Tag: towns

A Childhood Beside Poffenberger’s Well

“Mother, mother, where’s your daughter?/ Oh, my laws, she’s gone for water/ Three times daily I must yell her to and from the well….”

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Once, more than 150 years ago, Myersville’s de facto town well likely stood beyond that white picket fence. The well had almost been forgotten when this postcard photo was taken circa 1911. Author’s Collection.

In December 1951, Rev. Horace Ehrman Zimmerman wrote of his childhood in Frederick County, Maryland, for the Middletown Valley Register, which printed the story on the 28th of that month. “Of all the memories of [my] boyhood days in Myersville, none are more vivid to the writer than the old Enoch Poffinberger home well, across the street from the Lutheran Church. While not called a ‘village well,’ it virtually amounted to that for that part of the village in which our home was located. There were several other neighboring wells nearby, but none gave forth the clear, cold water that this well produced,” Zimmerman noted.

In small Maryland towns, the public well was not just a source of clean, drinkable water, but was also a social anchor point. “From its platform political speeches were often made; the village wiseacres … whittled and discussed the country’s problems; women gathered about it to gossip … [and] auctioneers cried public sales,” Zimmerman wrote of the common scenes of his childhood during the decade after the Civil War.

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We Were Happy Here

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Unknown American hamlet, Real Photo Postcard, circa 1910. Written on the reverse is “To keep.”

“We were happy here
Even in the cold spells
Even with the roads
Like a frozen river
We would keep each other warm
And we were happy here
With the soup on the fire
And the wind in the chimney
And the floors too cold for bare feet…”

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Unknown town, real photo postcard, circa 1905.

“And we were happy here
When the Spring broke the ice
And there were limbs to be cleared
And the melting snow
Let the pines spring back up
Toward the sky…”

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Unknown Maryland town, real photo postcard, circa 1905.

“But we were happy here
With our simple life
It was our whole life
And we were happy here
Before the news came
That the world was small
And the roar was loud
And not quite so distant after all…”

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Middletown, Maryland, postcard, circa 1940.

“But we were happy here
When the cries of our babies
Were the only cries
And our bad moods
The only bad moods
Which we coaxed and stroked
Just like our own private fires.”

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My mother, Sally Garnand (right), on the farm of her Aunt Edna Newton, King George County, Virginia, circa 1936.

“But we were happy here
Before….” Ω

Words: “Private Fires” by Andreas Vollenweider. Images: Ann Longmore-Etheridge Collection.