The family's origin

Page 3, paragraph 1
The Gromans came from the little town of Bavenhausen, near Lippe-Detmold [in Germany], and so did his mother's family, the Kluckhohns. They had the title of "von'' in their names. Between 1846 and 1849 a great many families from that community, friends and possibly some relatives, at least by marriage, moved to the United States. They settled in the area around Cedar Lake, Indiana. There were the Freverts, Meyers, Petersmeyers, Mandernachs, Buehlers, Einspahrs, and several others, remaining friends in their new country. After my father went out to Iowa, many of the younger members of those families followed him, and I have often thought how pleased their ancestors would be to know that they had stayed friends for several generations, and prospered. 

Description of Odebolt

Page 7,
All small towns are said to be alike, but they all differ in some ways. I really believe Odebolt was superior, perhaps because it was surrounded by some of the richest land in this country. The population first consisted of people catering to the farm families in the area, and later there were also many retired framers who built fine homes in town and moved into them, leaving the farms to be managed by their sons. Most of them became well-to-do and a big proportion of their children went away to college, many to Iowa State at Ames, returning to be better farmers, though some went on to seek their fortunes in the cities. Most of the citizens were well read, well informed, and patriotic, keenly interested in the welfare of their country.

Although located on treeless prairie land, the early settlers planted many trees so that when I was a child the streets were tree-lined.

.....My mother often mentioned how homesick she was in the early, treeless days for the woods and beautiful garden at her Indiana home, and how she longed for an apple from their orchard. She was also distressed because hunters killed, for eating, so many songbirds, as well as prairie chickens, quail, ducks, even meadowlarks.

Where the two streets converge [First St. and Second St] there was a bandstand for concerts on summer evenings. Later the bandstand was moved to Hanson Park and was replaced by a triangle filled with flowers. [referring to Hamilton Park, later Monument Circle]

 
(Click photo for enlargement)
Bandstand that stood at First and Second Streets

Page 8 
From this center, business establishments extended a little more than a city block along both sides of these two streets, There were three drug stores, four banks, three or four department stores, two shoemakers, the Post Office, two hardware stores, the harness shop, two barber shops, several restaurants, several meat markets, a pool hall, several saloons--which in my day, since Iowa was supposed to be a dry state, were called "blind pigs" (closed in front but entered via the alley)--and two livery barns replaced later by garages

Also, there were two furniture stores, and over one was a large hall with a very smooth polished floor, which was called the Opera House. It served as a dance hall as well as a scene for home talent, or traveling plays, although some of the latter carried their own tents. It was also where our churches held their bazaars. They would construct booths to display various homemade wares along the sides, and tables would be set up in the center for serving dinners, for which the charge was 35 cents first, later 50 cents. These bazaars were big events of the year….

There were four passenger trains a day, two from each direction, one from each direction carrying mail; and one of the pleasures of the day was to go down after one heard the mail train and wait in the Post Office for the mail to be sorted and placed in the boxes. It was a good place to see many of your friends and get the latest gossip.

Page 9
The little Odebolt Creek made a half circle through the town, and in the fall the local Council built a dam in the creek, where there were pastures in the summer, to create a very fine skating pond that was the scene of many happy winter days.

The Groman Home

When he prepared to build his home, my father bought three city lots forming a large corner of Third and Maple Streets, which meant that the business district was only a block away on either street so that we were very close to all the stores. At first they had a cottage, but they added on to it from time to time so that by the time I remember it, it was complete. Downstairs was a center hall with a stained glass window. A door on one side opened into the front and back parlors. On the other side a door opened into the sitting room, dining room (with a powder room opening at one side), kitchen and pantry--with stairs going up from the front hall and back stairs going up from the kitchen. These stairways were very convenient as in those days friends often called afternoons, and if one were not presentable when the doorbell rang, one could run up the back stairs and fix up a bit before coming down to the front door.

Upstairs were three very large, one medium-sized, and one small bedroom opening into a long hall, and a bathroom with a marble lavatory, a toilet (called a water closet as one pulled a chain to flush it), and a large porcelain bathtub on feet…

The top edge of the bathtub was covered with curved wood. This made a good place to put our side-saddle, a nice brown leather one with a red velvet seat, and pretend that one was riding, when I was too young to ride on a horse. We also had a fine dappled-gray rocking horse with a real hair mane and tail…

We had two water systems in our house: hard water, cold for drinking, for the town well; and soft water, from our cistern, for washing out clothes, our hair, and ourselves. So our sink had three faucets, one for cold drinking water and two for soft water, one cold and one hot. The hot water was heated by the kitchen range, a brass colored, tall, cylindrical water tank standing between the kitchen sink and the stove. The soft water was the rain water from the roof that ran from the gutters to the downspouts to the buried cistern.

In order to run through the pipes, water had to be pumped into a storage tank in the attic, which was later done by an electric pump. But in my first memories it was [my brother] Herman's job to pump the attic tank full once a week. So Herman had the neighboring boys come over to hold a contest to see who could pump the most strokes without stopping. They didn't realize that the contest was filling the tank. I don't know whether Herman had read about how Tom Sawyer got the fence painted or whether this was an original idea of his, but it worked.

We had a full basement with cement floor, divided into three rooms by wooden partitions. The first room, which could be entered by steps just outside our kitchen door, was used as the laundry. Next was the furnace room with a coal bin adjacent, and third, a storage room where many jars of home-canned fruits and vegetables were kept. Every fall my father would get three barrels of apples from New York State, one each of Jonathan, Winesap, and Northern Spy. Local apples were plentiful but were wormy and didn't keep well. We also had a supply of black walnuts from our farm.

