Julia Davis Hunt was living alone in the brick house now home to the Simon Kenton Inn.
“It was just Grandmother Hunt,” Gaffin explained, “and she had her family come in the summer.”
“The grandmother’s son had a daughter. They called her Baster,” Gaffin recalled. “Her name was Virginia,” she added, but nobody called her that.
And for the Chatwood children, Baster was a steady summer playmate, rollicking with them on the swings, slide and sand pile, in the creek and along the path to the woods where the cows stayed.
Youngest of 13
“We sharecropped,” Gaffin said.
Two when her family moved in, she was the youngest of 13 children — the youngest of the four still living with Albert Bloomfield Chatwood and Nancy Claretta Wagner Chatwood when they relocated from West Liberty.
In earlier times, Gaffin’s grandfather had been a Chatwood, but, it didn’t last.
“He said everybody that he knew called him Chatwood,” Gaffin said. “So he got tired of trying to tell them, and he changed it and that was that. He just let it go.”
It was all the same to her brothers — Millard, Albert and Edward.
The boys had known of brother Anson, who died at birth, but Gaffin never did.
“I was the baby,” she said, “the last one.”
Just as her brothers looked after her, the family looked after Grandma Hunt.
“Albert slept over at the Hunt’s house,” Gaffin said.
“She was up in her years and felt better with somebody else in the house. He didn’t mind. She was awfully nice.”
“She had someone to come in and clean her house and cook once in awhile,” Gaffin recalled. “And she had a gardener, a lovely African-American man, Sherman.”
If she needed help and no one was around, Mrs. Hunt had a paging system to call the Chatwoods.
“It was a great big bell, an old one,” Gaffin said. “They brought it with them when they moved there. She’d ring that bell if she wanted anything.”
She added: “We took pretty good care of her. We loved her.”
And Mrs. Hunt returned the favor.
“She was a painter,” Gaffin said — one who apparently liked children’s company.
“I sat by her and watched her paint all the time,” she said.
Gaffin remembers sitting with Mrs. Hunt the day she painted a stand of flowers form her garden.
“When she finished it, she said, ‘Maxine, would you like to have that picture?’ ”
Thirteen at the time, she said yes, and she still has it today.
Work and fun
Although there were stories of American Indian mounds and discoveries on the Hunt Farm, Gaffin never saw them herself.
“I knew she had a whole bushel basket full of arrowheads in the attic, so there must have been something.”
The land that held that spirit of adventure held adventure for the Chatwood children. Her brothers fished, hunted pheasants, rabbits and other game, and trapped for pelts.
“They brought in a turtle one time, and mom said ‘Once is enough,’ ” she recalled.
The children made some of their own fun, too. At a spot in the creek, “the older boys dug us a great big hole. It was a swimming pool for us younger kids,” she said. “We had fun down there, a lot of fun, all of us.”
Being a farm, there was plenty of work, too. The boys helped their father in the barn and the fields.
“That was horse-and-buggy days when we moved there,” Gaffin said. “We had work horses. We had three sets of horses.”
The horses pulled the plow and a corn planter with her father walking behind.
Then came a first International tractor.
“It didn’t have tires,” Gaffin said, only spiked metal wheels. “Then when they traded it in and got another one, it had great big tires on it. They were really proud of that.”
Behind their home, “you went up a lane to the woods. That’s where the cows all went. They came in by themselves most of the time.”
The milk was sold to a dairy.
She remembers her father’s voice calling hogs that he butchered out back, curing the meat in a smokehouse.
“We grew corn and soybeans, wheat and oats,” she said.
‘‘Moving around by the spring house, through the barn, by the granary and stopping for water at the pump, they were busy, busy boys and men,” she said.
In the kitchen
“I never had to go in the field,” Gaffin said. “I always helped my mother. I gathered eggs in the evening, that was all.
“Of course, mother was 45 when she had me. Meek is what we always thought she was, very meek.
“She used to say ‘You and I work good together.’ I was pretty proud when she said that,” Gaffin recalled, “because I wasn’t too old.”
Her mother’s kitchen was a bakery — cakes, pies and, of course, bread.
Gaffin said she was 12 or 13 when she saw her first sliced, store-bought loaf.
“My brother had been somewhere. He brought a loaf of bread and a pound of baloney.”
But most of the food came from home.
“We had a large garden,” she said. “We made sauerkraut by the barrel. They had an apple orchard when I was there. We had good apples and a pear tree. And, of course, you had wild strawberries back on the farm.”
She also recalls her mother’s spiced peaches, made by putting a bag of spices in to cook with them.
“Oh, we had a chicken,” Gaffin added with a smile. “That was my mother’s joke. It was a chicken and it would come in and lay an egg in the corner of the kitchen.”
“She’d walk around a little bit and mother would give her some corn. She’d kind of hang around a minute, then she’d leave.”
The chicken didn’t venture into the kitchen at threshing time, when her mother was making food for the volunteer help, and Gaffin’s school bus driver, Albert Budd, brought his threshing machine down from Tremont City Road.
Melons for sale
To the post office, the Hunt Farm was on Springfield’s Rural Route 3.
Although there wasn’t a great deal of traffic in the early times, Gaffin said, “we used to grow melons, and they’d sell them down along the roadside — muskmelons, watermelons, roasting ears, corn.”
Just as her father welcomed hoboes into the house for meals, irking her mother, her grandfather irked the boys by giving away too many samples of melon.
Not far from where they set up their roadside stand was a traction car stop.
“We could ride for 10 cents into Springfield or Urbana,” she recalled. She remembered, too, the awful wreck on Donavan’s Hill — two traction cars ran into one another .
“I had a sister on that wreck,” she said. “She was in the hospital, I think, for about a year. Her feet, her face, her whole body” was injured, she said. “I heard her say a person by her was beheaded” in the crash.
Then came the automotive age.
“The first one we got was a Plymouth, a green Plymouth,” probably in the 1930s, she said. “And dad had a pickup truck, a small one.”
Going home
Gaffin left her family’s home on the Hunt Farm in 1940, when she married Mavin Paul Gaffin.
“We were in the same grade,” she said.
“I missed my mother and father and the boys, of course. They always teased me, so I missed that a lot. Mom and dad stayed about five years longer.”
Every once in awhile, she and her niece Blanche would drive up to the farm, “and she’d just pull in,” Gaffin said.
She got another look at the place as the Simon Kenton Inn when her family brought her there July 18 for her 90th birthday, telling her only, “We’re taking you home.”
Impressed with the way the brick home looks — the shine of the floors, the way it’s been kept — the home seemed nonetheless changed by time. Said Gaffin, “It always looked so mammoth.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.
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