A day and a half trip

I went back to Coalmont, Pennsylvania (population 105) early in March; my so help me last trip up the long hill that is town, from the Dudley Methodist Cemetery.  I communed with the row of Lytle graves, the parents, the siblings and spouses—but not my grandfather.  Blanchard C. (Uncle Pete) and his wife Elizabeth, have the massive pink monument. Uncle Pete brought my grandfather home from Pueblo, Colorado in 1930, to be buried. It came to me with a smile: George Marion is there, somewhere.   No headstone, and too bad for him all the records were lost when the postmistress retired.

I drug Linda with me this time.  She needed a break from custom rugs, and was glad to get on board.  I booked a double in an old timey motel in Bedford.  My B&B from last year cancelled my reservation in anticipation of one of those blizzards.  My forecast was for the storm to go north to New England and south to Maryland, and it did exactly that.

Blue sky in Bedford

We ate lunch at the Bedford Diner, and set out to look at the town.  Downtown was short work, and Linda, turning around the walking map she took at the motel, found a notice for the National Museum of the American Coverlet.  

Go big or go home, we said, and worked our way two blocks over to Juliana Street.

The museum’s directors, Melinda and Laszlo Zonger, were off assaying a new coverlet find; we found the doors locked with a charming note announcing their return would be an hour or so earlier.  They did return before we gave over sitting on the steps; the rest of our afternoon was immediately engaged.

The opening scene was charming light comedy.  Mr. Zonger, whose name I did not know, returned eight dollars from my twenty, as we were senior citizens, like him.  He would let us in free if I could tell him his name, the most common in Hungary.  I failed.  His name is Laszlo.  Linda’s name had been spoken, Melinda said she is a Linda, also, and we had a famous beginning.

As I looked around the little office, waiting for Mr. Zonger to start his tour, Linda mentioned she grew up in Scipio, New York. It was said, when her parents bought the big 1800’rds farm house, it once housed a coverlet weaver. She once had an opportunity to buy a coverlet attributed to Scipio, but let it slip away.  However, she heard recently a Scipio coverlet is again available and probably going to the historical collection of a local church.

Such a discussion of the limited number of Scipio coverlets known followed! Melinda went off to the storage area to bring out the Scipio coverlets while Laszlo took us on the tour.  Melinda is a weaver.  I do not know Laszlo’s credentials.  He was extremely knowledgeable about home weaving and textile production from colonial times to the end of the Jacquard loom period in the mid nineteenth century. Like a textbook, he was.

Now, Linda and I both have knocked around the weaving world for some time.  I used up to eight harness looms, made and sold overshot coverlets.  Linda weaves art rugs to stand on.  We know a lotta stuff.  As Laszlo worked us through to the decline of the Jacquard as home industry in the mid-nineteenth century I ventured that as the Jaquard weaving heads moved west and the operating punch cards were worn and torn, the designs produced became more and more fantastical.  “Where?” Laszlo demanded.  “Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota,” I replied.  “There are no known Jacquard coverlets from Wisconsin and Minnesota!”  I shut up and listened to the tour.

In a room that featured Jacquard floor coverings Linda ventured that floor rugs originated as bed coverings in Europe. Laszlo immediately set her straight!  Bed coverings are bed coverings, floor coverings are rugs. Linda, too retreated.  We did need to get outside and enjoy our tour experience in the privacy of the car.

But then we reached the storage room and Melinda’s collection of Scipio coverlets.  It was worth the wait, and the Lindas exchanged information about the search for the missing Scipio coverlet. I liked seeing old coverlets in the overshot patterns I used.

This Scipio Jaquard weaver was a woman, one of perhaps two known women Jacquard weavers.  Charlotte Bryan inherited the business from her father.

 We spent another pleasant hour examining the museum’s collection.  It was past closing time; we started off to the diner for supper.  Two blocks and we went back to retrieve Linda’s coffee cup. We met the Zonger’s at the door, on their way to our motel to drop it off.

