Chapter Four-Bicycle Trip-Linesville to New York:1898
Bicycle Trip Linesville To New York-1898
By C. S.Line
With the start of the New Year and for some months thereafter, I was engaged more or less with the store routine, but during this year of 1898 there was to occur a momentous events to affect my future life. The previous winter Daisy Henry had come out to Linesville to visit my mother, with whom she had been on intimate terms in former years and the two had kept up a correspondence through the years. Daisy stayed on to help mother for a time, and then went to visit her sister, Myra, at Canal Fulton, Ohio, who lived on a farm.
During the interval above, Daisy and I had become engaged. It was arranged that summer that we would be married, and mother always had insisted that her first daughter-in-law should wear the lovely silk dress that she herself was married in, in 1868. She had cherished it and kept it all the intervening years. Therefore when Daisy went to Canal Fulton she took that dress along to have it remodeled.
When I got ready to follow her, I applied at our county seat I Meadville for a license but was advised that it would have to be issued at the county seat within the residence area of the prospective bride. This would be Canton, Ohio.
I set out of a warm August morning, on my trusty bicycle, for Canal Fulton, stopping at Canton to pick up the license, with which I had no trouble beyond signing the usual formal papers. Proceeding then to my destination, I found that the dress had been to the dressmakers and had undergone necessary alterations and there seemed to be no reason for delay, so Grant and Myra drove us to town and Rev. Yoder duly married us that evening, August 22nd, 1898.
Leaving Canal Fulton the next day, we enjoyed a short honeymoon in Put-in-bay, a resort on the Great Lakes. Then we went to Detroit, Niagara Falls, and a few other points of local interest. Returning to Linesville, we went to our home for the next 4 years and 4 months.
I will interpose here, that should have preceded the above story, which we had put in a telephone in the store. It was strictly a local company, the service not extending outside the town limits and wall equipment only. Except in the matter of modern equipment the service itself was comparable that of today.
We started house keeping in the rear of our long storeroom. I engaged a young carpenter friend to do the necessary work at a $1 per day which comprised a set of partitions to divide the area into a an adequate bedroom opening off the large room, which served jointly as kitchen, sitting room, and dining room with built-in corner cupboards for a pantry and general accommodations.
Fred had gone to Slippery Rock Normal School from his Linesville High regime, and had graduated there from with honors, and so qualified for a 6th grade teacher in our local school, which job he held for a term. While there he boarded at his parents and mother sent a 2-quart pail of milk down to us for daily use, by Fred, each morning, to leave at the store, which he passed on his way to school. On more than one occasion he forgot to leave it and carried it right on up the school thus depriving us of our regular allowance and subjecting him to embarrassment and never-ending ribbing from his associates. The absent-minded professor, you know.
From that time on, as his other duties permitted, Fred helped us in the store and it was his business to put the display goods outside in morning and bring them in at night, when closed. Once he forgot the latter, and thanks to mischievous boys, the next morning the telegraph poles were decorated with pail, slop-pails, or anything else that would hang up. We retrieved our goods, but Fred never heard the last of the incident.