My mother was borne 9/18/1907 in Buffalo. Her father’s business had a English walnut farm. I was familiar with the trees since she had one planted in our yard in silver spring where I spent the 1st 18 years of my life. You can see her and her father Norman Pomeroy sitting in their model T Ford outside the farm in photo # 1. Her father loved the latest car model and both my brother Pom and I inherited that obsession. 

I visited the farm one trip going to Buffalo and Niagara Falls and saw her house, the school next to the house and the farm cemetery where many family members are buried. My grandfather was also in charge of the mail, being postmaster as was his father, back in the pony express days. There was a post where the Ryder would  “post” the mail sack on to the post and hurriedly go on to the next place. The house contained a mail room for that purpose. The family (and the house) went back to the 1830s when the area was taken from the native Indians. My mother remembers as a girl having Indians coming into the front yard on cold nights and finding them sleeping there using a rock for a pillow. Or maybe get invited inside on very cold nights. The Indians were a very peaceful lot, not like in the movies after your scalp, although in reflection they could have a beef with the white folks.

In the town of Buffalo, they have a display, showing among other things, the mail parafinellia that came from the farm house when it was being used for mail. Mother used to tell me they were pioneers, meaning the people who settled there. The family came from Connecticut , and were the first of the families to settle there in the 1830s. This involved using mules to pull barges along the newly formed Erie Canal. This was the route to connect to the west.

Mother had a cigar box where she kept Indian relects that she would look at from time to time as a way of remembering. Pictures and feathers, I don’t know what happened to the box. I was  very young. But I remember pictures of Indians. She was a white person who took over land from the Indians, a couple of generations before. Most likely Seneca tribe, although I never spoke to her about it. But the family came there in 1830, and she was borne in 1907, so didn’t know about those earliest times. But she knew about the folklore, and used to sing to me about the Erie Canal.

Speaking of singing, mother sometimes referred to her youth as her “Salad” days. Mother never got a good chance of enjoying the freedom of early life.  Just a few years of her 20s, marrying into depression years of the 1930s raising her babies plus helping her husband’s older kids. So the salad days flew by very fast. A few years as a flapper was all. (flapper means the short lived life style of letting your snow boots un-done so they would flap in the 1920s).