All the Girls Were Getting Married

by Terri McFadden

My paternal grandparents didn’t have a happy alliance. They didn’t fight, to my knowledge, but were at best indifferent to each other. They lived in a five-room house and never even sat down in the same room at the same time. He had his two rooms, she had hers, she fed him in the kitchen and had her own meal on a TV tray in the living room. As a little child, I didn’t think much about this; as children do I accepted what I saw without question.

I was close to my grandmother – Grandma Sweeney we all called her – her name was Jessie Huston Sweeney.  She was born on a farm in western Pennsylvania in 1887, one of two girls. She and her sister married two brothers. Jessie married Samuel Hartman Sweeney - always called Hart - and Nora married his brother Ed.

Sometime in the mid 1960s, when I was 15 or 16 I became curious about the cold relationship between my grandparents. I asked my grandmother: “Why did you marry him?” She was a straightforward, no nonsense kind of woman and she answered simply, “All the girls were getting married and he asked.” 

A world away from her girlhood was mine. I had possibilities, choices – she was constricted by the times in a way that I couldn’t possibly understand. In some ways her childhood didn’t seem terribly different from my own, but in other ways it was vastly different. She had attended a small, one-room school with 25 or 30 pupils of all ages. I went to an elementary school in a building built just five years before I started first grade, crammed with baby boomers, 35 or more to a room.

The farm where Jessie grew up was just ten miles from the small town of Ligonier where I spent my childhood. Her home was a log structure of four rooms built in the early 19^th century, with no running water, lit by kerosene lamps. Mine was a brand-new brick split level house with five bedrooms, a play room, TV room and a shuffle board court in the basement. But both of us had extended family nearby; grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles were all available and get-togethers were common. Church was important in both our young lives, which we attended with strict Presbyterian regularity.

I expected, along with my siblings and friends, to go to college and prepare for a career. As a female, my choices were somewhat limited – girls could be teachers, secretaries, stewardesses or nurses, and of course, mothers – but I had choices.

I don’t remember when I learned that Grandma had once been a schoolteacher, but I was proud of that fact. It was confusing to me that she had earned her teaching certificate not in four years, but in a four-month course. Jessie finished 8^th grade at the one room school in the village of Fairfield and then attended a “summer course” at Indiana Pennsylvania Normal School. It cost $4.50. She began teaching at a one-room school not too far from her family farm, though in horse and buggy days, it was still too far for her to live at home. Instead she boarded with the family of one of her students.

When she began to share stories about her teaching days I came to realize just how different her experiences were from my own. It seemed strange to me that all ages were in taught in the same room and that she was barely a year older than her oldest pupil. Our school was well heated and comfortable, while she remembered a wood-stove which, on very cold days, the children would take turns standing close to in order to keep from freezing. Older boys in my day might get an afternoon job at the Tastee Freeze or the local grocery store; we girls earned our 50 cents an hour by babysitting. The boys that Grandma taught, “checked their traps” before school and sometimes came to class smelling of skunk. All of the boys and girls had to help on their family farms.

She described what she taught her students. The students learned to read and to write and to “cypher”. They had frequent spelling bees and mental math contests. They memorized poetry and geography. I never commented on her poor grammar, though I wondered how she could have been a teacher and not understood when to use don’t or doesn’t – as in “He don’t need to go to the store.”

When she married my grandfather in 1903 she gave up the school, having taught just one year. She had to quit her job – married women weren’t allowed to teach. She may not have even given it a thought; she always seemed to me to be a person who accepted what was.  Also, as a farmer’s wife, she had a job at the farm. Likely the young couple couldn’t have managed without her assistance at home.

Their life wasn’t easy. My grandfather wasn’t a particularly good farmer and she had to do much to make ends meet. They had pretty much given up the hope that there would be children, when after nearly eight years of marriage, she gave birth to a boy they called Braden.  Braden lived just six years. He contracted diphtheria, a killer we don’t think about today, thanks to inoculations. Her mother, who lived nearby came to help nurse him. “He seemed much better”, my grandmother told me more than 50 years after his death. She had gone outside to the garden and her mother was with the little boy. “My mother said he sat up and started clawing at his throat.” He died a few minutes later. I cried for that little uncle I’d never known. It was the first time I understood that children died. 

