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first interview   2

the room was a big round table on which the community tailor used to sit, cross-legged while making father's clothes. We children loved to hear him sing. The kitchen was large with a great fireplace which was the only place to cook. There was a long table, and in the potato-digging season the harvest hands ate at the table. We children held up the corners of the tablecloth and a big black pot of potatoes boiled in their jackets was poured on the tablecloth. No one had a plate, only a tin knife and fork and a cup full of buttermilk. Potatoes and buttermild formed the chief sustenance of the poorer classes. We had our meals in Mother's room, never eating with the servants." (note: I think "Mother" was a ladies maid to a local estate-owner - a better-paid kind of domestic service. (ELP)) "We had an orchard and a garden and a row of beehives. We lived in a land of milk and honey. We never knew what hardship meant until we came to the land of the free and the home of the brave. Father didn't like the government. He wanted an estate of his own and America was the land of promise. In Ireland we went to an infant school. I could read the bible when I was four. When I was old enough I walked the mile from school past fine mansions on the hedge-lined roads. Through the big iron gates we got glimpses of a paradise of beauty and not far from there, wretched hovels where man and beast often lived under the same roof. We finally left Ireland on a sailing vessel and after six weeks we landed in New York. From there we went to Pittsburg. The house we lived in was a shanty built of one thickness of boards. It was very small. We used a trunk for a table. Cholera swept over the city in 1852. It was terrible." There is much more to this letter, a bit indicating anti-Catholic sentiments. Grandmother Sophia grew up, married a pioneer settler named Henry Lee Leonard: (known affectionately in his home town of Vermont as Hell Let Loose). They settled in Waukee, Iowa and Grandpa Leonard led the farmers in the area in tile draining the land, selecting seed corn and importing good breeding stock for his Hereford cattle. Sophia