Memoirs of my Town

The town of Delaware was a very different place fifty years ago than it is today.  Talking to my grandpa is an easy way to see that.  The actual area that we live in has not changed very much.  All of the houses that were there, besides the house that I live in which is built on my grandparent’s property, have been there for a very long time.  These are all farms and the buildings and land aren’t going to change a whole lot.  One of the cool things that my grandpa had to say was that they built a railroad through part of his land, and he had them use some of the dirt to stack under the railroad.  He used the hole leftover from the dirt to have a pond so we can fish and for the horses to drink out of.  There is a picture up of an aerial view of the house and it was interesting to see the land without my house or the pond being there.

The biggest difference is closer to town, where some of the farmland has become subdivisions.  Some of this has been done in my lifetime, and some was done before that.  It is weird enough seeing some of the land that used to be completely flat or corn is now a bunch of houses packed together.  The town used to be a fairly small town as well, being a city of almost 40,000 people now, it had less than 20,000 in the 1980s, and much smaller before then.  There have been numerous restaurant changes and storefronts changing, but that has not really effected him much.

On top of farming, my grandpa also worked for the county.  He was the county roads commissioner at one point.  One of the funniest stories that he told me was when someone got a job with the county and came in with long hair.  My grandpa made him go get a haircut before he could work for him.  When he came back the next day, my grandpa said it was still too long and drove him to the barber and made him get it cut even shorter.