|
|
|||||
|
Updated |
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|
|||
|
Next July
18, 2009 |
|||||
|
Notes for Minor Ellsworth Leatherman Leatherman Memories - by Marvin Leatherman My Grandfather, Minor E. Leatherman was born August 7, 1885, the first child to Alec and Ida Leatherman. He married my grandmother, Mary (Molly) Hardy on August 30, 1914. They started their married life living in a small home behind what my dad calls "grandmother's place". It was here that Irene and Virgil were born. In either 1917 or 1918 they moved to his father’s former home (where he grew up) across the road up on the hill. While living there, Myra, Ralph and Garland were born. After this, he moved to where my dad calls the "home place" and where my dad was born. To many who are my dad's age and grew up in "the Ridges", this place was known as "the Minor Place". According to the Thomas Rotruck History, Minor was restless and liked to travel. May Harris says that Alec and all of his children were somewhat like this, but that Alec's wife Ida had held him down from wanting to "roam all over the place". Twice, Minor made trips to North Carolina with the intention of moving there, only to return and continue living in West Virginia. Minor was a minister as well as a farmer. Emmett Bittinger, the author of "Allegheny Passages" writes that Minor Leatherman was "a beloved minister of Knobley and harness Run Churches". He was service in the role of minister as early as 1915 and was ordained in 1918. Uncle Jody described him as a "sharp minister".
Front Ralph, Minor, Charles, Molly, Garland Back Myra, Virgil, Irene Minor's wife died suddenly in March 1935 after she took ill for the third time with pneumonia. It was said that at that time "you could survive your first and second bouts of pneumonia, but the third would take you"; and so it did my grandmother. Most of the children were in their teens except my dad being the youngest was only eight years old. Minor married again, this time to Minnie Warner, a widower from near Nappanee, Indiana. He had met her at a church meeting. She thought he was fairly well to do because he owned land in West Virginia. Little did she know that it was really poor dirt. They lived at the home place until the fall of about 1945 when he sold the farm, lived briefly with his brother Arlie near Mt. Airy, Md., and then moved to Indiana, near Nappanee, where he lived till shortly before his death in January, 1954. The Leatherman family was poor. They could afford only the horses that nobody else wanted and would work them till they were dead. However, they raised good-sized garden or truck patch and generally had enough potatoes, meat and other food to last through the winters. It was the items that could not be raised on the farm that there was a need of. Uncle Virgil once told me, "We never had much but we were happy". If you never have it, you never miss it |
|||||
|
|
|||||
|
|
|
||||
|
Buried at the Harris Farm Cemetery |
|||||
|
Web-Site by Dick |
|||||
