Ionia-Eaton County MI Archives News.....OUT INTO THE WORLD FROM WEST SEBEWA; As told on tape by T. Leander Peacock. June 1979
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MI, IONIA COUNTY:  THE SEBEWA RECOLLECTOR Bulletin Of The Sebewa Center Association; Volume 14, June 1979, Number 6.  Submitted With Permission Of Current Editor Grayden D. Slowins. June 1979
OUT INTO THE WORLD FROM WEST SEBEWA; As told on tape by T. Leander Peacock.

I was born near West Sebewa June 3, 1894.  My parents were Eunice Lindley and 
Sam Peacock, son of John Peacock, who lived in the log house on M 66 just north 
of the Clarksville Road on the Odessa side.  I went to school at West Sebewa 
and that was the extent of my education through the eighth grade in my 
sixteenth year.  We took the eighth grade examination at Lake Odessa in the old 
High School building.  I remember Alta Johnson as one of my teachers and also 
one of the Carpenter girls.

At home I worked on the farm some.  When my brother got a little bigger, I 
began to work out in the summers for two or three years.  I worked in the West 
Sebewa store one summer when W. R. Wells owned the store.  His son was 
operating the store and he wanted to be gone for the summer so I took his place 
in the same building that Mrs. Patterson now operates her store.  We bought 
eggs and cream from the farmers.  The truck came over from Woodbury once a week 
and picked up the cream and eggs and took them to Woodbury to ship them out.  
We tested the cream and paid for the amount of butterfat.  We had a Babcock 
centrifugal tester turned with a crank.  We also bought butter.  We did not buy 
poultry.  A truck came through the neighborhood for that.  We sold drygoods, 
overalls, groceries and things of that kind.  We did not have the post office 
in that building.

About that time the Presbyterian Church just south of the store stopped holding 
meetings.  The membership got so low that they quit and went to other places to 
church.  The Creightons, Goodemoots, Thorps and others as well as myself used 
to go to that empty church to play cards and fool around as young men do.  The 
stove was about shot so we met there only in good weather.

I painted houses some in early summer but later I went to work threshing and 
working in the sawmill.  I worked eight winters in the sawmill and eight falls 
with the gang thresher.  I tended the separator and looked after the blower so 
that whoever was stacking straw could get the straw where he wanted it.  By 
that time we had begun threshing out of the field though some were still 
stacking the grain before we threshed it.  I worked with Jimmy Creighton one 
year and the rest of the time with his son, Sam Creighton.  Jimmy was a good 
manager.  He had threshed for a good many years before that.  I think that my 
father was with his crew for one or two falls.

Sam Creighton had a bean huller besides the thresher.  Lots of times we slept 
right in the barns where we were threshing because we were quite a little ways 
from home.  Sam had seven or eight men in the crew that followed the thresher.  
Bill Elens and one of the Downing boys were in the crew.  There was quite a bit 
of transient help in the crew.  The pay was 50 or 60 cents a day.  This went 
back to the period of 1910-1918.  The Creightons used a steam engine.  When I 
was a kid we would hear the steam whistle blow and we would run out by the road 
and watch the outfit coming and kept on watching until it got out of sight.

I went in the first call of the first draft in World War I.  At Fort Custer at 
Battle Creek they put me in the first squad.  The Corporal had been in there 
about three weeks and they made him a Sargeant and they had to replace him with 
somebody and I became the Corporal so I had the first squad in the outfit.  I 
got a chance to volunteer with an outfit that was going across the pond.  I 
thought the war was going to end before I would get over there.  When we got 
down to New York State, half of our men were in one barracks and half were in 
another small barracks.  The other barracks became quarantined for measles so 
they sent my half right on across.  Over there we were helping to build a camp 
at St. Lazare, in France…………….I spent from spring until Armistice Day on the 
ammunition detail.  Part of that time I was chauffeur for French officers.  I 
drove both an English-made Model T Ford and a French Renault.  That was the 
best job I had in the army.  I had two leaves of two weeks while I was in 
France and visited mountain resorts in Southern France.

My father died while I was on the front and I did not know about his death 
until six weeks afterward.  Once in a while the mail would catch up to us but 
it was a long time between times.  We came home on a German ship that had been 
confiscated.  The apparatus that desalinized our drinking water played out and 
the last two days we had no fresh drinking water.  We made tea from the salt 
water.  We were five days in New York and then they sent us on down to Camp 
Custer and then we were sent home the next day.  I was paid off $30 and $30 
extra and on that I came home to find a job.  I think I pained some houses as 
my first work.  We never got any other Government help.

I worked for Sam Creighton again for a year and then started farming on my 
wife’s folks’ place near Lake Odessa and ran a threshing rig of my own for a 
while.  I also did some tile ditching.  I worked for Zerfas International 
Harvester dealership for eleven years, six years in the Lake Odessa Machine 
Shop and then I worked thirteen years for the John Deere dealer in Lake Odessa.

My sons are Tom, Harry and Dick.  Betty is our oldest daughter and one other 
daughter, Kathryn, died.  Frances and Helen are the other two daughters.  
Walter Peacock is my youngest brother.  The two boys between us died.  I also 
had three sisters.

Mrs. John P. (Shirley) Lich is my granddaughter.  She has carried a part of the 
family back to its Sebewa beginnings.





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