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This year my family homestead joined the list of "Things That Aren't There Anymore" in Monaca.

Over the years many people may have glanced to their right at the house on the hill just after they drove under the railroad trestle and through the tunnel over Brodhead Road on their way to Wal-mart or the mall. They may have wondered if anyone still lived there or noticed an elderly man diligently mowing the flat area by the road. That house was the Guba-Winkle house and that man was my uncle, Martin Winkle, the last of the family to live there.

The house was built in 1887 for my great-grandparents, Joseph M. Guba, and his wife, Marie Catherine (Mary Kate) Schnobel in what was then known as Phillipsburg. Joseph had immigrated to the United States from Langenau, Bohemia, Austria, and was, I believe, employed by the Phoenix Glass Company after moving to Phillipsburg from Tarentum. He became a citizen of the United States in 1888. Mary Catherine's origin is a bit more obscure. Family tradition held that our ancestors were Germans and that they lived briefly at Old Economy in Ambridge before moving to Freedom. (Thus far, the family names of Schnobel and Mohr have shown no connection with the Old Economy records.) The pair married on April 15, 1885, and an item in the Rochester Daily Argus notes that "Many good wishes follow Mrs. Gube (sic) to her new home. She has been a dutiful and loving daughter, and cannot help but be a dutiful and loving wife."

Joseph and Mary Kate hired James Parks to build the house on the hill, and his specifications, written in a child's exercise book, agree to "do all the work necessary to complete the house according to the plan and specification in a workmanlike manner for the sum of fourteen hundred dollars." The frame of the house was to be "good hemlock lumber" while the interior woodwork was to be walnut. There were to be six rooms and five fireplaces with "neat wood mantels" as well as a hall half the length of the house. As well, there was to be an "extension" on one side of the house. (This was later moved and connected to the back of the house.)

Unfortunately, Joseph did not have long to enjoy his house on the hill as he died of consumption in 1892 at the age of 35, leaving Mary Kate with two small daughters, Wilhelmina Mohr and Josephine Marie. His newspaper obituary describes him as "a well-known resident of this place," belonging to the English Lutheran Church and the Equitable Aid Union "in which organization he carried considerable life insurance."

Mary Kate died in 1911 at the age of 52, leaving Willa and Josie both still living at home. Willa worked as a secretary while Josie continued to care for the house and livestock (cows, chickens and goats) that provided another source of income from their milk, eggs, and meat. There was a barn and a pasture in the flat area by the road, and this area was considerably larger than it is today, having shrunk when the Brodhead Road was widened. Behind the house were hen houses and a smaller house for "peeps' as well as a goat shed nearer to the railroad tracks.

Enter Daniel Bracken Winkle, a widower with daughters nearly as old as Willa and Josie. "Brack" was a prominent citizen of Monaca, serving at various times as fire chief, building inspector, constable of the First Ward, and quarantine officer for the Board of Health. He was vice president of the Phillipsburg Building and Loan Association, and owned a candy and ice cream store on Pennsylvania Avenue. He was also looking for a new wife and spent a good bit of time visiting the Guba sisters. Willa considered herself a good candidate for the role---until he proposed to Josie! A newspaper item about the wedding is headed, "Fire Chief Weds," and describes Josie as "well known socially."

For a time, Willa lived with the newlyweds, then traveled a bit, eventually marrying George Claycomb, and selling her share of the homestead to Brack and Josie who filled the house with three children: Daniel Frank, Jean Louise, and, much later, Martin Wilson. (At the time of Martin's birth, Brack was 61. My mother, Jean, recalled going to Sunday School the morning after Martin's birth and announcing that she had a new baby brother. Several people puzzled her by asking incredulously, "How old is your father?")

While Brack continued to fulfill his numerous duties about town, Josie continued maintaining the house and tending to the animals and her gardens, both vegetable and flower. The house and grounds were considered a showplace in town, and Josie worked hard to keep it that way. Both porches were scrubbed every day, and the lace curtains at all of the windows were spotless. There were round beds of iris and other flowers scattered around the lawn, and a brick walkway leading to the front porch was lined with peonies. Pear and apple trees bloomed in the spring. The furniture, all original to the house, was dusted daily, and the glassware in the dining room's built-in, glass-fronted china closet was kept sparkling.

