Here is the account my grandmother dictated to my Aunt Jane Llewellyn in 1978. She was born in 1890 and was a very serene and sweet woman of deep faith. I enjoyed corresponding with her in her later years, and had a very nice visit about 1976 when our first son Eli and my wife Terrie got to meet her. Her reference to the Staiger family who attended the Friends school on her father, Isaac's, property, was a family with connections to Sebring, Florida. Eric Annett, who founded and owned Annett Bus Lines, had a mother who was a Staiger, and attended that school when she was a girl! Small world for sure. Enjoy our 'Nana's' account of her life. She also was a very avid word gamer, and enjoyed Scrabble and Anagrams and was pretty fierce at it, while maintaining her sweetness. Because of her and my grandfather we live in Sebring, Florida.
Ella Hall Llewellyn Autobiography
December, 1978
My dear children, you have asked me to do a difficult task, to write some facts about the early years of your father and me, but at my age,- 88 years old, it will have to be rather sketchy, especially the dates, for my memory is not good.My father, Isaac Hall, was born in Harrisville, Ohio, in 1829. He taught at Scattergood Friends Boarding School in Iowa and in 1851, he taught at Westtown. He married the girls' governess, Abigail Williams there.
Mother, Phebe T .Hatton, had lost her mother and went to Westtown. Isaac Hall and Abby Williams sort of took Phebe under their care and when they left Westtown they took her to Malvern to live with them. After Abby Hall died, Father married Phebe Hatton in 1885.
West Caln Meeting House where Phebe and Isaac Hall were married. Isaac is buried here.
At this time Father was in partnership with Levi Thomas in a business located along the railroad tracks in either Malvern or Paoli (I'm not sure which). There they sold feed and either coal or lumber. In addition, Father raised vegetables and other produce on his place a few miles west of Malvern, and sold them at the Reading Terminal Market. It was through this connection that he entered a contest, sponsored by the head of the market, to propose names for the railroad stop called Fraser Junction. Father suggested "Malvern" and that name was selected as winner, so he was responsible for naming the area that is known as Malvern today.
Of course the family attended Malvern Meeting. Another member of the meeting owned a farm at Sandy Hill, about 4 miles northwest of Wagontown, Pennsylvania, and he exchanged this land for Father's home in Malvern. The new property consisted of 180 acres of beautiful rolling country in Chester County; 100 acres were in farmland and 80 in woodland. There Father built a very nice three storey house which became the outstanding place in the vicinity. Our land was divided by a public road running from the old Lancaster Pike to a destination I do not know,
- probably Hibernia.
I will describe our house west of the road first. It was three stories high, with eight rooms including bath and pantry. There was a large water tank in the 3rd floor into which water was pumped by windmill from a good spring below the road. There was a dumbwaiter to be lowered to the cellar to keep food cool. Father had a pork butchering business, and the cellar was fully equipped for all the needs of taking care of it. He made lard in the cellar, and had the machinery there for trying out the fat which was then congealed in tubs. He made scrapple and sausage, too. It was the custom to cool the scrapple in pans set out on the cellar floor and I remember once, when he was a boy, Howard Hatton stepped in one in his bare feet. When he lived in Malvern, he sold pork products at the Reading Terminal Market and Isaac Hall's scrapple had quite a fine reputation.
The sausage was made in links and a neighbor, Mary Entriken, was paid to clean out the pigs intestines to serve as casing for them. These were filled by machine in links.
The house was a nice, large frame one with five porches,~ an upstairs porch, a back one and a small front one, and one on each side . The one on the south side was glassed in as a conservatory for flowers in winter. We had a nice yard around the house, enclosed by a hedge fence. It had beautiful flower beds, maple trees and a good lawn for croquet which my brother, Walter, and I enjoyed when we were old enough. A section of the lower part toward the road was set apart for bee hives, of which we had several. One wintry night the hives were broken into and the honey stolen. We had a pretty good idea who had done it, as a neighbor, Ellis Haines, followed the tracks in the snow to the home of Cy Hughes, who had a speakeasy. There he was told by Cy’s wife that night before and had been out in a bee tree the night before and had honeycomb stuck in his throat!
We also had a small barn back of the house where we kept a couple of horses, and stored hay and grain. There was a pig pen there and some pigs. Father also had a shop where the fruit we raised was prepared for market. And back of the shop he had a little low picket fence to enclose a vegetable garden for us kids.
