Pop-Pop Moyer's Stories
Stories told to me (Raymond Dennis) by my grandfather (Frank Moyer)
When my grandfather was a young boy, he and his mother would go and visit his great grandfather, Elias Shaver, at his dairy farm in Huntsville. The farm was located a few miles from the Huntsville Methodist Church on the right-hand side of the road in the direction of Plymouth Mountain. Elias Shaver’s brothers also had farms in the area.
My grandfather remembered that his great-grandfather and his brothers each kept a whiskey bottle in the feed bin in the barn. They had bear traps in the barn that he played with. They were large and powerful traps that he and his cousins would set and then trip with poles that would be snapped off.
His great-grandfather would go bear hunting for a few days at a time off in the mountains. He took a horse and a buckboard wagon to carry the traps and bring back the bear.
My grandfather recalled a time when he was about eight years old when his grandfather took him on a trip to a meeting of trappers, traders, and mountain men in the Lehman area. It was called a “Van-Do.” It went on for several days with some heavy drinking. On the way home, his grandfather, who had had a few drinks, fell asleep. It was dark, and my grandfather was quite scared as the horses took them home through the dark woods.
In the cellar of great-grandfathers house, there was a large butter churn. Gears and shafts connected the churn to a treadmill outside. Dogs were tied on the treadmill. The walking dog made the butter.
One of my grandfather’s uncles, Uncle Munc, was responsible for delivering milk from the farm in Huntsville to Plymouth. He took a wagon loaded with milk jugs to various places throughout the town. On the way back down Main Street, he would stop at more than a few saloons. By the time Uncle Munc got to the end of town, he was two sheets to the wind. On the way up Plymouth Mountain, he would fall asleep in the wagon. The horses knew their way home. When they entered the corral, Uncle Munc would wake up. He was in good enough shape by then to un-harness them.
When my grandfather was ten years old, he went to work at a coal breaker as a breaker boy. The boys were as young as 9.
The large chunk coal from the mines was brought up to the top of the breaker and dropped into the large rollers with teeth that crushed the coal. It then fell into shakers. They were like screens that separated the coal pieces by size. The large pieces rolled off the shakers into shoots. The smaller pieces fell through into the next shaker below that had smaller holes. The coal sized this way rolled down the shoots. The slate and rock, called bone, was picked out of the coal by the breaker boys. There were 3 boys per shoot. The 3rd boy down was in charge of the shoot. They sat on boards nailed across the shoot. The boys sat with their feet in the shoot and held a shoot board that was used to control the flow of the coal. They dropped the bone into bins below, and the coal flowed into individual hoppers. They worked 8 or 10-hour shifts, seven days a week, for 35 cents a day.
One day my grandfather was working as 3rd boy on one shoot, and another boy named Bob Collard, an older Irish boy about 15 years old, was 3rd boy on the next shoot. The shoot boss, a man named Orange Pringle, sat on a narrow platform up high and behind the boys in order to keep an eye on them. Orange kept a dynamite box on the platform filled with chestnut coal (about the size of an egg). He would throw the coal at the backs of the boys just to let them know he was watching. Being bent over the shoot, the coal would sometimes strike them on the backbone, causing them some pain.
On that day, Orange struck Bob Collard on the backbone. Bob picked up his shoot board, a piece of plank about 2” thick, and threw it at Orange Pringle, striking him and knocked him off the platform. He fell into the hopper below. The coal kept running, covering him up, burying him alive. Bob Collard picked up his lunch bucket and left, knowing he would be fired. My grandfather and the other boys made no effort to help Pringle out. My grandfather didn’t remember how he got out, but he did.
Many years later, Orange Pringle, an old man then, got ill. His legs were amputated. He died a painful death. As my grandfather recalled, no one had much sympathy for him.
Pop-Pop Moyer