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Artifact: PRR freight bills
I have a thick ledgerbook from S.E. Pannebaker’s lumber mill in East Waterford, Pennsylvania. Stuffed into the pages of the book are all sorts of interesting papers, including these bills for shipping two carloads of lumber from East Waterford, through Juniata County on the narrow-gauge Tuscarora Valley Railroad to Port Royal, and then along the Pennsylvania Railroad to transfer to the Erie Railroad for final delivery to the Standard Hardwood Lumber Co. of Buffalo, New York. None of these companies exist today–not even Standard Hardwood, whose address now seems to be the trackside location of a Laub warehouse.
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Samuel Pannebaker’s car
Many of the papers in my grandfather’s collection came from John and Beulah Patterson, aunt and uncle to my great grandfather, both of whom died childless. Beginning in the early 1950s, my great grandparents lived in the same East Waterford house as the Pattersons, after moving from Harrisburg back to the old hometown. Following John’s and Beulah’s deaths, these papers, I surmise, stayed behind in the old home. When my great grandmother moved to spend the final decade of her life in the single-level house my grandfather built in Honey Grove for just that purpose, the papers moved with her. She died in 1994; my grandfather moved in for the final…
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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…