What may have happened

Aunt Laura certainly filled in enough detail about her mother for me to form conclusions.  The only adjective I recall Aunt Laura ascribing to her mother was irresponsible.  Uncle Bill never mentioned her, nor did my dad, but his disdain was understood.  Aunt Ruth, charitably, offered no opinion on her mother, and my cousin Marge said in her note about Aunt Helen Rita, “Mom’s love was to Grandma Hogue.  That in itself says a lot.”

I can piece together that Mary Emma Hogue, oldest of nine living children of James Lindsey Hogue and Mary Cecelia Maley Hogue, when she was seventeen or eighteen married Georg Marrion Lytle, a man fourteen years older than she.   At the time of her marriage in 1906 Maime had seven living siblings and one yet to be born in April of 1907.  She and four sisters were born in Deerpark, Maryland.  The family lived in Akron, Ohio by October 1897, where the youngest sister, Sarah, died at age nine months.  Five more children were born in Akron, four boys and a girl. 

Coalmont Pennsylvania

map from the 1873 Huntingdon Co. Atlas

Georg Marrion Lytle was born in Coalmont, Pennsylvania.  Coalmont and Deerpark are about a hundred miles apart, and the trip is over the mountains, not through them.  Maime lived in Deerpark until she was six, when the family moved to Akron.  We don’t know how Maime and Georg met, but they probably did not meet in Deepark.  Georg was twenty two when Maime and her family left Deerpark.  He may have been working for mining companies at the time, and moving about, but without knowing his employer and their business locations, it’s difficult to say what towns Georg may have been in.  It’s probably safe to say they met in Akron, a hub of commerce.  Maime’s father was a man of business, a developer, in business with his brother-in-law, Frank Bisson, who developed Bisson Avenue, named after him.  So, Georg and Maime met.

Vintage postcard

Deer Park, Maryland

We know little of Maime’s personality.  Almost nothing, in fact.  Aunt Laura calls her irresponsible; my cousin Pat tells of Grandma Hogue yelling down Bisson Avenue for the returned Maime to tend to her own crying baby.  With seven younger siblings in her house and herself the oldest, Maime was certainly expected to take some responsibility for child care, laundry, cleaning and food preparation.  According to Aunt Laura, there seemed to be no joy in the house.   I’m certain Maime saw Georg as an escape.  Perhaps even as a responsible parent figure, given the age difference.

So, they married and lived in Coalmont, with Georg’s parents, the wisp of a grandmother remembered by Aunt Laura.  They married in 1906, my dad was born in August 1907, Uncle Bill in 1909, Aunt Laura in 1911, Aunt Ruth in 1913……just as many babies, and as often, as the house she left on Bisson Avenue.  They were back in Akron when Aunt Helen Rita was born in 1915, so Aunt Laura’s memory is right on her three to four years of age, hanging on the picket fence at Grandma Lytle’s home and watching the school children, probably including her brothers John and Bill.

So, nine years after marrying George, and with five children in that time, Maime left Coalmont and went home to Akron.  Aunt Laura cites the reason as being frequent moves for Georg’s jobs.  I wonder.  Aunt Laura, at least, lived in Coalmont, with her Grandmother.  Georg’s family appears to be educated; he was an engineer, two brothers and a sister were teachers.  I would think schooling for the children in a fixed situation would be important.  Can’t discount, though, that children not in school were left with the grandmother and the two older boys travelled and were resettled.  But I wouldn’t bet on that.  My dad had stories about his uncles that I think would be more likely to have unfolded in a more set situation, where the Uncle was teaching, than heard as my dad moved from place to place.

I’m betting Maime was more tired of regularly having children than she was of moving.  So, she went home, at age twenty six or seven, with five children (one unborn), and without a plan.  She refused to return to housekeeping with Georg, who lived another fifteen years, dying, probably of tuberculosis, in 1930, fifty four years of age. 

In the end, the extended family could not take responsibility for Maime and her five children.   If the children went to the Children’s Home at the beginning of 1921, just after Aunt Laura’s tenth birthday, there is a six year gap when the five children were “everybody’s children”, but nobody’s children.  A long time to eat “coffee-sop” for dinner and get your hugs from somebody else’s mother.  I can appreciate my dad’s attitude toward his mother and understand why none of her children would buy a stone to mark her grave.  And I can understand why my mother could say “Fifty years is long enough!”