Celebrating Sharpsburg’s Bicentennial “A Time Remembered”

Chapter 4

The hot days of August meant wheat receiving time. Farmers who regularly brought their corn to be ground into meal or stock feed, sold their wheat t my dad.

It was delivered to the mill by horse-drawn wagons in two-bushel sacks, rented to them new or sometimes used and patched.

I learned early that each sack weighed about 120 pounds, that wheat weighed sixty pounds per bushel and that good, dry, grain might turn out to weigh up to sixty-two pounds, while wet wheat was much lighter.

My dad could feel the grain and grade it but to make legal, he had a solid brass tester.

I learned too how to stack the wheat sacks right along with the full-grown mill hands.

There was one man who never condescended to unload or stack the wheat sacks, that was Mr. Barnaby and probably for good reason.

Although a large man, with reddened cheeks he had no sign of muscle.

It was Mr. Barnaby who waited on customers for chicken feed and the like, and who kept the daily cash ledger.

His wife ran a boarding house in their home on Main Street. She served good, wholesome, country cooking and I’ll always remember my mother’s comment that she was liable or not to serve toast with her fingers.

In addition to the Citizen’s Bank, owned by some of the farmers who lived in town, and which was run by Mr. Adams (who owned the radio), and Mr. Crit VanArsdale, there was the Exchange Bank.

The latter was owned and managed by my great uncles, Frank and Jack Allen.

It was across the street from Mr. Hovermills blacksmith shop and the post office and inside had a cool, almost elegant, serene, atmosphere. It was here that my mother, when she was a young girl, served as bookkeeper.

There were no business machines then, so all the ledger work was handwritten.

Uncle Jack, (who like uncle Frank was my grandmother Cracraft’s brother) lived in an apartment over Uncle Tom’s store. He was a cold, straight-laced man, stubborn, self-centered and aloof.

I don’t remember ever having been in his apartment.

Uncle Frank, on the other hand, was a warm, friendly man, impeccably dressed and distinguished-looking with his white hair and mustache. It was always exciting to visit the curio room in his big, white house.

It was filled with all sorts of odd things he and my uncle Henry had collected from all over the world.

It was the mid-twenties when he and aunt Lucy were about to depart on a trip to the northwest to be with their married daughter.

They were to spend the night in our spare room before boarding the train the next day a Mt. Sterling. They never made the trip.

Uncle Frank ended his life the night before their departure.

I never knew why, only that poison was used.

The two banker Allen’s were born in the Sharpsburg area, as were Uncle Tom and Uncle Walter, who once ran the store uncle Tom had, and my grandmother Cracraft.

They were five of the fourteen children of Ruben Sanford Allen, who was the grandson of John Allen.

The latter moved to Kentucky from Virginia in the late 1700s.

A graduate of William and Mary College, he was an officer in the Revolutionary War, lawyer and landowner.

He was the first judge of Bourbon County and served on the commission that framed the constitution of the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

The only other two of the fourteen that I ever knew were Eliza Dudley (Aunt Dee) and Uncle Henry.

He was a graduate of West Point, commanded a regiment in World War 1, was the U.S. minister to Russia and to Germany.

After the war, he served as commander of the Allied Forces in the occupation of Germany.

One of his aides was the then young officer, George Marshall.

The hardware store at Sharpsburg was run for several years by my uncle Tom Knight who was a brother of my dad and uncle Ollie.

He later served in the State Legislature at Frankfort, obtained a law degree and later taught law at the school that preceded the College of Law at the University of Louisville.

He was a circuit judge of Jefferson County and served a term on Kentucky’s highest Court of Appeals.

There were two sisters, aunt Florence, who lived in Hodgensvile and Aunt Eddie, who with her husband Dr. Woodson Taulbee, a surgeon, lived in Maysville. She played the piano by ear superbly.

Aunt Florence played the organ in her church for more than fifty years.

Their father died when they were all youngsters and they were reared ever so properly by my grandmother Knight.

My grandmother Knight was always just plain grandmammy to me, she lived alone in later years in the “old brick”, a rather large, two-story home between the cemetery and Uncle Tom’s house.

It was quite a place, on a large lot with numerous apple trees and a vegetable garden.

The garden was the pride of this grand, paralyzed on one side, woman who would read far into the night by lamp light after the electricity went off at 11 p.m.

She despised the thought of getting old. She died at the age of 86.

Stay tuned next week for Chapter 5.