Mary's story

(First ten pages – rough draft)

 

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Chapter 1

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Supercentenarian

Mary Isabel (Farlow) Ransopher, 111

“When the Lord says to do something, I try to do it.”

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“So, you wonder how Mother lived to be 111? She fell out of an apple tree

at eighty-two and didn’t break anything – only bruised – that’s how.

Mother said the best apples are on the top of the tree, so she got a ladder.”

– daughter Jane Ann

 

 

 

 

 

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I was born on our family’s farm the year the Titanic[1] went down. It went down on April 15, 1912, and I was born eight months later. We tend to think the Titanic was many years ago, but it’s the year I was born. 

Of course, I don’t remember the firsthand account of the Titanic. But I heard a lot about it at school as a young girl.

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Aunt Lilith – my father’s sister – I was with her, and there was a lady who walked across the street. Aunt Lilith said, "That lady's brother went down with the Titanic." We heard a lot about the Titanic, but then that died down after so long.

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January 2022. "How do you do?" asks Mary Isabel Ransopher. She is one of the oldest people alive, celebrating her 111th birthday on Christmas Day 2023. She has been blessed with a large family – four children, ten grandchildren, seventeen great-grandchildren, and nine great-great-grandchildren (as of October 2024). 

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She has seen nineteen presidents come and go, two World Wars, and six pandemics with unwavering grit. Her father bought a Kiddie bike when the older boys were ten and twelve which she was told not to ride. She defied him and rode anyway – sticking her leg underneath the bar to reach the pedal. 

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She also remembers having to rush through fixing her four brothers' school lunches before hurrying to fix her own so she could catch up to them on their walk to school.

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For most of her schooling years, Mary Isabel walked the one-mile trek each day until one rainy day when she decided enough was enough. “I thought, I'm not going to walk in this rain. So I went to the Apple House, got the car, and drove myself to school. And let me tell you, once I could drive, nobody dared take me anywhere."

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For the first twenty-three years of her life, Mary Isabel lived on Farlow’s Orchard,[2] the family property that still sits at the end of a long gravel driveway perpendicular to CR250.

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“We had a big lot in front of the house we called the Grove where the boys played baseball: they and the neighbor boys and all. Well, I wanted to play, too. But they would only let me if they needed one more player. They’d go to the barn and get a gunnysack, fold it up just right, and make a mitt; then, I could play. And boy, could I play.”

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Steadfast determination. It has suited her well for a century plus eleven years.

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How did Mary Isabel reach 111? Let’s ask the centerpiece of this story – Supercentenarian Mary Isabel Farlow Ransopher: 

 

I was not in school at the end of the First World War in 1918. But those events remain some of my strongest memories.

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My oldest memory is of the Armistice[3] of the First World War. I was five at the time. I turned six on Christmas Day. My father, Edward Farlow, came into the house and said, "Now we're going to go to Russiaville[4] and celebrate."

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We celebrated at my Uncle Al’s house. Uncle Al wasn’t really our uncle; he was Grandpa Thompson's half-brother. And he wasn’t in the war, either, but we still went to his house to celebrate the war's end.

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The young people marched up and down the street. And there was a teenage girl. She organized ten or twelve kids. Everybody had a flag. And they marched. They had sticks. We didn't have any banners. We just held up a stick with a white rag on it.

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Of course, there was no traffic then. But I still didn't get to march up and down the middle of the street like everybody else. My two older brothers said I was too little. They carried a stick with a rag. I was hurt. Of course, I wanted to do as the boys did. I was left out a lot. I always hated that.​

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I was five or six when we got electricity. If enough people signed up, they would build an electric line along our road. Of course, we signed up for it, but we lived back off the road, so we had to pay extra. 

We didn’t have an electric iron; all we had were lights. And then when we got an electric iron, the iron didn't shut off. It would get too hot, and you had to unplug it to cool it off. And then plug it back in to use.

We didn't have electricity when we were first married. Not in the bungalow in 1935.[5]

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Here’s what Mary Isabel’s daughter, Susan, said to her sister, Jane Ann: That's why you were born early: Mom and Dad didn't have anything else to do. That's why Mother cried during the Depression. She became pregnant with you (Jane Ann).

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They didn't have electricity. It was dark.

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Go to bed.

