OUR SMITH FAMILY STORY PART THREE by Lorena May Smith Stahlbaum, my Aunt. 4/25/2009

My sister, Dorothy Alice was born on July 14, 1907 in Pelston, Michigan. A brother, Samuel Arthur, in Cheboygan, on December 9, 1908, a brother, Robert Neil, in the same area on August 30, 1910. I don't know much about those days in the north woods, because the family had moved to a farm near Bad Axe, Michigan, where Papa worked for a family named Spittler, and I was born on March 27, 1914. A year or so after we moved to a little house in Bad Axe where my brother, Donald John was born on December 25, 1917. We often visited the farm of a Sunday, it was only a walk of a mile or so, and I remember Donnie being in a baby carriage to go there. Also while playing on a stack of baled hay I remember falling in the middle of it and being rescued by the grownups. However, I have many more memories of that little house in town, though I was only 8 when I left it. That little house on W. Hopson Street had only four rooms. A big front room, a kitchen with eating area in back, with a stairway leading up to the two bedrooms upstairs. It had no indoor plumbing, water had to be fetched from a faucet in the yard. the primitive facilities were out back alongside a shed that stored wood and coal for the stoves for cooking and heating. There was a small pond out in the field between the houses in back where we used to sail boats in the spring, skate in the winter. Alot of homes at that time were like ours, but many in the neighborhood had modern plumbing. The mayor lived on the corner opposite us, a realator on our side of the street a doctor next to him on the intersecting street. In a small town like ours everyone pretty much knew each other, their children all went to school together.