Ionia-Eaton County MI Archives News.....THINGS I REMEMBER by Ben Probasco December 1979 ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/mi/mifiles.htm ************************************************ File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by: LaVonne Bennett lib@dogsbark.com June 11, 2007, 3:25 pm MI, IONIA COUNTY: THE SEBEWA RECOLLECTOR Bulletin Of The Sebewa Center Association; Volume 15, December 1979, Number 3. Submitted With Permission Of Current Editor Grayden D. Slowins. December 1979 THINGS I REMEMBER By Ben Probasco When I started farming I used a hand corn planter. My dad marked the rows with a home made tool that was a six-inch log or timber with stakes protruding to scratch the ground and leave marks for the rows of corn………Later we got a couple of John Deere riding cultivators……..I was born May 21, 1885 at the Showerman house a half mile south. When I was about six years old my parents decided to make a trip to Texas to visit Uncle Uzel Probasco. We left Sunfield by train. We lived in the Merrifield house on Bippley Road on the land that Howard Meyers now owns. When we returned from Texas my father built this house where I live so that we could move in in late tall. He always said that it took the last cent he had to pay for the plastering……Granddad came here as a cooper and had a cooper shop, first on the corner at Sebewa Center soon after 1852. A little later he sold that land to Sam Gunn and bought the land where I live and built another cooper shop across the road from where Howard Meyers lives. I never saw him do any cooperage work because he was finished with that work before my time. He made a tight barrel and made whiskey barrels and cider barrels. When that kind of played out he made butter tubs. He could make four a day when he had the timber, at a dollar and a quarter apiece. I think he used white oak. The hoops were made out of hickory. When they were notched out right you could slip them right together and they would stay. He had a lot of tools up in his buggy shed and corn shed. They were right in there when I sold Roy Sears the shop so Roy got the tools but they didn’t keep them anymore than I did. I think I sold the building for $40 and I don’t know if Wallace has the building left or not. Frank Cassel came over and moved it. Before 1883 the schoolhouse was on Granddad’s corner. He was always good to kids and raised flowers. He would work harder than a man would at farming. He had a good garden for everybody. He had about half an acre of flowers around the house that was moved for the Portland Christian Reformed Church parsonage. Granddad was married three times. His first wife, my grandmother, was Deborah Showerman. After she died he married I. A. Brown’s sister, Luryette. The next one was a Quackenboss. She had been married before and her man died. Her maiden name was Boyer. Pa always said that Granddad could make a barrel airtight but he couldn’t nail up a gate. My Dad, Gene, and Heman Brown went to the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893. Near the fairgrounds they had Libby Prison set up. Heman had been a prisoner of war when the old tobacco warehouse was made a prison at Richmond, Virginia. He was in the prison a short time before the war closed. He had cut his initials in a door frame. When they went to look over the reconstructed building at the fair, there were his initials in the door frame. For souvenirs at the fair, Pa brought folders and he brought me a little box about an inch high that was made in Japan. It had two mud turtles about as big as a nickel. You just wiggled the box a little and the turtles seemed alive. I was at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. I got a stopover to the fair for three or four days on my way to Texas. I was seventeen years old. St. Louis people took the fairgoers in to make a little money and accommodate the crowds. Frank Showerman and Kelly had a cousin there and they stayed with her…….Granddad was the youngest one in his family. There in Ohio he did the farming. The other boys had all gone then…….Uncle Ephraim Probasco was here in Sebewa first. He owned the land where Ken Seybold lives in section 15. Uncle Uzel took this up for Granddad. Granddad was only 16 years old when he got it. His brother it up for him through a Mexican War grant. They had a brother who was killed in the Mexican War. There were a lot of the Ohio people who came up here. Lots of the settlers were from Ohio. I suppose they got noise of this part of Michigan down there that this was a pretty good place—probably a few mosquitoes and a little water. Anybody from Sebewa was known as a “Swomp Angel”. It’s a pretty good place to live in now. When Granddad came to look at land here he wanted to go to the land on the southeast corner of the Center. He was at the corner of Bippley and Sunfield Roads and went to the Center by way of Marshall Ralston’s on Musgrove Road. Pa asked him what he went that way for. He said “Well, the water was four feet deep between the Center and a mile east”. You can imagine what it could be in the spring when there were no ditches. Pa said he could remember when from the corner on Bippley east past Wesley Meyers’ place to the hill there was an old crossway—logs and blacksnakes and a little dirt on them logs. He said the water was four feet deep on either side of the road. I guess the country has improved quite a lot. End. Ben is now 94 and is at the Eaton County Medical Care Facility at Charlotte….. File at: http://files.usgwarchives.net/mi/ionia/newspapers/thingsir63gnw.txt This file has been created by a form at http://www.genrecords.org/mifiles/ File size: 5.8 Kb