And so we arrived. The noisy tractor pulling the truck, mom carrying two babies. My older brother, I, and my uncle carrying what we could from the car, it having been left at the neighbor’s place to keep it from getting stuck.
The house itself wasn’t much to look at, it had been built from rough sawed lumber with a tar paper roof. It was what was called board and batten, which means the walls were built out of boards standing on their end with smaller boards covering the cracks. There were three small twelve-foot by twelve-foot rooms and a path. It had two windows in each room on opposite walls and two doors, one in the middle room, [front door], and one in the kitchen, [back door]. The middle room had a hole in the roof where a stovepipe had once been and the house itself sat back a ways from the road in a little grove of white oak trees.
Just across the road was a large woodshed and small barn, built of split beech logs, standing on their ends. There was also a chicken house and tool shed built of the same type of rough planks as the house except these were covered with split wood shingles and just a little way down from the main house there was a spring house built around a large spring of clear cold water.
Back in those days, there were no fast food vendors and in the country, there were no restaurants close by, and most store-bought food had to be cooked before it could be eaten. So when moving into a new place things were usually done in a certain order and that meant the cook stove was the first item carried inside. While this was being done, my brother and I were sent to the springhouse to get a bucket of water.
[A bucket of drinking water was usually sitting on a small table, which was called the water table, and a long-handled water dipper was placed with it, some of the dippers had a hook on the end of the handle and was hung on the bucket, if not it would be either placed on the table or sometimes just put inside the bucket of water. In the spring and fall when flies weren’t a problem the water bucket might be set outside and the dipper hung on a nail.]
In our case, the bucket and dipper were passed around.

After having a big drink of water, the neighbor and his son, who had come to help, along with my uncle started unloading the truck.
The first thing they unloaded was the heavy wood-burning, cast iron cooking stove. This they carried into the middle room and set under the hole in the roof where they figured it would sit so that the stovepipe could go up and outside, but Mom had other plans, she wanted a real kitchen and living room. So the stove was then carried into one of the end rooms.
It was now getting late and beginning to turn cold. It had been a long day and everybody was tired and hungry but before the stove could be set up and a fire built, a hole had to be cut in the roof for the stovepipe. Dad got his handsaw and brace and bit, [this would be called a drill today], and with a boost from one of the men, there was no ladder, made it onto the roof and began drilling and sawing. Wood shavings started falling into the room followed by sawdust and then a piece of plank hit the floor. Mom picked it up and looked up through the hole at Dad and said, “Hurry up, I’ve got the wood ready”, A statement that was repeated many times over the coming days,
While Dad was cutting the hole for the stovepipe, the others were busy unloading the truck and carrying the rest of our belongings into the house.
[Mom had three prized possessions, The cook stove, an old Hoosier kitchen cabinet with a flour bin, and a trunk.]
The cabinet, a table, two mismatched chairs, and a bench, which my brother and I would sit on to eat and if we happened to have company at mealtime Mom would sit on it with us, if there happened to be more than one extra person the men would eat first. These were carried into the room with the stove, that was to be our kitchen. Everything else was just piled into the other two rooms.
The neighbor said he had to get home and tend to his chores but his son could stay and help as long as needed. Dad said he appreciated the offer but it wouldn’t be necessary and asked if they needed help draining the water from the tractor to keep it from freezing as the night would be cold enough for it to freeze. The neighbor said he would just bank the fire down and tend to it tomorrow.
Dad asked my uncle to bring the empty two-gallon oil can from behind the seat in the truck and put some short nails in it and throw it and a hammer up to him, Using his pocket knife he cut the can open and stepped on it to flatten it, Then he cut a round hole in it and asked my uncle to hold the stovepipe up through the hole he had sawed in the roof. Using the hammer he pounded around the inside of the hole he had just cut in the tin oil can until it was a tight fit around the stovepipe. Then, using the nails he nailed it down over the hole he had cut in the roof.
Before the neighbor left he and his son had helped Mom and my uncle to set the stove on its base under the hole and by the time Dad came down off the house and inside Mom and my uncle had already got the warming closet installed on it. Dad pushed the stovepipe up through the hole and pulled it down over the opening on the back of the stove and told Mom she could build her fire.
I don’t remember much more of what happened that day. I know they built a fire in the stove, lit a kerosene lamp, and that mom fixed something to eat. The house was getting warm and I for one was getting very tired. We still didn’t have the heating stove or any beds set up. The last thing I remember was Mom putting some quilts on the floor for us kids to lay on.