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The Flu Epidemic

Well, during the 1918 Flu,[6] news of the flu spread by riders on horses and by mouth. One person to another. I stood by my mother (I would have been six) as a neighbor teenage girl, Kit, came down to our house. She wanted to borrow turpentine or something familiar. Medication, we didn't have any. And so, Kit ran on to the Newby’s (Frank and Eva), our neighbors across the road, to get it. Kit’s brother, Willie, was sick. He had the flu. He died. It wasn't long after that Kit took the flu, and she also died.

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It was two or so weeks apart. Both teenagers died, Kit and Willie.

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My younger brother, Max, almost died. He was born in 1915, so maybe he had what was going on in 1918. Maybe that was part of the flu because he was sick, and the doctor had told some of the neighbors that we were going to lose him. But Mother rubbed his chest with Watkins blue box[7] (menthol camphor) ointment and made him a vest out of wool, which would go on his front and back, and he lived.

 

Maybe that was what it was. But he was the only one that got sick in our family. When Max got well, my father and grandpa, who did everything together, went to Kokomo[8] and bought Max a little coin purse. They never brought the rest of us anything.

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It irked us, thinking they got him something but didn't get us anything.

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The Telephone

The telephone came much earlier than electricity because the phone was run on a battery. But anyway, with our bill, everybody had to pay three dollars a month, whether you used that much or not. 

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You’ve seen these old telephones hanging on the wall with a crank. Well, I can remember cranking that thing on the wall. You just cranked and cranked, cranking it harder if the battery ran down. It didn’t need electricity, which came later.

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That must have been in the late Twenties because I graduated in Thirty-one, and we had a telephone at home by then.

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There were six parties on it. You know the party line?

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There was a long ring and a short ring.

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Or a long and two shorts, or just two shorts.

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You'd know your ring.

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Ms. Mary, what did you think when you first got a telephone? Did you use it a lot?

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Well, no. Not much.

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Dad said that when he and Frank Newby were teenagers, they tried to rig a telephone line between their homes so they could talk.

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That's how it started.

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Did they ever get it accomplished?

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No, I don't think so.

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Walking to School

In the early 1920s, we lived in a white two-story house a little over a mile south and east of New London and the school. It was somewhere other than Eastern Time or Central Time. It was the old time. We walked to school, and I didn't have a job yet. Well, my job was fixing all our meals for school. We carried either a bucket or a lunch box. We didn't like taking a bucket because we had to carry it home. We liked to have lunch wrapped in a newspaper. We could throw the paper away, and we didn't have to bring anything home. I always had a sandwich and a cookie, a Sorghum cookie. We had the Orchard[9] and Grove in the front yard, which was considered the south forty-four acres. We always had apples and peaches, cake and pie or something. We never bought oranges.

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We had to walk to the New London School; oh well. I walked for eleven years. When we walked to school, every road was gravel. That wasn't easy walking. And in the wintertime, we never had a snow day or ice day. We always went to school. We walked to school when it was so slick that we had to walk in the middle of the road with the horses. Buggies, too. Their tracks were too slippery. And the snow, I had icicles on my eyelashes when I got to school. My hands got so cold that they put them in cold water. I wanted warm water. No, you had to put them in the cold because it felt warm. Everybody was the same except those who rode the hack.[10]

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As a kid, we went sledding and stuff on the hills around New London; there were some nice hills. We'd go from the school over to the hills and sled down and see if we could cross the first bridge, because the hill slopes down this way, then curves and crosses a bridge.

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Everybody had a sled, and then one community bobsled would hold ten people. The hill, which was at our home, was from the barn to the creek. And to go down the hill, oh, that was a thrill. It was where all the community went to. The Thompson Hill, it's called. It was where my mother, Pansy Thompson, was raised in the house on top of that hill. You could go from the Friends Meeting House through the cemetery[11] to the hill at New London.

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We had a lot of parties that year. We were allowed one a month, and most of them were at our house. I arranged for our eighth grade to get together and sled. At school, there were fourteen of us; seven boys and seven girls. It just turned out like that. But anyway, I called Mother in the afternoon. She never refused me anything. You couldn't have a sledding party just any time. It had to be when the snow was just right. And so, I reckon the snow was just right when I called her at the last recess and asked if we could have a sledding party. It was quite eventful.

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During the summer, for my class, we had taffy-pulling parties. Mother cooked syrup, and she put the plate on the railing of the porch. And so, a lot of the classmates pulled taffy.