Our farm west of the road was entirely used for raising fruit of many kinds: an acre of grapes, large patches of strawberries, raspberries - yellow, red, black, blue and purple, which were large and called “Cuthberts”, dewberries, gooseberries and currants, some fruit trees, - lots of peach trees, some pear, quince, apple and plum, and some cherry, When I was real small I complained of feeling sick and Mother asked me where I felt sick. I said, "Down in the plum orchard." So I never heard the last of that! We marketed our produce mostly in Coatesville, and Uncle Israel Hall, father's brother, drove our horse and spring wagon to deliver it to market two or three times a week. My mother once picked 100 quarts of strawberries in one day and I was determined to equal her record. I did it, too, when I was eleven or twelve. During the height of the season we hired neighbors t o help pick the berries which were packed, 32 quarts to a crate. We had enough to send several crates to market at a time, several times a week.
The main barn of the farm was below the road, where we kept the dairy cows and some of the horses and stored the farm crops and farm machinery. There was an ice-house adjoining the barn and in the winter the neighbors helped Uncle Will Hatton to cut the ice into blocks and put it in the ice-house, separated by saw dust. The ice came from Henson's dam. a near neighbor, and was hauled up to fill the ice-house. We didn't have an electric refrigerator but the ice did a good job.
Father also had a small schoolhouse built on our place, down along the road, for us and children in the neighborhood interested in Friends. About a dozen of us went there, mostly Friends,- Arthur Haines, Walter and I, the Staigers, Hattons and some others. It was known as the West Caln School and was under the care of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. They provided the teachers and we boarded them, one at a time. The names of the teachers were Louisa Brackman from the Elklands, Martha Cope (later married Walker Wickersham), Edith Whitacre ( later married Herman Cope), and Cousin Ella Tomlinson who lived at her home a couple of miles away and walked to and from school across the fields. The teachers were responsible for cleaning the school house, building the fire and teaching, for which they were paid perhaps five to eight dollars a week.
Now I guess that takes care of the main part of the farm.
West of our house was about 100 acres of woodland, and an old stone house on it in which Uncle Will Hatton lived, and where several of his and Aunt Lizzie's children were born. When they Lived there, Uncle Will rode horseback through the woods to our side of the farm, for he was our farmer. Later on he moved his family to the other old stone house down across the road. There was a large barn down there, where we had a dairy. Of course he did the milking, and I liked to get up in the morning and go down there and help him. Brother Walter never took to that kind of work.
There was a good spring and spring house down there and that is where the windmill was which pumped the water up to our third story water tank.
We had a big farm wagon pulled by two horses and : remember one winter they put runners on it instead of wheels, and we rode over the tops of fences over the ice-encrusted snow. It was that deep!
Father also built a small house on a corner )f our property for his brother, Uncle Israel and his wife, Aunt Sarah Ain, both of whom were physically handicapped. He had a badly deformed foot and she a crippled back. Both of them were hard of hearing, using black trumpets for hearing aids. I would carry a can or kettle of milk down across the berry patches each morning, and she would give me a cucumber pickle, her own work, and were they good!
There was a meetinghouse (West Caln) a few miles from us. The meeting there had been laid down some years before but Father started it up again. There were several Friends' families living near enough to attend, and besides our family there were Uncle Jonathan Tomlinsons', Ellis Haines and wife and son, David Stager and large family (Germans), and Jacob Dingee and William Jacobs, as regular attenders. The old meetinghouse is no longer there, but the stone wall around the graveyard I guess is intact. When Father died in 1902, his body was laid there. But the graveyard is in terrible condition now, grown up with sumac, green briar etc., and my father's gravestone cannot be located. It is thought it may have been stolen, as it is suspected some others have been, too. We never missed going to meeting twice a week, on First Days and also mid-week meeting, on Fourth or Fifth Days.
In order to reach the west Caln School, I remember that Uncle Will Hatton used to ride his horse through the woods from their house with his daughter, Mary, on its back with him. She and I ate our lunches together, often in our glassed-in flower room, and I liked to exchange some of my sandwiches for those her mother had prepared with her good blackberry jam.
I also remember sitting on the sloping roof of our icehouse on a summer night watching barns burning around the countryside. Several were hit by lightning in one night and we had a commanding view from our location.
As Friends were opposed to music, we were deprived of any opportunity to take part in it. Aunt Rachie, not a Quaker, did have friends who had organs, and in fact, Mother, too, had a friend, Annie Leightion, not a Friend, and she and I visited her. She had a little girl about; my age and I enjoyed playing with her in her playhouse. Once I found an old broken mouth organ which I could keep. So I treasured it; although it was broken it would still make music. So took it home, but it soon disappeared, much to my sorrow, so I couldn't have any more music.
