the board yet.  We never forgot the door afterwards.

    Grandma was superstitious and believed in ghosts.  Such stories as she would tell.  Even our pump in front of the house would be pumped when the handle was locked down by a chain.  Some man who had lived in the house was supposed to have murdered his wife.  Though never proven to be so.  He used to come back, according to the mountaineers and torment folks, was often seen after he was dead.  I am sure I thought he was standing in his shroud at the chicken coop door.  They buried in shrouds those days, white ones.  Such wickedness to tell ghost stories.

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To be continued                                                                                                                    October 10, 1934

    When I was worried and could not concentrate    EEZ