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JL Patterson, farmer
My great great great grandfather, John Lyon Patterson, wife of Ellie Stoneroad, lived on a farm in Pleasant View, Pennsylvania. His stone farmhouse stands today, along present-day Route 75 in Spruce Hill Township, Juniata County, not far at all from where I grew up. My family, or at least many parts of it, hasn’t moved far in well over a century. Grace Patterson Henry, JL’s daughter and my great great grandmother, assembled and saved many items and papers from both her mother’s and father’s families, and she’s the reason I have this amazing collection today. Among the items saved are those pointing to JL’s farming background. I found one of these items…
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Retail artifacts
That my grandparents lived in a funeral home was a slightly odd but mostly accepted piece of childhood. That the house had also contained a store about a decade before I was born was a piece of childhood fascination. My mother talked of minding the shop and slicing meat for customers, and that old meat slicer stood along the wall in a room that held musty old toys that we grandkids played with when we visited. The idea that an insignificant rural crossroads like Honey Grove, Pennsylvania, could be home to a grocery store seemed impossibly quaint and old-fashioned to my young mind. And like so many other stories I heard…
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Continental traveler
A yellowed but intact envelope from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Department of Highways was marked, in big, loopy, penciled writing, “Important Don’t Destroy.” Inside was a very important looking document indeed–a title for a 1922 Buick sedan, registered to John J. and Beulah Patterson of East Waterford, Pennsylvania. It’s dated 11-24-23. JJ Patterson was the brother of Grace Patterson Henry, my great great grandmother. JJ and his wife, Beulah Pannebaker Patterson, had no children and lived in a beautiful, rambling house in East Waterford that became the home of his nephew, my great grandfather John Patterson Henry, and wife Margaret Adam Henry, my great grandmother. The Pannebakers and the Pattersons were East Waterford business…