Neighbors

When I was a boy there were a lot more families living in the Prairie Home community than there are today. As the farms kept getting larger over the years many of the old farmsteads were no longer needed, so the buildings were torn down and the former yards, gardens and farm lots are now corn and soybean fields. There used to be five other homes that were less than a mile from our farmhouse; today they are all gone but one.

We had a close community—we knew all our neighbors well and they were like extended family. We visited back and forth, we borrowed things from one another, we helped out when someone was sick, we all sent fresh meat to neighbors when we butchered, we kids walked to school together and played after school together—things like that. We really cared for each other.

I hadn’t realized until I recently made a list of early neighbors that essentially all of them had English names. Our closest neighbors were: Winters, Burrows, Hudson, Lindley, Boyer, Gordon, Marshall, Shaffer, Stewart and Wicker—and these names were typical of the whole area. It wasn’t until I was in high school and played (poorly) on our 4-H softball team that sometimes played Moweaqua, where there were several families of Polish coal miners, that I came across such surnames as Wotkowski and other “foreign sounding” names.

Our closest neighbor was Charlie Winters who worked for Dad and lived with his wife and mother in our little hired hand’s house that used to stand “across the road and down a little.” Charlie was a good, hard-working man that I liked a lot. His wife, Ruth, sometimes worked for Mother at the then-standard rate of a dollar a day. Once Charlie’s nephew from Chicago visited on a motorcycle and I was thrilled to get a short motorcycle ride on Charlie’s lap. At one time Charlie had an old car (old even for those days) that was in such poor shape that the steering mechanism came apart once and Charlie ended in the ditch. Fortunately he was going slowly and there wasn’t much damage, so he just wired it back together and continued to drive it.

The Burrows family lived a quarter-mile south of us as tenants on Aunt Ella’s farm (now known as the South Farm). There were seven Burrows children—from William, who was just older than Donald, to Nellie Marie, who was just younger than Mary Grace. Lynn was my age and Glen Merlin was Paul’s age--and we four spent lots of time playing together and usually walked to school together. Burrows were kind of an “earthy” family and their grammar and manners often left something to be desired. When one of us Baird boys made an error in manners or grammar at home, a brother was apt to tease him with, “You’re worse than Burrows!” And the Burrows boys’ talk about sex provided me with early sex education; we never, ever talked about sex at home.

When I went to the 60th anniversary of my high school graduating class last year, Betty Lindley (now Roby) came up after the program to renew our acquaintance after more than sixty years. Betty used to live half a mile from us and is only a few days older than I am. After some talk about shared early times she asked, “Did you know that your father delivered me?” She then explained that when the time was drawing near for her to be born her father went to Moweaqua to get Dr. Sparling. But there was some delay and he wasn’t back, and, Betty said, “I wouldn’t wait!” So, her family sent word for Dad to please come help—and please hurry! They knew that Dad was an expert midwife for all kinds of animal births—and that there simply wasn’t time to be choosy. I had never heard this story until Betty told me about it—but it’s a great example of neighbors helping neighbors in an emergency.

The Boyer family lived in a farmhouse a mile west of us (through the fields—two miles by roads), directly across the road from the Prairie Home Church. While we were growing up I knew that Sally Boyer’s maiden name was Baird and that we were “distantly related,” but I never understood what the connection was. Our family always had a friendly, neighborly relationship with the Boyers, but we didn’t really treat them as cousins or “special,” the way we treated other somewhat closer relatives. I don’t know why this was; perhaps the fact that they were Catholic and didn’t attend our church had something to do with it. (However the three little Boyer boys, Baird, Bob and Dick, usually came across the road to join in whenever our church had an ice cream supper or something like that.)

It wasn’t until a year ago that I finally got around to figuring out how we were related to the Boyers. My great-grandfather, John Baird, and Sally’s great-grandfather, William Baird, were brothers. They both moved their families from central Pennsylvania to Prairie Home in central Illinois in the 1860s. (Two other siblings, Ira and Eliza also made the same move in that period.) I then learned that Bob Boyer (fourth generation after his great-great grand-father William) still farms in the Prairie Home area—he and his family are the only Baird family members still living in the same community. I recently spent a couple of hours with Bob and we had a great time talking about the “early days.”