I was born October 21, 1866, in Jelloway, Brown Township, Knox County, Ohio. My parents were living at that time in a house that stood where Mrs. Etta Oswalt’s Hotel is now. 

My father, Truman Sanford Mix, was about 35 years old, and in poor health. He had a severe attack of “lung-fever” (pneumonia) a few months before, from the effects of which he never recovered. He was a shoemaker by trade. In those days a shoemaker really made shoes and boots. My father made men’s and women’s fine shoes and boots. I can plainly remember seeing him sitting in a low leather chair, with his implements arranged at one side, pounding pegs deftly in the soles of a shoe. There was in those days a tannery at Amity, where ill-smelling hides were made into leather. I once went to the tannery with my father to get some leather, and well remember how smelly the place was.

My mother was Elizabeth Withrow Mix. She was about the same age as my father, and I was her eldest child. Her parents were James and Elizabeth Withrow, who lived in Jefferson Township. She had worked as a milliner, and also as a tailor. She made good suits for men in the days before ready-made suits were common.

My father had been married once before he married Ma, to a woman named Ellen Mynteer, and had two children by her, Bruce and Eva Mix. Bruce was about 9 years old when I was born and lived with the family about 3 years longer. Later he became a stone mason, became lazier and lazier, and finally went to Colorado. He lived in the mining districts until he died two or three years ago. Eva lived with us until she was 15, and then went to live with an uncle until she married. She lived in or near Howard most of the time after that, and in fact, still lives there. She is about 70 years old.

As a baby I needed a name and got one in this way: One day my father carried me into Elias Watlz’s store in Jelloway.

 “Have you named the girl?” said Mr. Waltz. Pa answered “No.” “Well if you will let me name her, I’ll give her the goods for a dress.”

Pa agreed, and Mr. Waltz named me Frederika Blanche, after the heroine in a long-forgotten novel which his wife had just finished reading. He then tore off the goods for the dress. It was yellow with a little red figure on it. After that I was called Freddie until, when I was about 4, we moved into a new neighborhood and Ma decided that it was a good time to begin calling me Blanche.

My start in life wasn’t very auspicious because I had the whooping cough all winter my first year and wasn’t expected to live. This was the first of several serious sick spells that took up a good deal of my childhood.

I can’t remember anything about our life in Jelloway because we moved away too soon but I remember many things that Ma told me about it. The Civil War had only been over a year or two and there was still a good deal of hard feeling and occasional fights between the “butternuts” and another group whose emblem I don’t remember. The Republicans had favored the war, and the Democrats opposed it and favored the South. My father was a Democrat, but not a noisy one, and so far as I know, never had any trouble with his Republican neighbors, but Grandpap Withrow did. Grandpap belonged to the Knights of the Golden Circle and was very outspoken.

Our next home was a small 6-acre farm near the Six Corners in Pike Township. It was about 8 miles southwest of Jelloway, and only 3 miles from Amity. It was there that my sister Mary was born when I was two years and a half old. I can’t clearly remember back that far, but my first recollection seems to be of her as a baby lying in bed. Another very early recollection from about that time is of a visit to some neighbors named Atherton, where we stayed for chicken dinner. I asked for gravy so many times that Mrs. Atherton finally said: 

“She must be made of chicken gravy!”

She was an odd sort of a woman, and this remark seemed funny to the folks and caused them to tease me about it frequently afterwards.

There was no town at Six Corners, and isn’t yet, but it is a place where three roads cross, and was an easy on for the country people to get to. I don’t remember for certain, but I suppose that Pa kept on working at the bench while we were there.

When I was about 4 years old, we moved to a 40 acre farm a mile south of North Liberty. We lived in a frame farmhouse with two stories. At one end of the house was a kitchen which was reached from our living room by stepping up on a wide step. This step was used as a rostrum when Mary and I decided to hold divine services. We were in the habit of going to church sometimes in those days and after we would get home, we children had church for ourselves. I would stand up on the step and preach and throw myself around. After that we would sing and pray.

There was also an upstairs at this place. At the head of the stairs there was a small bedroom. One day I was making a bed in this room, standing with my back to the stairway, I threw back the sheet, intending to throw it on the bed. It came back over my head, got tangled about me, and I rolled all the way downstairs in it. So far as I remember, I was not much hurt.

