Sommerer Family Website

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Mary Jane on the Porch

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Aunt Cleo sent me these two pictures. Here’s what she wrote:

I have 2 pictures here that were taken of Mary Jane Sommerer Piazza. These were taken about a month before Julie was born.

This was Grandma & Grandpa Sommerer’s back porch before it was converted into a living room and a bathroom. Picture #2 shows where we piled the wood for the stoves when we carried it in from the wood pile. It also shows a square washtub hanging on the wall. The door & window go into the kitchen. On the lift of the kitchen door is a weight that was used to press the tobacco together for shipping. I don’t know what else it was used for, but it was very heavy. The part of the porch you can’t see had a swing and the washing machine was stored there.

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Aunt Naomi’s Story (part 18)

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At night in winter on weekends we would sit around the kitchen table and play cards or monopoly until the fire died down and the kitchen got cold. Then we would go to the outhouse or use the indoor accommodation (pot with lid), and then run upstairs to bed and jump in under the covers as fast as we could. There was no heat upstairs except for the heat that came from the downstairs stove’s flue pipe. These pipes were very dangerous because if an article of clothing was left against them, the clothing could catch fire. There was one home in the community that burned down because of this. We were always very careful not to leave our clothes by the flue. When we went to bed, mother would always yell, “Make sure there are no clothes around the flue.” If we took a glass of water upstairs, it was sometimes frozen in the morning. We had plenty of very heavy quilts and blankets, so we were very snug once we got in bed. A few times we took hot irons (not the electric kind) up to the bed to help warm our feet.