In 1923, she and my grandfather bought a piece of property in Ligonier. My father had been born in 1920 and a few years after that that Grandma suffered a severe sunstroke. She could no longer handle the heavy work that farm life entailed so they moved into town. The agricultural depression of that decade kept the farm in the family; there were no buyers for the rolling 80 acres. Although my family is grateful that the land has stayed in the family for more than 200 years, not selling it made life very difficult for my grandparents.

While my grandfather sold farm machinery at the local International Harvester, there wasn’t enough income to support the family of four. They had several ways to bring in extra money. They kept chickens and sold fresh eggs. On Saturdays Granddad would slaughter the Sunday-dinner chickens. Grandma would clean and pluck them and then she would take the fresh birds to her customers, traveling on the train from Ligoner to Latrobe to Derry late on Saturday afternoon.  She came to hate those chickens. In later years any sort of bird that might come to the table she called “fowell”, somehow elongating the word so that it sounded truly disgusting. My mother always heated a slice or two of ham for Grandma on Thanksgiving, because she wouldn’t eat turkey.

A large garden provided vegetables for the table and jars of beans and tomatoes were joined each August by delicious apple butter and peach preserves. The bounty must not have always held however. I recall hearing stories of meals that consisted of nothing but cabbage soup.

Today the Sweeney home might be called a poor one, but they didn’t seem to see it that way. There were so many people worse off and my grandmother was a generous woman. Their home became one of those places that the thousands of men on the move during the Great Depression knew about through word of mouth. You could get a good meal at the Sweeney’s house on Fairfield Street. In addition to keeping boarders and selling eggs and chickens, Grandma made and sold ladies undergarments, tended her large garden and generally kept going. She never really stopped working in all her 92 years. On her death-bed she remarked that the peaches were ripe and if someone would fetch a peck and a paring knife she’d have something to do to keep her occupied.

When I was in my teens she would call on me to come and help her with the heavy housework. After the chores in the “forenoon”, mopping floors, cleaning woodwork and so on, she would cook us a substantial “dinner” – she never used the word lunch.  We’d eat fried pork chops or meatloaf, mashed potatoes, homemade bread and apple sauce and she would talk about the “boys” she knew who went off to World War II or memories of her childhood, where “they had less, but were more content than now days”. After I got my drivers license she called on me often to take her on errands. Only once did I balk and I must have let her know I didn’t want to spend my Saturday driving her around. It was the only time in my life that I saw her angry. 

One of those Saturdays she taught me how to bake bread. She was a small woman, and smaller in her old age with a severe stoop.  At 5’2” I topped her by a head. That morning she made up ten pounds of flour into what would become a dozen delicious loaves. She used an old refrigerator crisper drawer to mix the dough. Initially she asked me to mix it, and at first, I did okay. But as the dough got stiffer, I could barely make a dent in it. She took over, kneading and kneading that mass of dough until it was smooth, the severe arthritis in her knobby hands didn’t hold her back at all.

Years later, after her death, my father sent me her “receipts”, her recipes.  In my hand writing I found my notes of that day of bread making. I remembered asking her for the recipe and she was surprised as she didn’t bother to use one for bread. She told me what she was adding and I wrote it down. Evidently, I left it behind that day, but she had saved it, tucking inside her favorite cookbook. A message for me from the past.

I remember that while we let the bread rise we talked – me asking questions about her life and Grandma answering through stories of a very different time. The three risings and baking took all day. At the end of that Saturday I drove her all over town where we delivered the still warm, home-made bread to friends and family – to their delight and to my unforgettable memories.

*The photographs are of Jessie Huston Sweeney and her sister Nora about 1890 and as adults with their mother, Sarah Huston.