We had a stairway inside from the dining room down to the basement. Often on winter evenings my mother would give me a wooden bowl and ask me to go down and get some apples and nuts. In those days there was practically no crime, but still I was very much afraid of going down there, but wouldn't say so. I would arm myself with a butcher knife and as I started down the stairs I would sing a hymn, thinking no one would have the heart to harm a child singing a hymn.

We did do a lot of roller skating in those days, the rollers being made of wood and the skates clamped on the shoes, as with ice skates. They were inclined to come off at a crucial moment. Many of the sidewalks were of brick or wood and not smooth for skating…

And we loved to play hopscotch. In bad weather I thought our long hall upstairs was just made for that. We'd draw the diagram with chalk on the hall rug and jump away. I know now that was a real ordeal for my mother.

In the sitting room, which now would be called a family room, between the front hall and the dining room, were a fireplace and a bay window. There was also a bay window in the bedroom above the sitting room, both formed by the curved corner of the house, going on up to be topped by a turret, or small tower, which made it a typical "Gay Nineties" house. Outside, between this curve and the front door, was a porch with "gingerbread" carving along its roof. On the other side of the front door there was the one-story bay window of the front parlor, with similar gingerbread carving along the eaves of its roof.

Next door my father had a small office built, which looked like a cottage, with a porch and three rooms inside: the waiting room, the consulting room, and the room where he stored and mixed all kinds of drugs. Those were the days when physicians sold the medicines they prescribed. There was no charge for an office call and often the medicine was only 25 cents. If the case called for something my father didn't have on hand, the patient would have the prescription filled at the local drug store.

About 1910 or before, my father built a one-floor brick and cement-block office downtown on Second Street between the combined Town Hall and firehouse, and the German bank. It was before the town had electricity because he had a plant in the basement to generate electricity. The physics class in the high school made an expedition annually to see how it worked.

Behind the house were the barn, the shed for the cobs and coal, the woodpile, and the playhouse, our old chicken house on the farm which my father had moved to town to serve as a playhouse. It was just one high-ceilinged room, bare wooden walls with two-by-fours from floor to ceiling every two or three feet; but it was the scene of many happy hours.

When neighbors bought wallpaper they would donate leftover paper, and we spent much time putting this paper up. It didn't bother us that every strip was a different color and design; we thought the result was elegant. Near the playhouse there was also a ("john," "Chic Sales," or) "Mother Jones," as we called it. I suppose that the reason my parents kept it, even though we had indoor toilets, was that it saved an awful lot of tracking in and out of the house for us and all the neighbor children.

We also had raspberry bushes, strawberries, an asparagus bed, and a good-sized vegetable garden. There were also grapes, gooseberries, and currants. Then, along the side separating our lawn from the Coys', we had flowers, including yellow roses, moss roses, peonies, and lilacs. Then there war two elm trees and towards the front yard near the street, an evergreen tree, the annual home of rose-breasted grosbeaks.

In the earlier days a mountain ash stood in the front yard, and we enjoyed stringing the red berries into necklaces. The front yard was given over to the lawn; on the south sideyard were three apple trees along with a green wooden lawn swing, the kind with two benches facing each other. On the other side, towards the side street, stood a cherry tree. In later years we had a plum tree which grew from a plum stone my mother had brought from New Zealand and planted, although my father tried to convince her that it would never grow. It did grow and had plums, but not as large as those in New Zealand.

In the back yard we had a high-swinging swing, supported by two telephone poles. It was fun to stand on the swing board and "pump up" high, sometimes two kids facing each other, doing it together. I remember my mother saying on her forty-fourth birthday that she was going to push me in the swing and run under me forty-four times, once for each year. The joy of the swing was tempered somewhat by my concern as to whether she should do so much running when she was so old.

Close to the house, by the kitchen door, and between the cellar windows, were beds of lilies-of-the-valley and Stars of Bethlehem; and on the north and west sides were flowers we had transplanted from distant woodlands. There were bloodroot, Sweet William, Jack-in-the -Pulpit, wild ginger, Solomon's Seal, Dutchman's Breeches, trillium, and hepatica.

Where the yard touched the street sidewalk, front and side, we had a fence made of two iron rods supported by green wooden posts. It made a good place for sitting and for limited acrobatics. I remember one day as I sat out there, our church bell across the street, and the one on the Methodist Church back of us, began to toll mournfully. I anxiously inquired and was told that our President, McKinley, had been shot. There were no radios in those days to spread news, nor extra papers in such a small town, but the news would be shouted about in city streets for "Extras."

There also, just beyond the fence sidewalk, and parking lawn, near my father's office, were hitching posts where farmers coming to see the doctor could tie their horses.

A wide sidewalk made of bricks almost a foot square and a very dark red, almost wine-colored, ran along the street at the side and in front of our house. A narrower walk of the same bricks led up to our front door, and from there a branch of the walk went one way around the house to the kitchen door, the other branch to my father's office. When our house was torn down in the Fifties, I understand that George Dresselhuis, who bought the fine Petersmeyer home, bought those bricks to use in his patio.

In the kitchen we had a large oak refrigerator which we called the ice box, near the back door so the iceman wouldn't have so much opportunity to "track up." The amount of ice in the box, of course, had to be watched, and we would put a card in the front window to flag the iceman as to the number of pounds that it needed. We also had to be sure to empty the pan under the icebox where the ice that had melted ran off, because if forgotten it would run all over the kitchen floor….

My Family in Iowa continues on  page 2     page 3

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