The house and yard provided lots of fun for the three children who could count on having plenty of other children "from town" to play with. They went sledding down the hill to the pasture in winter and jumped from the hayloft in the barn in the summer-once right into a pile of manure below! On the Fourth of July, the children were confined to the safety of the front porch while their father set off fireworks on the lawn.

At one time there was a horse to ride, bareback, and a photo from that time shows the poor horse with five children on its back! A dog named Shep roamed about, and, of course, there were the cows, goats, and chickens. Jean's job was to deliver eggs and cottage cheese around town, a job she detested. For the rest of her life she refused to eat cottage cheese, while my grandmother, who had to kill and pluck the chickens she sold, never ate fowl of any kind. For Thanksgiving, we always cooked a pork chop for her!

Life was fun, but it had its "downside" too, as Josie was a strict mother. She rented a portion of her land to a black man from town who raised vegetables there, and one day. while working in her own lot, she noticed that some of Mr. Johnson's corn had been trampled. Immediately suspecting Frank and Jean, she grabbed a handy switch from a nearby bush and, despite their protestations of innocence, "taught them a lesson" and sent them to their rooms for the rest of the day. A few days later, finding Mr. Johnson working in his garden, she went over to apologize to him for his trampled corn. "Oh. Miz Winkle," he replied, "I did that myself." Jean and Frank got no apology from their mother.

In December, the door to the parlor was closed and the window shades in that room were pulled down so that no one could look into the room from the porch. There, while the children were at school, Josie spent her days trimming an enormous Christmas tree that was revealed on Christmas morning as the work of "Santa Claus." One year, when Jean was in fifth grade and beginning to be more than a little suspicious about Santa's existence, school was dismissed early, and as Jean came up the hill, she noticed that the blinds were up at the parlor windows. Creeping onto the porch, she saw her mother in the act of tree trimming. "Aha!" she shouted, "I caught you!" Josie was so furious that "Santa" returned Jean's sled to the store, and Jean got no presents that Christmas.

On Christmas Day, 1934, when Jean was seventeen and Martin just nine, Brack died of cancer. It was in the middle of the Depression, and Josie struggled to make ends meet. The phone was taken out of the house, never to be reinstalled, and, at one point, a boarder was taken in. Then, along came WWII. By then Frank and Jean were both married, but Martin was still in high school. Frank, by then the father of three children, went off to the Navy, and Jean's husband became a Ranger in the Pacific. As soon as Martin graduated, he, too, went into the army, serving in North Africa and Italy.

One night, Josie, unable to sleep, was resting on the horsehair sofa in the dining room when she felt a terrible pain in her leg. For some reason she marked the day on the calendar. Later, a telegram from the war department informed her that Martin had been seriously wounded. He was shot in the leg by a sniper while he tried to take cover behind a rabbit hutch, and he was evacuated, tied to the outside of a tank, as it rumbled through enemy lines. The date of his wounding? The same day that Josie felt the pain!

Even while in the service, Frank and Martin were still farm boys at heart. Letters to Josie from both asked, "How is Curly?" "Did Curly have her calf yet?" "Did Curly have a bull or a heifer?" "Is Curly still giving milk?" Meanwhile, the dog Shep, died "of a broken heart," as Martin, its owner, wrote on the back of its photo. Shep was buried at the brow of the hill with a circle of stones to mark his grave.

On Christmas, 1946, the war over, Martin arrived in New York while Jean's husband Steve, sailed home from Japan on the same day. In Josie's unheated parlor, the Christmas tree still stood when Martin arrived home. But, Jean, whose own tree was dropping needles, wanted a tree for Steve when he arrived home at the end of January. So, Josie and Jean untrimmed Josie's tree, carried it through the streets of Monaca to Jean's apartment on Atlantic Avenue, and re-trimmed it!

In the 50's, after a health scare, Josie "sold" the house and its contents to Martin, who never married, and he supported her there for the rest of her life.

As a child living just a few blocks from the house, I spend a lot of time there. Josie, the strict mother, had become a doting grandmother, and she indulged my ever whim. I loved pulling onions and radishes out of my grandmother's garden, and I often wonder what she did with all of them after I went home. She packed picnic lunches which we would take over by the disused "peep" house and eat while sitting on one of the apple trees that had fallen down by then. I loved working the pump handle on the cistern outside the "summer kitchen" door, although no water ever appeared. My white rabbit, Maggie, lived in a hutch by the hen house, and the little colored peeps that I received at Easter went to live in the hen house when they grew too big for our apartment.