After Father died in 1902, it was necessary to sell the farm. Mother was able to have a public sale and also sell the farm. We moved from there to Malvern to a twin house right along the railroad. I remember Hughes Cox drove us and our things to Malvern in a farm wagon. At that time our family consisted of Mother and her sister, Aunt Rachel Hatton, Brother Walter and myself. Aunt Rachie had a cancer of the breast and Mother had to dress it. Her doctor was Sam Brinton's grandfather (Clement Brinton?) who lived in West Chester and drove to Malvern in his horse and carriage. We lived there for two or three years.
Then we were asked to move to the stone house at the end of the lane on the east end of Westtown School. We did that but Mother was not able to support us without finding some work so she took boarders, laundered waists and petticoats etc. for the girls and removed collar's from the boys coats, which was required at that time. We lived there for a couple of years, and Walter and I attended Westtown School. We both had bicycles and one summer when we were in our early teens we rode them into Philadelphia and took the ferry boat over the Delaware River to visit friends in Haddonfield and other New Jersey towns. We had our necessary baggage strapped on the bikes behind us. That was a great venture for us. It was lots of fun and we got along fine for there was very little traffic at that time. We had other folks in Philadelphia that we visited, too,- Uncle Doctor Tomlinson's in Germantown, and others.
Dr. William H. Tomlinson, M.D., taught Laryngology and Otology at Temple Univ., Phebe Tomlinson Hall’s relative.
I will not attempt to tell all the moves we made, none of 1hem of very long duration. It must have been about 1904 when we moved back to Malvern from the end of the lane. Walter graduated at Westtown while we lived there, in 1905, and I think Aunt Rachie died when we lived there. Then we were asked to go back to Westtown and occupy the Farm House, which we did for a few Years. I remember a poem I learned about this time when I was 15 years old and in Master Charles Palmer's math class. It is: "Smile a while
And while you smile
Another smiles
And soon there are
Miles and miles of smiles
And life's worthwhile
Because you smiled.
It was quite an undertaking for Mother to take over the duties of the Farm House, but she managed it very well. She started taking summer boarders, which had never been done there.
But it was quite successful and we had several nice families from Philadelphia spend their summers there. Then we moved to Coatesville, on South 5th Avenue. While there I attended Coatesville High School for a year and we had Mary Hatton, Uncle Will’s oldest daughter, live with us and go to school there, too. It must have been in 1909 that we left Coatesville, and Eli Harvey, a Friends' minister from Indiana who was on a religious visit to Philadelphia, became interested in Mother. They were married at 4th and Arch Street Meeting House and I was a bridesmaid. And so our family was increased by one. We moved several times, not living
long in one place, and I fail to remember all the moves, and I guess I shouldn't attempt to recall them. Father Eli raised broom corn and made brooms, and had quite a sale for them.
Brother Walter had a job with the Chester County ritual Fire Insurance Company, in Coatesville, of which Brinton Cooper was president. He studied law at Temple University, and he sent me to Banks Business College.
I left home and went to live with Uncle Doctor Tomlinsons in Germantown. Aunt Naomi was an invalid and I could take some care of her and at the same time go to Bank's Business College on Chestnut Street, Philadelphia. After graduating there I got a job with the J.B. Moyer Dental Instrument Company at 1212 Vine Street, and worked there for two or three years. While absent from work with mumps, I took an examination for the Civil Service Commission in Philadelphia and through that got a job with the office office of the Civil Service Commission. Except for the "mumps vacation", I would not have been able to take the exam as the Moyer Company would not have given me permission to be absent on a working day for this purpose. I worked as clerk and stenographer in the Civil Service office.Later,I transferred to the office of the Philadelphia Department of Public Works where I did secretarial and clerical work until I was married.
When I left living with Uncle Doctor's, I lived with cousins Will and Mabel Hoopes at 265 West Rittenhouse Street, Germantown. That is when I bought a bedroom suite and furnished my room there. The brass bed from that is the one that Bob and Jane are using. While working for the Civil Service, I boarded with Cousin Emma Hatton at 139 North 21st Street, and Brother Walter did too.
While living at Cousin Emma's, I attended the 12th Street Meeting socials which Maria Scattergood held regularly for Young Friends. This is where your father came into my life as he saw me home from the socials and thus started our affair. That was in 1912. On our return from an evening in Willow Grove Park one night, he asked me to marry him. That was June 12, 1913,
and after thinking it over and praying about it , I decided he was the one for me so when he called on me the next evening, I gave him my answer. He said that was the longest night he ever spent, waiting for my answer. And so we became a very happy engaged couple. Sometime after that. I went to live with my brother Walter and his wife Catherine on Ross Street in Germantown. Dad's brother Charley and his wife Emily and two little girls lived on the same block and I used to take my handwork down and spend the evenings with him, so we could baby-sit for the children while their parents went out. We lived there on Ross Street until we were married. Our engagement culminated in our marriage on April 9, 1915 at the 4th and Arch Street Friends Meeting House in Philadelphia. We had a short honeymoon in Ocean City.
