Johannas Garber Home in VA
Photo Credit: Emmert Bittinger
found online at
http://www.vbmhc.org/visit-us/off-route-42-driving-tour/off-route-42-virtual-tour/ but the link no longer works.
This weeks Saturday Night Challenge "Who is your Bad Behavior Relative" and the other posts that responded to that challenge can be found HERE.
My father's mother was Doris Ellen Shively. Her mother was Carrie Belle Jacobs. Carrie's mother was Elizabeth Ellen Garber. The Garber family traces back to an Old Order Background as do many of my family lines. I would not consider Lydia Stoner Garber's behavior in this story bad because I think she acted very heroic. But I love the story and wanted to share. I can just see it. I would love to track the gene that has that spit to it. Lydia's husband was the brother of Samuel Garber and Samuel was Elizabeth Ellen Garber's great grandfather. In November of 2004 I was privileged to receive an email from a woman named Gladys Royer that contained attachments of her lifetime of work on the Garber line. What follows is quoted from the reports that she sent me.
From John Heatwole’s The Burning -“Just to the south and west of the church stood another home of the extensive Garber family. Lydia Garber, age twenty-seven and known as Aunt Liddie to her nieces and nephews, lived with her elder brother and widowed mother in a house built against the western rise of a little vale. She had been watching the evidence of the approaching destructions since the previous afternoon. The scores of narrow smudges being pulled toward a leaden sky had gradually thickened as the Union horde drew nearer. In the night a band of coral- light from the glowing embers – illuminated the horizon in that direction.”
“Troops moving up and down the Middle Road during the past week and a half had stayed near the road as they gathered livestock or moved supplies for fear of the surprise raids of the Confederate guerillas. The Garber farm, nestled between the sheltering hills less than a mile from the thoroughfare, had escaped attention for that very reason. Now the Yankees were in force and spreading out across the land.”
“Aunt Liddie correctly deduced that the Garbers’ period of grace was about to end. On the morning of the 7th she led their three horses up to the house, where she penned them in the living room. She then heated a large kettle of water on the cook stove. When the Union cavalrymen came to her door, she stood on the threshold with the kettle of scalding water and warned the unwanted visitors that if they tried to enter the house they would get the contents of the kettle in their faces. Her threat was greeted with nervous laughter. They had not enlisted to do battle with determined women, so they turned away. They set the Garber barn ablaze before riding on to the next far, but Aunt Liddie had saved the horses and kept the house from being ransacked. (Interview, Allen Littne)”
J. Floyd Wine writes “I recall my first visit, as a teenage, to the Garber homestead and talked with Aunt Lydia Garber who then was about 95 years of age (about 1930). She died soon after this visit and she left her papers with my father. She was the 4th generation of John H. Garber. I do not recall, however, how the buildings looked at that time.” (Aunt Lydia’s box of papers today are in the vault at Bridgewater College, and probably may be available to read).
“A barn, probably not the original, was burned during the Civil War by Sheridan’s army. Some additions have been made to the house and some horses or farm animals may have been taken inside of the house to present their being stolen/confiscated by the enemy."
“The walk from the drive goes to the basement door on the north side of the house. On the south side of the house there is a porch that looks like the front door. It goes into the living room, and the kitchen is on that floor. You should see the fireplace in that kitchen. I believe it was in the living room where they kept the horses the night they heard the raiders were coming during the Civil War. They ‘hid’ the horses in the house. The raiders came and found nothing. The chickens had already been stolen, perhaps cows too. So they burned down the barn. The horses got just inside the door.”
