What's A Caulk?

Bad news…

Another week has gone by. 

Good news…

It’s only one more week until the official start of spring. YAY!!

I was poking around in some old photos I’d taken and saw this one from June of 09; daisies pushing up through a crack in the concrete beside the garage. It made me smile and reminded me of the promise of summer to come, so I put it up on my desktop. 

Spring may be just around the corner but today was just about as cold and blustery as any day in the dead of winter could be. 

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Mike and I had gone into town earlier this past week, on Monday actually, and made several stops while we were there. We went to the hardware and the grocery stores, the post office, and Mike wanted a haircut. When we drove past Shorty’s Cuts though, she wasn’t open.

“Maybe she opens at 10. Let’s go get a library card and check back later,” I suggested.

At the Wyalusing Public Library we ended up with two library cards, one for Mike and one for me. We spent an hour in there, getting the cards, and chatting with Cathy, the director. Wyalusing has a fabulous public library! 

“Can I come back another day and write a blog about the library?” I asked.

“Sure, I’d love to have you do that,” Cathy replied.

Mike was fascinated with all of the historic photographs adorning the walls and asked Cathy about a couple of buildings in town.

“We have a book,” Cathy starts to say and walks away. She knew we would follow. She leads the way into the media room and picks up a well-thumbed copy of Wyalusing Valley Portraits and hands it to Mike. “The Wyalusing Valley Museum Association sells these, but you’re welcome to sit and look through it if you want.”

Mike took the book and sat down at a table. “How about wire weaving?” I asked Cathy. “Do you have any books on that?” 

Cathy led the way and I followed her to another section. “If we do it’ll be back here,” she said. When we got there, the book she was thinking of wasn’t there. “It must be checked out.”

“That’s okay,” I told her. “I can actually find a lot of stuff online.”

When we got back to where Mike was perusing the book, he was so excited. “Peg, look at this one,” he said and flipped back a few pages.

“Uh-huh,” I said, but I can’t tell you now what he was excited about.

Mike flipped through the pages and asked Cathy a question here and there. As I stood looking over his shoulder he flipped the page and a shot of the main street business came into view. Now it was my turn to ask a question. I put my finger on the page so Mike wouldn’t turn it before I could ask Cathy, “Why did they always have steps up into the businesses in the old days?”

Cathy didn’t hesitate, she knew the answer. “Because the streets were muddy and it gave people a place to step up out of it.”

We’d been there a good while at this point and I was ready to go. “I think we should just buy a copy,” I told Mike. I turned to Cathy. “Do you have a new one?”

“I sure do,” she said and once again she was off. This time we went to the front desk and she pulled out a brand spankin-new copy, still in it’s plastic.

“Excellent!” And I wrote her a check. 

 

As we were leaving town Mike drove past this old building. There was a squirrel clinging to the front of it, on the second floor near a hole by the door. “I wished I’d gotten that picture,” I told Mike, “but I didn’t have my camera ready.”

Mike pulled a u-ey at the end of the street, probably an illegal one, and went back but the squirrel was gone, out of site, inside his little hidey-hole, I bet.

Coming home, Mike was halfway up the driveway when I saw some birds at the edge of the yard take flight. Among them was a flash of red. “There’s a cardinal!” I exclaim as he sat on a bush. There’s just something about the bright red of a male cardinal against the starkness of a winter landscape…

Mike didn’t stop and had just put the Jeep in reverse and was backing up toward the garage, when I say, “Pull up and let me get a picture, would ya’ Mike?” 

Mike put the car in drive and crept toward this guy, all the while putting his side window down.

“Closer,” I say.

“If I get closer you’ll have to shoot out the windshield.”

With the snow smattering on the windshield, spotting it all up, I wouldn’t get a decent picture that way. “Well, go in the yard,” I say. Then I see the RV pad. “Head toward the RV pad,” I quickly amended. 

Mike did as I requested, but with the densely falling snow, that’s all my camera wanted to focus on.

“Doggone it!” I said and clicked away. Finally, I got the auto focus to change and this is it. This is the best shot I got before he flew away.

Saturday was our cold and blustery day, although today (Sunday) isn’t much better. I spent a few hours Saturday going over pictures and figuring out stories to tell you in my head. 

Pretty soon, this old building will be gone, I thought when I chose this one for the squirrel story. (I know, I’m using the same picture twice.) Our city bought the building so they could tear it down. It seems like they could have figured out a better way to have the building torn down without spending $10,000 for the purchase of the building, plus now they will spend another $24,275 having it demolished. Doesn’t make much sense to me, but that’s what they did. 

“What did it used to be?” you wonder.

I know, right! I wondered the same thing myself. I always thought it was a mill because it’s right on the creek. But I didn’t know for sure. 

Mike’s book! Maybe it’s got a picture, I thought. I pulled the book off the shelf and paged though. There was only one picture in the whole book that had this building in it and it wasn’t even a picture about the building, it was about the bridge. 

I turned to the internet and spent quite a long time Googling it but when I Googled ‘old mills in Wyalusing, PA’ only one came up and that was Welles Mill. The Welles were and still are a very prominent family in this part of the country. Mike’s book shows how handsome the mill was in the 1920’s. 

I’d just about given up on finding out anything about this building when I went back to the book one more time. There’s something written on the side of the building, maybe I could find out more if I had a name to Google. I got out the magnifying glass but I couldn’t read it. “Mike, can you tell what this says?” I got up from my seat and went around the table to where Mike sat playing a game of Solitaire on his computer.

“What?” 

“On the side of the old mill. It says something but with these old Cadillac eyes of mine, all I can make out is Taylor, Arty and I think that’s a Chevrolet sign.” Cadillac eyes, get it? You can blame a lot of things on cataracts.

Mike studied it for a while. “And Sons… it says and Sons on the end of it.” 

I Googled that and came up with Taylor McCarty & Sons which was a car dealership. Car dealership? I bet it wasn’t always that, I thought but couldn’t come up with anything else. 

After church today, I asked the Kipp’s. Rosie said she doesn’t remember what it used to be, if she ever knew. “It wasn’t anyplace I’d ever gone into. You should ask Pat. She’s lived here a long time. She may know.”

“I think she’s gone already. How about Lamar, would he know?”

“I don’t know, you can ask him.”

I made my way to where Lamar was chatting and when he turned to me, I asked him. 

        “I’m not sure, let’s ask Leon,” he replied. Lamar called Leon over and asked him, but Leon didn’t even know the city had bought it and were going to tear it down. 

“There did used to be a dam there that made a big pond,” Leon said. “Did you ever see any pictures of that?” 

“I had not,” I told him, “but it makes sense. Grist mills often used water to turn the massive wheels that turned the heavy millstones that ground the grains to flour.”

“The Rocket Courier had an article in this week’s paper about it,” Lamar said. “Did you see it?” 

“I saw it online. It just called it the Cotter building and when I Googled that I found out that was just the name of the guy that bought it ten years ago.”

I obviously had not seen the whole article because Lamar, bless his heart, when he got home he found the article and called me. “It says here it used to be a foundry and a machine shop in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s.”

“Really!” Boy was I surprised. 

“It was owned by Wyalusing businessman and inventor Will Lee. He owned a movie theater and a clothing store too, however, he was likely best known as a machinist and blacksmith. He invented a horseshoe caulking machine — whatever that is — that sped up the process of adding caulks or cleats to the metal shoes worn by workhorses and met with wide commercial success but was short-lived due to the increasing popularity of the automobile,” Lamar read.

I didn’t know what a caulk was either, so I Googled it. And now we know.

 

         Let's call this one done.