We lived there until I was six and a half. During this time, I went to school a few days with my half-sister at the Arnold School, a small one-room school at which my oldest son, Ralph, later taught his first term of school. The teacher was a hunch-back named Quilla Arnold who used crutches; he could outrun me and several of the other children.

We seem to have had a rather pleasant life at this place. Pa was able to work at the bench. Mother worked hard too. We had three cows. She milked them, let the cream rise, skimmed it away from the milk, let it sour, and then churned it into butter in an old-fashioned churn with a dash. She kept the milk and butter in crocks and jars in the spring-house. The spring-house was a small building with a small ditch filled with flowing spring water along one side of the floor. The cold water kept the milk and butter fresh and good. Sometimes Ma would save up as much as a hundred pounds of butter and take it to Mount Vernon.

We had a nice brown mare and a one-horse wagon. We didn’t go many places but when we went, we went in it. Once in a long while we drove to Mount Vernon, ten miles away, or to Grandpap Withrow’s, about the same distance. On such occasions we got up before daybreak, and were usually gone until long after dark, especially in the wintertime when the days were short.

While we were here, I learned the letters from our cook stove. We got little books printed in large type from Sunday school, and I read them too. And when Pa went over Eva’s reading and spelling lessons in the evenings, I listened intently and learned a good many words.

One day Ma went away and left Mary and me with Pa. It was summertime and he had moved his work bench out of the kitchen into a building in the yard. Mary and I played around and finally found the scissors. After we ran out of something to cut, I decided to cut Mary’s hair which hung down below her shoulders in long curls. She was agreeable and so, as we stood in front of the stove, I cut off three or four curls on one side. The effect was striking and lead me to suspect that we were making a mistake. I told Mary she must never tell, to which she agreed, and we burned the curls to destroy the evidence.

Mary was a pretty little girl in those days, with a round face, a fair complexion, and up to the day I’m telling about, with long yellow curls. After I got through with her there was nothing else to do but cut off the rest of the curls. My own hair was thick, straight and heavy. It was hard to keep braided. I wore it in two braids, one of which generally came loose during the day’s playing. My parents decided that I had cut Mary’s curls because I was jealous of her looks. I tried to tell them differently, but they felt sure of it and caused me much discomfort by their opinion. I have always tried to remember this when I was tempted to attribute motives to children for their actions. I am as sure as I can be that my only motive was to find something to use the scissors on.

It was probably on the same day that I decided to scour the stove. Using a wet cloth and some ashes I scoured away until the result looked good to me, and then washed away the ashes. My mother often used the same method for scouring. When the stove got dry after my operation it looked streaked and dirty, and pretty terrible.

We had a garden, a truck patch, and an orchard at this place. Pa never worked on the farm but kept busy at the bench when he was able to work. Ma raised all kinds of beans, especially soup beans, which grow on little bunchy vines. When the beans got ripe and dry, she would hull them and sell them. We had plenty to eat, including potatoes. Some things were different then from what we have now. The tomatoes, for example, were small. Not many years before they had been considered poisonous. In my mother’s early days, she first saw tomatoes in the garden of some people named Caldwell, who had come over form England. They raised them purely for ornament and called them “love apples”.

Pa rented out some of our fields to some neighbors, who raised wheat and corn and other field crops on the shares. The corn was fed to horses and cows, and to some pigs. Somebody had given my mother a runty, scurvy, little pig which she and Eva washed one day. After the washing was over it grew and prospered. When it got big enough, we butchered it and ate it. I can’t remember what we did with our wheat, but it is likely that we took it to a mill somewhere and had it ground into flour. The miller would make flour out of a load of wheat, give us part of it and keep the rest for the use of the mill. My mother had flour –however she got it– and used to bake our bread in a big oven heated by a wood fire.

While we lived at this place, I had an attack of inflammatory rheumatism. I was absolutely helpless for weeks, while the pain flitted from place to place over my body. My mother waited on me, but was very busy, and I had lots of trouble and cried a great deal. Sometimes Pa had time to sit by me and work with me, and I always got better for a little while. When I finally got better and the pain stopped, I thought I could get up. The folks didn’t agree with me, but when they were all out of the room, I raised up on the edge of the bed and tried to step down on the floor. My legs hadn’t a bit of strength left in them, and I fell sprawling on the floor.

