Some Interesting History Connected with
The Life and Death of Mary Maria Sprague
Continued from posting of June 1, 2016
Just before Thanksgiving, 1903, Fred accompanied his father and his deeply worried mother to Ithaca where a doctor who used electrical massage greatly improved Will's condition. Persecuted Mary left her three children in Smyrna to see to things. The next year, 1904, to be near Dr. Hamlin and let Fred resume school, the family auctioned off most of the farm things, share-leased the farm to John Haggerty and moved to Ithaca about Sept. 1. Mary scrubbed her life away on the washboard to make ends meet while Fred and Hermon attended Ithaca schools and Bertha took in a few classes in Cornell.
In 1905 massage became unsatisfactory and Mary saw Will have an operation for enlarged stomach and she saw her little boy, almost dead, go to the hospital for appendicitis. But both operations were successful, and Will was so revived that the rest of the family moved back to the farm in the spring of 1906, leaving Fred in the College of Agriculture. It should be noted here that Mary had seen her daughter suffer nervous trouble in Ithaca and had seen her older son, through an operation in the late fall of 1905.
Things went along fairly well for Mary back on the farm for a while. Fred was home for the 1906 vacation and helped fix up an ice pond, build a milk house, put in a concrete barn floor and dig an eighteen foot well and pipe the water to the barn. In 1909 Bertha moved away and Fred got through college and came home to stay.
But, as the years passed Mary saw Will through three more major operations. His health continued to decline as Hermon was growing up and spending his fancies on poultry, came home from war and married Myrtle Rice Nov. 1, 1922, and celebrated the birth of two daughters, one of them now married to a service man and as Fred and his mother teamed it together with purebred cattle and other things.
One of Mary's great trials came early in 1929. Will drove the black mare to Earlville one early January day, fell on the ice and broke his hip. She stuck by him abed for some six long weeks till he got out of bed on the 17th of February and shaved, only to suffer a burst intestine upon returning to bed and quickly giving up the ghost. Mary was about worn out.
The farm business continued as before. Mary still had her older son with her and her daughter and younger son within reach. She patched and darned and scrimped to pull herself and Fred through the hard times around 1932. But in September, 1933 a cow sale was made and things began to pick up.
Nov. 20, 1935, Fred brought a wife home who had been a farm girl, Viola Colwell, near Chenango lake. For nearly ten years, in-law friction has clouded the home atmosphere, but otherwise Mary's burdens may have been eased.
To be Continued
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