Building their own house meant that there were no automatic debits coming out of family paychecks.  The house wasn’t anything fancy, but it was large enough for the family and boarders.

Yeah it was just regular ground [dirt] and we had a door we lifted up like this [moves as if to pull open a wooden latch]. Don’t know how they ever got that like that, but it was just slick as glass. **(Roxie Cooper Gillespie 1976)

Raising livestock cut down on food bills and brought in extra income.  Elizabeth rented to boarders, one of whom married into the family.  These side businesses plus a no debt rule meant that the Coopers and their boarders could insist on being paid in cash and could make it through strikes and times with less work.  

Elizabeth ensured that those in the household stayed out of debt by collecting everyone’s entire paycheck and then passing back a monthly spending and expenses allowance.  Neither spent beyond their means, but Tom was quite likely to give excess food or money to those in need while Elizabeth had a stronger eye toward a rainy day fund.  With kids, boarders and friends, frequenting the house surplus money didn’t stay up on the shelf for long.  

Roxie:

…and my dad would take his money and put in a can or paper bag or anything and we had a little garden down this way from the house and mom had a little garden up this side.  And down at this lower part, he’d raise corn.  And mom raised her tomatoes and onions and things like that up the hill.  

And us kids was play’n up there one day and around that and ya gather up the rocks you know and just have a you know inaudible he’d pile ‘em up and first thing you know the be a pretty good size. Kinda we’d round ‘em up. Looked pretty the way he’d do it.  

And we got to playing in that. [inaudible]…build some furniture out of them rocks and we found a whole big bag of money.  That was dad’s.  He would hide it in there till he would go to the bank.  What he ever wanted to hide it for, I don’t know.  But there’s too many people goin’ in and out of our house.  And we found it.  I think Ruth’s the one that found it. (Roxie Cooper Gillespie 1976)

*Will’s store started out as a flatboat store that ferried goods in and sold them at dock.  Cooper’s store moved to Smithers Main Street in 1914. (Cavalier )

**How do you make a dirt floor “slick as glass”? Here’s a step by step video. 

***Did you catch the continuity error?  In 14A, soon after the house was built, we depict the door as opening outward.  Here it opens inward.  We don’t know which way it opened–just that it had a homemade latch board that you had to lift.  If you didn’t want to be locked in, the latchboard inside seems more likely.  

The 14A house also has boards as the inside walls and no porch yet.  It wasn’t necessarily uncommon to add the porch later (which they did).  How do you get a raised wooden porch in front of a house with a dirt floor you ask?  You obviously don’t live in WV.   What we call a flat spot, they call a hill in the midwest.  

As to the interior walls, many families started with rough wood walls which later were covered in layers of newspaper until the time when either wallpaper or plaster and lathe was in the budget.  We currently live in an old house with original wood walls and ceilings still exposed in many rooms.

Another branch of the family used to have an old farmhouse in Webster County that had been in the family for generations.  I remember reading the newspapers on the closet walls–and seeing them behind the old wallpaper where it had torn in other rooms.

Other Featured Bullpush Mercantile Content (Merchandise)