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Anyway, we lived back a lane. The next-door neighbor’s kids had to walk to school, too. But then the next home was across the line. The hack would pick them up, but not us. In my senior year, which would've been 1931, the hack stopped and picked us up in front of our house. 

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That would have been the first time we ever rode the hack. There were several of us coming out of school at the same time. Some walked in one direction, and others walked in a different direction until we got to Shirley’s Corner. And then Helen, me, Lodema, and some of us walked south.

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Shirley’s Corner is a four-way stop. You would come out of Russiaville going north before you’d get to New London. There was an old Dr. Shirley[12] there before my time, but they have always kept the name because the family lived there.

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We lived a mile west of West Middleton[13] on CR250. We would sit on the porch of our house, and we could see the dust on SR26. Our front porch faced south. We were glad we didn't live on SR26.

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It was always Middleton, Middleton, Middleton. One time, my uncle who lived in Kokomo said something about West Middleton, and I thought, West Middleton? It's east of us. It wasn't West Middleton to me; it was always just Middleton.

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The Quakers built the first school in this area. There were three one-room schools in the township. My mother, Pansy, taught at one of those schools. When the township bought the school building in 1872 from the Quakers, everybody was taxed. They took up a collection and bought slides and swings. Middlefork and Russiaville never had them, but New London did. It was always a conservative school. And it was above average in education. People that I knew, some of those older people, were well educated and had worked in other schools in other towns.

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When the township took over the school, everybody could go to school until the eighth grade. In the early 1900s, only some students would go on to high school. You see, everybody didn't graduate. Earlier, students just went for three months. Yeah, just to learn. Then, it was back to the farm to work. 

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The community erected New London High School's first brick building in 1876. It sat at the end of Main Street. They formed the bricks from the ground, and the first four-year graduating class was in 1896. There were twenty-two principals during its lifetime. High school commencements were held in the afternoon in the New London Friends Meeting House.

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Mother (Pansy) graduated in 1902, then went back to the eighth grade to review it, then she started teaching for a few years until she was married in 1907. A schoolteacher couldn't be married, and Mother couldn't teach after she was married.

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Was that just a Quaker thing, or were all the schools that way? 

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Yes, every school was that way. I haven't any idea when they started letting married people teach.[14]

The boys had to help make a living on the farm. They were big. They were twelve, thirteen, and fourteen, so they could start doing things around the farm. Herbert and Joe were older and played organized basketball, baseball, and track. When my younger brothers Max and Bob came along, it was basketball. New London had a community hall in a big building, and they made it into a basketball gym. They built some bleachers alongside the court. The gym was two blocks away from the school. You had to walk there. To heat it, they put a potbelly stove in one corner.

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Bob, my younger brother, played basketball. In the Orchard, we had a big Apple House. 

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There was a day when the iceman (and woman) came around and left the ice in the cellar. They put large chunks of ice in the window with the number of pounds – twenty-five or fifty – and came in the back through the alley and put the ice in the refrigerator. Of course, we never had a fridge or homemade ice. We had what we called a cellar – it wasn’t a basement – where you kept things cool, kept potatoes and all.

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Well, we could keep apples year-round. My dad built the Apple House in the garage while in the business. Anyway, we put the apples down in the cellar. There were springs on the back of the farm, and he fixed them so the spring water ran through these cement troughs on both sides of the building, keeping the Apple House moist; we kept a few apples all winter. We still had apples in April.

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We had a peach basket nailed above the garage door to practice.  

 

After a school day, I changed from our school clothes to everyday clothes. I sewed; I did a lot of sewing. Mother knitted sweaters and stuff for the Red Cross. 

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I was always at the house. I didn't do anything outside the house except for Friends Meeting House events until I was a teenager.

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Footnotes

[1] The majestic Titanic, a symbol of the British empire's wealth and opulence, praised for its luxurious amenities and believed to be impervious to disaster thanks to its hermetically sealed compartments and automated doors, met its tragic fate on its inaugural voyage when it struck an iceberg. Despite the heroic efforts of the crew, the ship snapped in two and descended into the icy depths, claiming 1,496 souls amidst the frantic chaos of evacuation. Return to text

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[2] Between Russiaville and New London, Indiana just off of CR250, sixty-three miles due north of Indianapolis. Return to text

