This article will be fleshed out in the future with many more details. For now, I wanted to get this much of it recorded.
Freeman Gifford was the patriarch of the central-Illinois clan of Giffords. He came from New Jersey in the 1840s, where he entered government land.
Benjamin (b. 5 Apr 1840 d. 30 Mar 1913) was second oldest, after Eliza Ann, b. 1835. Later sons, by Freeman's second wife, were L. D., b. 1848, and George Edward, b. 1852.
L. D.'s son Harry Earl and George's son Freeman both settled in Indiana and worked for their uncle. Many of their descendants remain.
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First post in two years
I own all or part of seven houses in Medaryville, an old farmstead in the Milltown neighborhood northeast of Monon, and I help take care of two other houses out in rural Jasper county, making ten all-told.
My most recent acquisition is the Theodore and Mary Bremer house, which was also built to house The Medaryville Telephone Company, in the style of the day (summer 1908).
The photo below is the Simpson and Florence Faris Low house, built in 1888.
I only recently got this machine back online reliably. I’m not sure this is the platform I will be using in the future to communicate. I’ve gone Wiki.
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Cool and mysterious
One of my longtime goals, finally realized this weekend, was to dredge up the old cabinet I found last year in the basement at Dr. Hackley’s, get it upstairs and brushed off, and see what it was all about.
The cabinet is in two pieces, and it wasn’t clear until it was moved out of the cellar that the two went together. But indeed they do, as can easily be seen in the picture above, which was taken in the kitchen at the Hackley place. Note the old kitchen wallpaper.
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It was tougher than it looked
We got the roof on today. Still some work to do—the chimney needs flashed yet, and there’s still nothing where the “soffit” would go.
The roofing crew was pretty much ready to never see the house again when they got finished. While the exact quote escapes me, it went something along the lines of “if there had been one single piece of that roof on either side that was square, it would have been a lot easier.”
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In 1965 she recalled the streets of her childhood
I am going to reprint here what has become a valuable document for me in my efforts to paint an accurate picture of Medaryville’s past. In 1965, Flossie (Low) Poisel, who grew up in Medaryville, wrote the piece below for the local paper, The Medaryville Herald. It is a memory-generated “walking tour” of the town, beginning on the north side of Main Street at the railroad tracks and proceeding east, then crossing the street, coming back all the way west along the south side of Main Street, then crossing and going back east again, finishing up at the point of beginning. Later on I’ll have some commentary based on this recollection.
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