Celebrating Sharpsburg’s Bicentennial “A Time Remembered”

Chapter 3

Saturday nights in Sharpsburg were something special. Even before noon country people from the farms would come to town in their buggies, their buckboards, their wagons or in the saddle.

Downtown would be crowded with folks dressed in their Sunday best. They came to talk and visit with friends, relatives and to swap stories, trade shotguns or knives and to talk about the weather or their crops.

They came to shop for staple groceries and dry-goods and thread, for feed from the mill.

The younger men, sunburned to an oven-brown from working in the fields, might gather at Pete’s Pool Hall to shoot a rack.

This might be after they had met Red Wagner down on Back Street to negotiate the purchase of a pint of shine. This often oiled the trigger for at least one fist fight.

But there only rarely was and entanglement that resulted in a fatality, as the lawyers in the county seat put it.

In the summer months, there were always several wagons parked in front of the public square where choice watermelons and cantaloupes could be purchased. The melons, of various shapes and sizes were always arranged neatly on beds of freshly cut hay in the wagons.

The smaller watermelons, dark green of rind and with deep, red meat, sold for ten to twenty cents; the larger ones for up to seventy-five cents.

When anyone in Sharpsburg had to go to the store, bank, post office or to conduct some bit of business, he or she went “downtown”.

Sharpsburg is not an industrial town, nor was it in the 1920s.But in the earlier period it did have its complement of stores and other home-owned institutions to make it, well, nearly self-sufficient.

Counting the small one across the street from the Citizen’s bank, there were five groceries, a dry-goods store, another bank, a garage where repairs were made on the few automobiles in the area and to farm machinery, a blacksmith shop, electric plant, my dad’s feed mill and farm supply business, a telephone company and a movie theater or “picture show”.

My favorite store and oft-times loafing place, belonged to Will Sharp. He was a beautiful, rotund, jolly man who loved to hunt and was the husband of my mother’s sister, Sue.

Up front of the store there was a soda fountain with all the equipment to make real Coke, sundaes and chocolate sodas an off and on place of employment for me when I got to be a five-foot nine, skinny, twelve-year-old.

On the left as you entered the store, there was a glass-enclosed compartment containing cigars and cigarettes which Gina, Will Sharp’s daughter and I used to filch and smoke behind the barn when we went for an overnight visit with her cousin Lula, who lived two miles out of town with uncle Jim and Uncle Ben.

There was bulk candy in long, metal trays arranged also in glass fixtures that was also a temptation.

But even more so was a large wheel of rat cheese in its screened-in holder and the ever pleasant barrel of soda crackers nearby.

I learned to cut a piece of cheese pretty early in life!

The store had its own pot-bellied stove and around it the talk of the assembled men of the town dealt mostly with dove shoots, hunting rabbits and turtles, fishing and frog gigging.

I always marveled at his bravery when Mr. Will Sharp, (a cousin of my uncle-in-law, who had the same name) used to tell about thrusting his hand into a creek bank hole in search of a turtle and bringing out a water snake. No turtle hook for him!

Footnote: Though he was my uncle by marriage, I always called him Will Sharp, using both his first and last names, just as I called Sue without using the word aunt. The same was true with my father’s brother Ollie.

Ollies store at the east end of Sharpsburg’s two-block business district was almost as fascinating as Will Sharp’s.

Though it had no soda fountain, it did contain, in addition to staple groceries, a sort of variety-store stock of gadgets and household items.

Uncle Tom Allen’s store was much more austere and stark and not my favorite place.

I remember though as a very young boy he would call me in and give me a small bag of marshmallows since he knew because of a serious earlier illness I was not allowed candy.

Mr. Charlie Peter’s pharmacy, well, you really called it a drug store, was on the corner of Main Street and the alley that led down the hill to my dad’s mill.

Two memories linger, he carried on the shelves packages of Cubebs, a forerunner of the modern mentholated cigarette. While tending store for him one day, I stole a package of Merry Widows, which I promptly hid in my dresser and which my mother found. A lecture from my dad on their use will never be forgotten.

Two doors up from the drug store, a modest little house was occupied on the first floor by the telephone operator and her family. On the second floor the switchboard and it maze of wires was one of the wonders of the town.

My dad owned the county-wide phone company, so I always had a phone in my room at home, and in later years, long after he sold the system, my father still would pick u the phone and make a long-distance call at the drop of a hat.

I remember the heavy sleet storm one winter when wires and poles were downed. It was a major financial loss, but not a fatal one.

Directly back of the phone company house, past a vacant lot, stood the mill. It was on a no-name short street that paralleled with main street. (Later named Montgomery Street)

It was at the mill that I worked in the summer months of 1925 and 1926 until we moved to Carlisle in 1927.

Stay tuned for Chapter-4 in next week’s edition of Around Town.