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[3] The First World War, or The Great War as it was called, devastated the world from 1914 to 1918. It was driven by a fierce sense of national pride and the pursuit of colonial power, as countries formed alliances in a tangled web of secret diplomacy and global interconnectedness. On June 28, 1919, the war came to an end with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in France. However, this peace was only achieved after five months of an armistice declared at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month (November 11th) – a day now remembered as Armistice Day, symbolizing the end of "the war to end all wars." Return to text

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[4] Russiaville, Indiana. This community was founded in 1848 by Samuel Russel in Howard County. Despite being home to only around eleven hundred people, it has played a significant role in the impressive growth of Howard County from six thousand residents in 1850 to over eighty-three thousand today. While neighboring Kokomo has transformed from an agricultural community to one of manufacturing, Russiaville remains a beacon of traditional values and old-fashioned warmth. Return to text

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[5] If you were fortunate enough to reside in the town during the 1930s, chances are your household had access to electricity, enjoying the luxuries of electric stoves, hot plates, blenders, coffee makers, waffle irons, and Waring Electric roasters. However, for those living in rural farmhouses like Mary Isabel and the Ransopher family, it took much longer for power lines to reach their remote area. Return to text

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[6] The outbreak of 1918, often referred to as the infamous Spanish flu or the Great Influenza Epidemic, ravaged the globe with its deadly H1N1 influenza A virus. Originating in Kansas of that year, it spread like wildfire in four devastating waves over the course of two years. By the time it had run its course, a staggering five hundred million individuals – roughly one-third of the world's population – had fallen ill. The death toll has been estimated up to fifty million souls lost. Return to text

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[7] The J.R. Watkins Company, established in 1868, still offers a variety of household goods such as home remedies and baking supplies. The memory of the Watkins man, who traveled from house to house in a horse-drawn carriage, remains vivid for many individuals even after decades have passed. Return to text

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[8] In Central Indiana, Kokomo has some 58,000 residents. As the state's 13th largest city, it boasts a history intertwined with its thriving manufacturing and industrial sectors. In the early 1900s, Kokomo gained recognition for its pioneering work in automobile production and was dubbed the "City of Firsts" for its numerous groundbreaking innovations in the field of automotive engineering. Return to text

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[9] The Orchard House was built in the mid-1840s, with two rooms up and two rooms down and a lean-to kitchen on the north side. In 1902, Grandpa Lindley built onto the old house, extending it to the west side with a cellar made from scaly, rugged, uneven cement, a parlor, a dining room, two upstairs bedrooms, and a stairway in between. An old chimney guarded the facade of what once was. Return to text

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[10] Author’s note: While researching Mary Isabel's story, I came across several terms that were unfamiliar to me – "hack" being one of them. I discovered that Mary Isabel was referring to a type of horse-drawn carriage used for transporting children to and from school in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This "kid hack" was a precursor to the iconic yellow school bus we know today. These carriages were loaded at the back to avoid startling the horses and could carry up to twenty students from nearby farms to one-room schools in rural areas. As technology advanced, motorized versions of kid hacks were developed and eventually, in 1927, sturdy steel bodies were mounted on truck chassis to create what we now know as school buses. Return to text

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[11] New London hides a quiet secret – five graveyards, each with their own tales. But the largest, the Friends Graveyard, holds the remains of Mary's beloved husband, Marland. And in this sacred ground also lie her kin – Ed and Pansy, Lilith and Lindley, Herbert and Max, Joseph and Caroline Peacock, as well as Ward and Lucille (Ward’s headstone displays his service in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II). When her time comes to join her spouse, Mary Isabel will rest in eternal peace beside him. Return to text

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[12] D.J. Shirley, born in 1817 as the seventh son of a seventh son, was an infamous figure in Howard County. He dutifully honored his parents' wishes by pursuing a career as a traveling healer, braving harsh elements and rough terrain every spring to reach those in need. In the autumn of his life at seventy-four, he peacefully passed away in 1891, leaving behind a legacy of healing and compassion. Return to text

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[13] Between Kokomo and Russiaville on 250 South lies West Middleton, home to some one hundred and fifty residents. This idyllic town has remained virtually unchanged since its establishment in 1873. Comprised of just three streets – Rabbit Street, Hobson Street, and the nameless thoroughfare that serves as its main artery. Return to text

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[14] It wasn't until 1964, when the Civil Rights Act was passed and implemented, that the outright prejudice against married women working as teachers in the U.S. was put to an end. Return to text