Handbook N-P - Fulton County Public Library

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did factory work long enough to discover he abhored it, then directed as many as 20 men in the
construction of electrical power lines while at the same time operating a chicken hatchery, feed
mill and a farm. Later he opened an automobile and farm implement dealership and finally took
up the quieter role of realtor. And that gave him the leisure to produce oil landscape paintings of
enduring charm, thus reviving a drawing talent he first practiced as a boy.
His partner most of this time was my motlier, born Edyth Kingery in Rochester, to whom
he was married 43 years until her untimely death in 1957.
He was devastated by her loss, but a year later was fortunate to be accepted as husband
by a gentle widow, Vivian Wagoner Trout. She endowed his life with such love and grace that he
lived enthusiastically for another 21 years, dying in his 85th year on September 16, 1978. It is our
good fortune that Vivian is with us yet today.
Of my father's life, of his successes and of his troubles I knew little until he decided near
the end of his life, and quite on his own, to record the story. This he did for many days, sitting in
the window of his realtor's office on East Eighth Street just west of The Sentinel office and filling
12 single-spaced typewritten pages with vivid recollections. This man, among his other
endowments, was an articulate and sensitive writer, which is another reason for me to be grateful
to him.
Dad's recollections are a fascinating glimpse into how life two generations past was lived
by a boy off the farm who was ever striving to improve his fortunes. Today and the next two
weeks I offer excerpts from his memoirs with my own comments placing them into context,
sometimes but not always in parentheses.
He begins, as one might expect, at the beginning:
"I was born on December 16, 1893, one mile south of my grandfather's old homestead in
Richland Township, Fulton County, Indiana .... The house sets up on a small hill with the barn and
other buildings at the bottom of it and barnyards bordering onto low pasture land.” His grandfather
was Levi Overmyer, who emigrated in 1855 from Ohio to Richland Township north of the
Tippecanoe River. The homestead was at the corner of today's Roads 700N and 325W. The
house south of there where Dad was born is unoccupied today.
"I was the last born of a family of five children (four boys and a girl) and was the runt of
the family. My mother often told me that the reason that I was so frail and puny was because I had
the whooping cough when I was two months old and they gave me such strong medicine it ruined
my stomach and also my teeth.
Dad was about 10 years old when he moved with father Frank and mother Inez to the
Overmyer homestead, along with sister Grace and brothers Anson, Vern and Lloyd. The
homestead farm "had been a showplace in its time with a wood picket fence in the front yard and a
two-story, eight-room house with two large porches in the front and a large red barn with fancy
shuttered cupolas on the roof.” (The house burned in 1925 and was replaced with a smaller
structure.)
My father had an abiding dislike of alcohol. He never tasted it nor did we ever have it in
the house for medicinal or any other reason. He was not prone to lecture me or my sister, June,
against its use so I often wondered about the origin of his abstinence. His memoir explains:
"My father, as I know now, was the ambitious one of his family and had bought a woods
north of where we lived, and to pay for it he cleared it off and cut firewood which he hauled all the
way to Rochester in the fall and sold it by the cord. This was a long and cold trip, so I guess the
only heat he could get to warm him up on his trip home was whiskey, and sometimes when he got
home he was just TOO warm, and this mother did not go for a minute.
She just hated alcohol of any kind. I have no recollection of this one incident but I think
Lloyd told me that he (Dad) came home one night pretty quarrelsome and mother took the buggy
whip to him. I remember that something happened and they didn't speak for weeks. This worried
me more than it should have a normal child."
The worry sometimes had to do with his father's condition upon returning from frequent
visits to Rochester. “I had a chore of filling the woodbox every evening before night and I got the