The summer kitchen was the "extension" that had been beside the house originally. The sink, with a pump, was in this summer kitchen as was the old, green gas stove with the oven on the top, but the refrigerator, for some reason, lived in the "big kitchen" next door. The summer kitchen had a narrow cupboard where my grandmother kept her canning supplies and jelly jars, and, when I opened the door, the smell of paraffin would come wafting out. Above the summer kitchen and accessed only by a board laid across from the hillside directly behind the house was the "playhouse," as my mother and uncle referred to it. Here the smell was of the chicken feed that was stored there.

The "big kitchen" held a table and chairs as well as a highboy and a glass-fronted bookcase/desk. The pantry here smelled of the ginger snaps that Uncle Martin loved. From the dining room, stairs went down to the dirt-floored cellar that could also be accessed by a slanted door in the ground by the cistern. I was never allowed in the cellar as the steps, by this time, were "too rickety."

From the big kitchen a door led to the dining room that, in my memory, never saw a meal served. A large oak pedestal table occupied the center of the room, and a huge sideboard stood against one wall. It was filled with old games and toys that fascinated me. Here, also, my grandmother had her old treadle sewing machine and her radio that she listened to at night in the dark to save on the electric bill. By this time, all of the fireplaces were closed up and wallpapered over, and my secret delight was to sit on the horsehair sofa in front of the fireplace and poke at the wallpaper so I could hear the sand trickle down inside. (This activity was frowned upon by all the adults.)

Three more doors in the dining room also led to interesting places. One accessed the side porch, one led to the hall, and the third, which looked as if it might open into a closet, actually led upstairs, via a winding staircase, to a space between two of the bedrooms. When my grandmother suffered a stroke and was lying in one of those bedrooms, I admitted the ambulance driver to the house, and, as he made his way toward the main staircase, I slipped up the "secret" stairs, and was waiting for him when he arrived. The look on his face when he saw me would have been funny if I hadn't been so worried about my grandmother who left her home for the last time that day.

Down the hall and past the closet under the stairs was the parlor, called the front-room, which one entered only to look at Martin's and Frank's WWII portraits sitting on a marble top table or to pat the cast iron bulldog that stood on the hearth. Then, one went past the front door (never opened in my time as the porch floor had become unsafe to walk on) and up the main staircase. At the head of the stairs was a bedroom occupied by uncle Martin, even after the ceiling fell down on to the bed one day. Like all the other bedrooms, it had a very small closet and a fireplace and all of the original furniture. At the other end of the hall was the tiny bathroom with its claw foot tub and a toilet with a wooden seat. The main bedroom, where I slept when I stayed overnight, had a huge bed said, by my family, to resemble the one in the Lincoln Bedroom at the White House, but rumored by my elementary school classmates to have a head impaled at the top. (By this time the house had begun to look a bit spooky, so the head on the bed seemed appropriate, and I did nothing to discourage the idea.)

The "back bedroom" could be accessed only by passing through the "front bedroom" or by ascending the aforementioned hidden staircase, and I believe this is where my mother slept as a girl.

After my grandmother's death, my uncle continued to live in the house, filling it with WWII memorabilia and other "treasures," but, after heart surgery, he went to my mother's house to recover and spent the last sixteen years of his life with her, going to his own house every day to check on the furnace in the winter and, of course, cut all of that grass in the summer.

An unoccupied house is a magnet for some people, and three times the house was broken into and ransacked. Oil paintings were slashed and many items stolen. Once, my uncle caught three young boys in the act and held two of them until the police arrived, called by someone at the factory across the railroad tracks. The pictures he took of the damage after each of these break-ins are enough to break anyone's heart.

And so, what was once the showplace of the town ended in a state of disrepair and chaos. Following my uncle's death, most of the contents of the house were sold at auction, and the new owner stripped the house of its siding, lighting fixtures, and all other materials of value before having the house burned to the ground. But, I'm happy to say, I have all of the family photos and papers, including my favorite, a bill of sale from 1929 when Josie bought a goat named Honeybunch! And, many items from the house are in various museums, including Mary Catherine's wedding dress and mourning clothes which are right here at Vicary House. Come and visit them!