During part of this time, I had a great deal of toothache, too. Once when a big double tooth was making me lots of trouble, I decided to have every tooth pulled out. I went to a doctor who took a pair of pliers, and without any anesthetic, pulled the aching tooth. Nobody had told me how bad it would hurt, and I was unprepared. I changed my mind then and didn’t have the rest of my teeth pulled till much later.

While we were living here, Pa and Ma joined the English Lutheran Church in North Liberty. I remember seeing them baptized at a creek on or near the farm. The preacher had them kneel down on the bank of the creek while he sprinkled water on them.

Mary was considered sickly and had lung fever every winter. Pa worked most of the time, but occasionally would get to feeling very bad and be unable to sit at the bench. When I was six and a half, he decided that his health would be better if he quit making shoes and worked in a store. He sold the farm and bought a general store in North Liberty.

We moved into a five-room house with only one story. A doctor named Shirey lived on one side of us, and the schoolteacher on the other. I suppose there were fewer than a hundred people living in town, but people came in from the farms from long distances to trade at the store. A man named Grubb walked four miles to Butler, a slightly larger town on the railroad, and carried back the mail every few days. There were no bathrooms in town. We took a bath with a pan of water and a wet rag. We got our water from a well on the doctor’s lot, next door, while most of the village people went to the town pump, where the two main streets crossed at the center of town. We had board sidewalks along the streets, but no streetlights. There was a blacksmith shop which we used to pass on the way home from school. I liked to stop and watch the sparks fly when the blacksmith stirred up the fire with the bellows or pounded the red-hot horseshoes on his anvil. There was also a cabinet shop, 

where Mr. Loos made furniture, a harness shop in which John Hammett and Frank Mix made harness, and another store besides my father’s. I suppose some of the people worked on the farms near town.

We lived in North Liberty from the time I was six and a half years old until a few months before I was ten. During this time I went to school more or less every winter. I was out at one time with the measles, and another time with scarlatina, and a third and longer time with a second attack of inflammatory rheumatism. I probably started school in the lower room, but before long moved up to the upper one, and began reading McGuffey’s New Fifth Reader. Besides reading we had lessons in spelling and arithmetic. History and physiology were not taught in any of the schools to which I went. I studied geography, but not at North Liberty. I never had a very good time at school there, probably because I was in classes with boys and girls considerably older than I.

My mother worked hard here, just as she had on the farm. We had a garden and one cow. She made all of our clothes in addition to her other chores, and was, as always, a very neat, clean housekeeper.

Pa was the senior partner in the firm of Mix and Mishey. His partner sometimes got drunk, and Pa had to watch the business pretty closely. I think he was pretty well liked, and probably had a good business as long as he was able to work. His health was poor, however, and got steadily poorer.

Shortly after I was eight years old, Ma had a severe attack of typhoid fever. She got better after a while, but remained paralyzed from her waist down, and never was able to walk again during the remaining ten years of her life. Shortly after this, Pa got so much worse that he had to sell his interest in the store. In February 1876 he was so poorly that the doctors thought he would not live for more than two weeks. He got better, however, and was able to be around for a while. He lived on until the 19^th of July of that year and then died. He was buried at Amity.

After Pa’s death Grandpap Withrow told Ma that we could move down to his farm. She sold the house and collected as many as possible of the debts still owing the store, and we moved down. Grandpap had a big family. He gave us a living room and a bedroom. We lived there, with the exception of the winter after I was 13 years old when we lived at Uncle Sam Beeman’s for seven years. We had our own garden and a cow, both of which I took care of. Ma could do such work as dish-washing and knitting. One time she knit 25 pairs of socks for a store in Jelloway. They furnished some yarn that they hadn’t been able to sell, and she made the socks for so much a pair.

The next spring after we moved to Grandpap’s, Ma heard of a wheelchair for sale somewhere down by Gambier. Somebody went down and bought it for her and brought it back. She had been lying there all winter and was very anxious to get away. She decided to go down to Bonham’s, who lived a mile or so down the road. I tried to push her. The going got pretty bad before long, but I held out until we were too far from home to come back, and then I had to keep going. The people at Bonham’s thought we were some children playing with a new toy. Finally, when we got to a little stream near the house, they came down, still not knowing who we were. And helped me push the chair up to the house. I was terribly tired and worn out, and Ma was very much worried. She often spoke about it afterwards. Of course, she hadn’t realized how hard the trip would be.

