Bob Austien lived all his life in Huntsville Ohio. My earliest remembrance of him was as janitor of our church. The Huntsville Methodist Episcopal (it said this above the front door.)
Bob Austien sat at the back of the church's sanctuary on a chair ready to care for the furnace and other duties. As far as I know, he received no salary (wage) for this. He did this on Sundays as well as other days when something was going on in church. This was his support of the church. He might have given money also for he was a bachelor and ran a local plumbing business. He lived with an old maid sister in the house that his parents owned when they were yet alive.
This sister worked all her life in the local telephone company, Bellefontaine office and when she died, she left the little Methodist Church one hundred thousand dollars. I guess she lived so simply that she had money to put into company stock. Which she did all her working years. I don't ever remember her attending church. Perhaps she did as a young girl.
Bob always chewed gum in church and at work. He always passed me a stick if I was in the back pew and he on his chair just beyond and tipped back against the rear wall.
Bob was a first World War veteran and had spent time in France though I never had heard him tell of those years.
Bob and his father were known as pump men, not as plumbers. They took care of windmills and hand operated pumps. Electric motor pumps were not common in those times. I remember the Austines working on our windmill when repairs were needed. They arrived at our farm in a Model T Ford truck with the necessary tools to pull a well pipe or drill a new one and fix the workings of the gears at the top of the wind mill towers.
After Bob's father died, Bob ran the business for the next 50 years. Always by himself. He did hire Gene Eggleston to drill a well in Huntsville in the nineteen 50's. By hand with a combination rope, pulleys and driver weight. Gene lifted the weight with rope and pulley and dropped it repeatedly on the pipe until water strata was reached-about 18 feet down in the town of Huntsville.
Bob also ran a cider mill in Huntsville during the apple season. I never got to see his operation. He high school boys would go down from our school and get cider but I was too young at the time. I do remember Pop taking our Model T car loaded with grain sacks of apples to the cider mill. Most of these apples were from one huge apple tree. I recall this car (model T) had a fold-down top (a convertible no less) and we pilled it full of apples. Pop got back with a full barrel of cider. Can't remember how we got it off the model T and down in the cellar. About forty years after this we had another barrel of cider from the Amish to sell in our pork market.
After that, cider began to turn "hard". Several of our occasional elderly customers became regulars until we finished off that cider.
Speaking of trucks, after the first Model T truck that the Austiens had, Bob used a 1934 pickup to haul his tools about. His next ruck was about a 1949 pickup and I believe that was the last one he owned.
When Cissie and I finally had our own house, the one that I paid $1.00 for, one that we moved across fields and set on our $750.00 lot (3/4 acre). This lot had an abandoned house on it that was no longer inhabitable and the owners wanted it destroyed. (I still have some parts of that old house). It did have a good 70' deep well on the lot. Bob Austien put a pump down (a submersible) did the plumbing work for the kitchen and bathroom and gave us a bill for $29. He just smiled when he looked with unbelief at our bill for his labor and many parts that he furnished. This was 1960.
Some years later while living in Hancock County but still operating the farm at Huntsville, I was talking to one of the men who owned and operated the Huntsville Grain Elevator and who knew Bob Austien, as everybody in that community did. He said that Bob once asked him if he knew how much money could be stuffed into a two inch pipe? He said that he had no idea. Bob said that he knew how much a two inch pope would hold- didn't say anything more.
Bob died a few years ago and there might just be a two inch pipe stuffed full of greenbacks and driven straight down about eighteen feet.
Bob didn't believe in giving the government money. He didn't believe in charging much because he didn't need much.
there was an Austien Mill, a water powered gristmill . It was located on Cherokee Creek but gone before my time. It was probably one of Bob's ancestors who owned it.
Cherokee was once a very small village with a stage coach stop and tavern in the early 1800's. It lost out to Huntsville when a railroad was put through a mile away. The name Cherokee was given because (probably) a Cherokee Indian lived there even though that tribe of Indians were located hundreds of mile to the southeast. There was also a Cherokee Creek that flows just below our house that we moved eventually ends in Indian Lake.
a branch of Cherokee Creek was named Cherokee Mans Dry Run. That name sounds as though Indians named it. the dry 'run' so named because it ran dry every summer but would flow enough in the spring season that sucker fish would swim upstream to spawn. As a child, I could occasionally corner fish in shallow water and catch them. I attempted to use a bent straight pin fastened on a string to catch suckers. No luck. These fish would congregate in the only deep water on that creek and it was barely three foot deep. My equipment was not up to the task of catching even a sucker.
This branch of the Cherokee was about 3/4 mile from the farmhouse where I was born and lived for 12 1/2 years. It flowed through that first farm that my parents owned when they moved from Defiance County, Ohio to Logan County and promptly lost to the Huntsville Bank when the price of alfalfa hay went from $40 a ton (Chicago price) to $15 (local).
Bob Austien could tell you just how deep my well was in that town of Huntsville and all the farms for miles around. He and his father had worked on all of them.
A lifetime as a pump man.
The Cherokee main creek flowed just below the house that Cissie and I had moved on our $750 lot.
I have since learned that there was a tribe of Cherokees located there.
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