WALLPAPER: Frances Wolfe Haight of Kane called in reference to the historic building in Mount Jewett that recently started to collapse and had to be torn down. We mentioned it in last Monday’s column
She told of a day she went there to perform an errand and left so upset she still remembers it vividly.
“When I was a kid, that was a post office,” Frances said. At one point as a child, “I missed three months (of school) in sixth grade due to illness.” It was during that time she was out that the other students learned to use money orders.
A few years later, when she was a teen, she went to get a money order from the post office so her grandmother could purchase wallpaper through the mail.
She recalled that she went down, paid for it, then realized she needed help preparing it. “He let loose,” she said, adding that he yelled, “You should have learned that in sixth grade.”
“I was close to tears,” she said.
Luckily, there happened to be a kind woman in the post office who offered to help her.
The post office was a regular stop for Frances when she was a student. “It was my job to stop after school to get the mail,” she said. She still remembers the post office box number was 388, and it was a combination lock.
She said wallpaper was a common purchase for her grandmother, as people would pay her to paper their walls. “My grandmother always ordered wallpaper from a place in Titusville.” She always cleaned for people and took care of sick people, and her grandfather worked for the railroad.
“She charged $3 an hour for hanging paper,” said Frances, who noted her grandmother could paper up one to two rooms a day. When she stopped hanging paper, a man started doing it for people in town, and Frances said he charged double what her grandmother charged, and it took him three days to finish a room.
Her family did other things to help make ends meet. They had a “big garden,” and her grandfather hunted and fished.
This kept their reliance on store-bought goods to a minimum. She recalled going with her grandfather to pay off the monthly bill at the local store, and he was agitated because the bill one month was $20.
Despite that, “I loved going with him,” said Frances, who noted the shop clerk would give them a box of crackers.