The winter after I was ten years old, I didn’t go to school. The school was a mile and a half away, too far for me to go alone. The next spring I think I went a few weeks. After that year I went more, but never regularly.

The winter after I was thirteen, I started going to school more regularly than usual, but it didn’t last long. In January I rode a horse over to Jelloway to get some medicine for Grandpap, I think, and it didn’t go so well. I had gone the week before and got along alright. Ma didn’t want me to do it again, but I wanted to, and Grandpap insisted, and that settled it.

The mare, which had a stiff neck, jerked the rein from my hands and started running as fast as she could. The rein was so short that I couldn’t get a hold of it, but I thought I could stay on anyhow. As she came down to a little creek, the mare headed for the crossing at the side of the bridge, then abruptly turned to cross the bridge instead. Just then a stirrup strap broke, and I was thrown against the iron bridge. Several teeth were knocked out, and others driven so far up that they didn’t come down for a long time. A hole big enough to stick my finger through was cut through my chin into my mouth. Old Doc Hyatt fixed up a sort of halter to hold my chin in place, and some of the teeth grew solid, but never looked very well; the accident spoiled my beauty considerably.

After I was fifteen years old, I quit going to school. The care of my mother took so much time that I couldn’t go to school any more. The fall I was 17, I made my final effort and went for 17 days. It was too much trouble, and I quit for good. Mary stayed away from home a good deal of the time, and got to go to school more regularly than I.

In March 1886, when I was past 19, Ma died. She had been very poorly all winter. We were living then in a house near Grandpap’s, and Mary and I took care of her. The winter was very cold, we had a hard time getting enough wood, and we had a pretty rough time. I was young and strong then, and Ma liked to be alone, and we managed to get along.

After Ma died, I made a home with Jim Beeman’s family, and Mary lived with Uncle Jim Withrow. I worked out part of the time, and Mary went to school.

On Sunday we were in the habit of going to the little Biglow Church, which still stands about a mile north of the Garden. (The Garden is how Blanche referred to the farm that she and her husband had after they were married.) One Sunday, I walked back home with an old bachelor – he was 35 years old – named Jim Reed. He asked me to go to church with him that night at Dutch Hill. I shied away at first, but finally told him that if he came past that evening, I would have my mind made up, and might go or might not. He drove up that evening with a nice buggy and a high-headed bay horse with a white stripe in its face. It was called Chief. I decided to go. In the course of the evening, he asked me if I wanted to go along to the Mount Vernon Fair the next week. I thought not, but went, and we had a race on the way back, which Jim won.

We were married April 26, 1887. We began housekeeping in a little house down at the Crossroads, below the Garden, where we lived most of the time during the rest of Dad’s (Jim’s) life.

This will be a good place to insert what I know of Dad’s early life. He was born September 9, 1852, on the old farm, across the creek from the Garden. His father’s name was Daniel Reed, and his mother’s maiden name was Elizabeth Cain. He was the fourth of twelve children, the older ones being Elias, Elizabeth (Sis), and Joshua (Jofe), and the younger ones Loretta (Ret), Alice, Delano (Dee), Louis, Nan, Eva (Ev), Flora (Flo), and Squire. As a baby, Dad received the name of James Riley, after two uncles who had died on the way to California to hunt gold. They were buried about 12 miles south of Omaha, Nebraska on the west bank of the Missouri River.

James Riley (always called Jim) was a stubborn little scamp. When he was about two years old, Aunt Sarah Cain (as she became later by marrying Uncle John Cain, Grandmother’s brother) worked for the Reed family, and she used to tell later about how she had to take little Jim down on the floor and hold him down while she washed him. When he got old enough to go to school, he didn’t care much for that, either. Grandma used to take a little switch and escort him down through the field in the direction of the school, and sometimes, after she got back home, he would show up there, too. This was back in the days before the Civil War.

He apparently learned to like going to school after a while, and took part in trading, fighting, and other school sports of that day. He got to be quite a fighter, probably in his early teens, but later, according to his version, “got kind of cowardly”, and didn’t fight any more. In fact, he got so cowardly he wouldn’t have any fighting going on at all, and when a fight started, he would step in between the warriors and make them stop.

