December 2014
Dear ,
Well here it is another Christmas, and time for me to send
my self-imposed letter to you.
As I have pondered what I might say to you, without being
too repetitious, I had the thought that maybe you would like to know a little
more about your ancestral home—this old house.
So I decided to tell you what I know.
This home was completed in 1889, at which time William Lehi Bateman
moved his family into it. William Lehi Bateman is your paternal three-great
grandfather. One of his sons, Thomas
Philip Bateman, 14-years-old at the time they moved into the house, is your
Great-Great-Grandfather and the second owner and occupant of the home.
William Lehi and his wife, Sophronia, build, lived in, and
raised 12 children, plus four foster children in the home. Phil (commonly known) and Josie (commonly
known) raised 10 children, one of which was your great-grandfather, Dean Wilson
Bateman, in this home. Dean fell heir to
the home soon after I became his wife and he and I, Dean Wilson and Sybil Greer
Bateman, raised five children in this home.
We shared it with Phil and Josie until their deaths. They lived on one side of the house and we
lived on the other. Early on Josie still
had use of the upstairs, but as our children grew, the upstairs became part of
our side of the house. There have been,
on occasion, others of the family living here, but none have owned it save
William Lehi and his posterity, until Dean’s death, when I fell heir to it
through marriage.
When the house was built, it was considered a large and
fancy home. It consisted of two floors:
kitchen, dining room, parlor, master bedroom on the ground floor. Upstairs, three bedrooms. You will notice the absence of bathrooms. There were no closets, storage rooms,
bathrooms, extras of any kind. The walls
were and are thick, made of adobe brick in order to help with heat in the
winter and cool in the summer. Later the
summer kitchen was added and eventually divided to make a porch and accommodate
a bathroom and small bedroom on Dean and my side of the home. Finally, the two
wings (bedrooms) on the north and the south.
I’ll tell you a rather funny, but true, story. There used to be an apple orchard across the
hollow. “Across the hollow” was a space
designation used then and now. It is the
other side of the deep ravine that ran through the farm and had at its west end
a warm water spring that was eventually turned into a pond, which you can see
today if you drive through the subdivision.
One year there was a bumper harvest of apples. Since there was no place to store them and
since the apples could be used to help feed the myriad people who, at any time
could actually be living in the home, the apples were dumped loose in one of
the bedrooms upstairs. I’ve been told
that the apples just about filled the—top to bottom and side to side! “Necessity is the mother of invention!” It
became a storeroom and not a bedroom for at least that year. And I’ve been told
that the family ate apple everything until they were so tired of apples that
they could hardly look at them!
On that note it is time to end this Christmas letter and remind
you once again that you must always remember how very much you are loved by me
and by our HEAVENLY FATHER and HIS SON JESUS CHRIST.
Great Grandma, Sybil
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