Country People, and a Pittman Legacy

 I come from country people on both sides of my family.

Right up into the 20-century we were farmers. If there was ever anything like an old family homestead, I guess it was my great-grandfather Clark Pittman's farm in Gnaw Bone, Brown County, Indiana.

Clark was the patriarch of large family. His father, Thomas Pittman, came to Brown County around 1853 or so, when Clark was just a baby, along with several other Pittman families, coming out of Monroe County, Ohio. Clark never learned to read or write, but he held onto the family farm in Gnaw Bone and died there in 1931. He married 5 times and had 12 children, one of whom was my Mom's Dad, Orval Pittman. In the picture below you have Clark on the left, Orval on the right, and Orval's young half-sister, Vernia Edell, standing in front.

So, country people, as you can see. I don't know what exactly happened to the farm in Gnaw Bone, but it sure didn't come to Orval. According to the 1940 Census, when Orval and family are living in nearby Johnson County, he is listed as out of work. My mother was 8 then, and she has told of her own mother, Ethel, making dresses out of flour sacks for her two girls.

Orval was truck farming during this period, but eventually he would be the one to move to the city, this after more than 300 years of rural life in the Pittman line. The city he moved to was Columbus, Indiana, where Orval got work in the American Fork & Hoe factory. This move from country to city, from farm labor to factory work, was of course repeated a million times over during that period in American history. My mother, Patricia Pittman, recalls facing disdain from some of her classmates at Columbus High School because she wore homemade dresses. She was a hayseed. She was a hick.

It was for that reason that my Mom never returned to Columbus for a High School reunion. "Why would I want to see those people," she used to say.

I do think my mother made the adjustment in time though, as most young people do. In her yearbook picture in 1950 she seems positively elegant!

Her father Orval died in a tragic workplace accident at American Fork & Hoe in the Spring of 1949, when my mom was a junior in high school. According to his death certificate, he was struck in the right kidney by a falling beam. This is Orval in the back yard of their house out on Route #2 in Columbus.

It was in high school that Mom met my Dad, Robert Cornelius Spencer, and they got married soon after graduation. Dad joined the Navy and they moved away from Columbus and lived in some much bigger cities, and my Mom in time lost her country accent. But I will always think of her as a country girl at heart. Here she is at the homestead in Gnaw Bone, round about the mid-30s.


And here she is again, at the house in Columbus.


She's 88 now and has accumulated much wisdom over the years. Her memories go back to another world, it might almost seem. "Though much is taken, much abides."

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