After he got tired of going to the district school (the one now known as Locust Grove), he attended a select school for young men and women who wished to fit themselves to teach. He went to Amity a while where John Butler was teaching, and later to Danville. After some study, he took the county examination for teachers, and passed. He taught several years in different schools; Wildcat, College Hill, Ireland, and one term at Locust Grove.  He was very popular, and a good disciplinarian. He never had any trouble with the big boys, who were in the habit of running teachers out every now and then. At Locust Grove, he was expected to have trouble with a young man named Torg Donough, but Torg decided to be good all the term that Dad taught.

He quit teaching after a while but did serve as body-guard for an oppressed teacher the year before we were married. This teacher always had respect for Jim later, thinking that he had saved the teacher’s life. In fact, the boys didn’t make any trouble at all while Jim was at school.

About the time he quit teaching he made a trip to Iowa and visited several months with Uncle George Reed and family. Blanche and Maud, daughters of Uncle George were about Dad’s age, and he enjoyed visiting with them, especially Blanche. She is dead now; Maud is said to be living in Pasadena.

After we were married Dad farmed and I did the housework. It was a little different from the way most people live now (this memoir was written sometime between Jim’s death in 1929 and Ralph’s death in 1940), and some of the details might be interesting. We had a very poor well at first in the Garden and had to carry most of the water we used from the spring on one of the neighboring farms. That meant taking a big pail and going to the neighbor’s before every meal, and once in a while during the rest of the day. When it rained, we set a tub under the spout that drained the eaves and caught enough nice soft water to do a washing. (New well drilled in 1898.)

Each spring we made a garden and raised such things as tomatoes, onions, cabbage, beets, lettuce, lima beans, string beans, salsify (a root plant), cucumbers, melons, and everything. We gathered wild grapes, wild raspberries and blackberries to can and preserve. We didn’t have an orchard, but usually helped some neighbors who had, and got a supply of peaches and apples. Sometimes Dad would gather up a wagon load of apples from the orchard of some friend who had more than he could use, haul them to the cider press, and come home with a barrel or two of cider. We boiled most of it down and made apple butter. Sometimes we let the barrel of cider stand all winter and turn into vinegar.

During the winter we saved the ashes from the wood stove, put them in a barrel, put water on them when the barrel was full along toward spring, and caught the lye that came out at the bottom of the barrel. The lye would be boiled later along with meat rinds and bits of grease and made into soap.

Dad always liked to raise hogs. The pigs were usually born in the spring and lived on milk, dishwater and such things till along toward fall when the corn was big enough for them to eat. They got sleek and fat and lazy. We sold some of them and butchered the rest after cool weather came. We made sausage, pickled the side meat and smoked the hams and shoulders in the old smokehouse. We had plenty of meat all winter, a little during the summer, and, sometimes, a little over the next fall.

At first, we used to have our wheat and corn ground, but later we sold it and bought flour and cornmeal. We raised all the potatoes we used and sometimes had some to sell.

Dad always had from three to six horses, two or three cows, two to twenty pigs and occasionally some sheep.

Ralph was born April 21, 1889, Brooke the Second of December 1891 and Clarence the Twenty-sixth of October 1899. Ralph was fat and lazy, Brooke wiry and stirring, and Clarence medium.

We lived in the Garden until January 1901 when we moved to Butler, a little village about ten miles north of the Garden. Dad carried the mail over a route about 30 miles long and received in pay $500 a year. It was surprising how little we could save out of his salary, and besides, he didn’t like the job very well. After a little over a year (ca. 1902) we moved back down to the Garden. We stayed there a year and then moved out to the Hamrick farm (ca. 1903), two miles north of Jelloway. We lived there three years, and the boys went to high school in Jelloway. They also helped a little on the farm. After the farm was sold, we moved back down to the Garden (ca. 1906), then lived a year (ca. 1907-8) on the Grant Place near Nunda, and then came back to the Garden. The boys were going away to school by that time and Dad was getting older, and we didn’t need a big farm. If the boys had been good farmers, we might have continued to live on a bigger farm.

This memoir was compiled by Blanche’s eldest son, Ralph.

Frederika Blanche Mix; 21 OCT 1866 – 5 MAR 1953

James Riley Reed; 9 SEP 1852 – 30 AUG 1929

Ralph Daniel Reed; 21 APR 1889 – 29 JAN 1940

James Brooke Reed; 2 DEC 1891 – 15 FEB 1982

Clarence Mix Reed; 26 OCT 1899 – 1 DEC 1988