Jack Meredith's Memories of Tower Hill (11/21/04)

I don't think a picture of our house on Tower Hill exists, but I can give you a physical description of it if that helps.

It was a two story house with four rooms and a path to the crapper, located about a hundred yards from the house down over the hill. Next to the crapper was an outbuilding where we kept a three legged horse and an old cow. [His little sister, Pat, disputes the presence of a three legged horse and an old cow.] A path ran down beside it to the spring where Joe and I carried water to wash, drink, bathe, etc. (Not much bathing.) We had a wood and coal stove to heat the kitchen and for Mom to cook on. We had a coal grate in the other room (fireplace) to heat the downstairs. All the kids slept upstairs and Joe and I slept under a feather tick mattress in the winter time. We would wake up in the morning and see the snow piled up where it had blown through the cracks in the house. A real paradise!

To give you a little background on why we moved from Monongah to Tower Hill, you have to imagine what the economy was like in 1937, the year we moved there. Granddad did not have any work and things were tight. He had a grocery bill he couldn't pay so Dad agreed to take over the bill in exchange for Granddad building us a house on 18 acres that my Grandmother Grace had inherited from her Dad, Wesley Grove. My Aunt Florence Fox owned an old house about 3 miles from the property, so Grandmother bought the old house for $75 from her. Grandpa tore it down and Dad and he hauled it over to our property. For two years, Joe and I had to walk up the Tower Hill every evening to take nails out of the boards and stack it up to be used again. That's what Granddad built our house out of.

After we moved up to Tower Hill, Radio Station WMMN in Fairmont bought some land from my Grandmother Grace and build three towers approximately 300 feet tall to broadcast their signal. That's where the name Tower Hill came from.

Incidentally, they hired me to dig the ditch between the towers to run an electric line to power the lights on the towers. Other ways I earned money was digging graves in the graveyard next door to where we lived. Walter Mason and I worked for $5 apiece and dug a lot of graves in that old graveyard. When we would hit rock, we had to use dynamite to get through it.

I was 12 years old when we moved to Tower Hill and stayed for six years, until the Navy took me away. I was glad to get off that hill. I walked to school and to the streetcar station to get to work at 12^th Street in Fairmont, at the Power Company garage. I was 16 when I worked there and stayed until I went in the Navy.