Wedding photo 1915 at Friends Meeting House Arch St., Philadelphia
Our first home was a little single house a t 212 Jefferson Avenue, Cheltenham, where we lived for about 3 years. This we rented for $18.00 a month. Bobby was born in the Germantown Hospital while we lived there. While hanging out his wash on the line in the back yard,- on coming back from the end of the clothesline, I found that the lid of the cesspool had fallen in so that I had just escaped a nasty accident.
After living there we bought one side of a twin house on Elm Avenue, Cheltenham, and were living in it when Walter was born in Germantown Hospital. In May, 1923, we bought and moved into a house a t 229 East Moreland Avenue, Hatboro where we lived for 54 years, until Dad's death in 1977. The spring that we moved here, Bob was 6 years old and started school at the Loller Academy. Our other 3 children also went there when their turns came.
I have gone into too much detail of my early life, and I'll try to recall what I can of Dad's beginning. He was born near Winona, in Ohio. When he was 10 years old, his mother died of tuberculosis. His father remarried after father and son lived alone and took care of themselves for awhile. When Dad was working for a neighboring farmer by the name of Warrington, he caught his left hand in an ensilage cutter and lost a couple of fingers. He was then about 12. Aunt Sina Stratton, who was a doctor and connected with the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia, insisted that his father bring him over on the train to be taken care of there. This was done and the rest of the hand was saved. Aunt Sina then took him into her home on Diamond street, along with some other members of the family. She sent him to Friends Select School which he attended until he went to Westtown. He graduated there in 1908 and planned to go back to Ohio but instead attended Penn State for a year. Aunt Sina owned a gold mine in northern California and wanted him to manage it for her. She planned to send him to a suitable college in the west to learn mining engineering, but he told her he wouldn't have to go so far, for Penn State had a good course for that. So she sent him there. He hadn't gone very far in the course until he found out that her mine would be a losing proposition. So he persuaded her to sell the mine, losing a great deal of money which she and some of her friends had invested in it. And when he stopped taking that course, he wanted to leave Penn State and save her spending her money for the rest of the year. But she insisted that he finish the year. Later, he was glad that he did for he learned a lot of engineering that helped him through the years.
Soon after that,, when he was expecting to go to Ohio, he was offered a job at the S.L. Allen Company by William C. Warren, which he accepted. He started as an office clerk, but kept advancing until he became Treasurer and then President.
To give a short account of his useful life, I will insert the following from his obituary:
He served as Mayor of Hatboro from 1942-45. He also served on the Water Board and was responsible for locating sources of water which provide the present water supply. A man, skilled in the use of a divining rod, was brought in from the south to assist i1 this project. He was employed for 52 years with the S.L. Allen Company, serving as presidentfrom1953 until his retirement in 1961. It was several years after he began working here before we could afford a car, so he had to commute by trolley.
He was a charter member of the board of the Cheltenham Federal Savings and Loan Association, and served as its president from 1939 to 1966, retiring from the board in 1976.
He was one of the founders of the Cheltenham Monthly Meeting of Friends, and served as clerk for many years. He was influential in building a new meetinghouse on the Jeanes Hospital grounds when the small meetinghouse on Ryers Avenue was inadequate.
He served for a good many years on the Board of Jeanes Hospital.
We have been blessed with having our good home in Hatboro, and a summer home in the Poconos, and a winter home in Sebring, Florida, and we shared our time between all of them. And we have been glad to be able to educate you four children at Westtown and through college. And we have a great deal to be thankful for in having had such a capable and ambitious father to take care of us all . He did live a rich and useful life, providing well for his family, and was loved and respected by everybody.
Near the end of his life he assured me that he had provided well for my future care, for which I am ever thankful for having the White Billet Nursing Home provided for me. I am thankful, too, that I have survived him, as he hoped that he would never have to go to a nursing home, and that he has been called to his Heavenly Home to be with our Savior, Jesus Christ, whom he loved. I shall be happy to join him there when my course here is run. My life is in the Lord's hands. His will be done, and I pray that He will give me grace till my turn comes to join him, and use me here as He can. May we all meet there some day.
Your mother,
Ella H. Llewellyn
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