Editor’s note: This is another column in Bill Boyd’s new series, “The Way It Was,” about growing up in Marysville. Bill continues to work with the Union County Historical Society to obtain information for his stories. With Marysville and Union County celebrating Bicentennial anniversaries in 2019 and 2020, respectively, these articles help depict what life was like in those early years.
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I don’t think anyone changed the look of Marysville more than Henry Ford. Before he came along, a lot of people in town needed a barn behind their house, to keep their horse. But Henry’s Model T Ford changed all that.
Over the years, some of those early barns were razed, but others were simply changed a bit to fill new needs. Take Alvi Graham’s barn on South Court Street (on the alley behind his house). He turned his haymow into a classroom for a kindergarten that his daughter, Jean, operated for about 20 years.
Then there was the barn behind Tom Elliott’s house on West 7th Street. When I was a kid, his dad put up a basketball hoop at one end of the haymow. That was perfect for all of us boys, because it gave us a place to play basketball on rainy days. The floorboards were a little spongy in spots, so the ball didn’t always bounce well, but it was better than playing outside in the rain.
Our barn on West 5th Street was used for several things over the years. It was built by my grandfather, Tom Tracy, in 1908. In that same year, my grandmother, Hetti Tracy, started using it for other things. According to an article in the “Union County Journal” that year, Hetti held a quilting party in the barn. She set up a quilting frame on the concrete floor and 15 Marysville ladies spent the day quilting there. It was the first of many social events held there.
By the time the late ‘30s came around, the horses were gone, and we used the haymow for storing things that wouldn’t fit in our attic. You wouldn’t believe all the old stuff that was up there.
Then one day, Richard Leggett and I were in the haymow looking around. As we dug through all that stuff, Richard said: “This would be a great place to build a ‘fun house,’ like they have at amusement parks. It could be full of scary things and funny things.” He said we could put a sign in our front yard and sell tickets to it.
That sounded great, so he and I went right to work. He was five or six years older than me, so he took charge of the project and I was his helper. There were several scary things that Richard came up with. My favorite was an old mannequin that my grandmother got somewhere, years earlier. It was a female mannequin.
Richard laid it on an old metal daybed. I had a toy hunting knife that was made of rubber. He took the knife and made it look like the lady had been stabbed. I got some Mercurochrome from our medicine cabinet in our bathroom, and Richard poured some around the knife blade. Boy did that look like blood. That should scare the daylights out of people.
Then Richard got some old clothes from a trunk and stuffed them with rags and other things. Then he made a head out of something, I don’t know what it was. He got a rope from his own garage and made a noose. Then he slipped it around its neck and hung it from a rafter in a dark corner. The whole thing looked so real you wouldn’t believe it. I mean, it looked like some guy had been lynched right there in our barn.
Oh, there was one thing I thought was really funny. It was an old birdcage that my grandmother had many years earlier. Richard made a small sign and put it inside the birdcage. It was a lot like the sign in Dr. Longbrake’s office. It read, “The bird is out for lunch – will return at 1 p.m.” Boy, that Richard Liggett should have been a comedian.
When the fun house was finished, Richard and I made a sign and put
it in our front yard. It invited people to buy a ticket for five cents and visit the funhouse. We left the sign up for a few days, but no one ever bought a ticket.
He thought that maybe we should have used a lower price. I think he was probably right.
Those wishing to contact Bill Boyd can e-mail him at bill@davidwboyd.com