HESSTON, Pa. (AP) - For over a century, Clair Grove’s family worked hard around Trough Creek, farming the land, harvesting timber, and, later, figuring out how to get sugar water out of all those maple trees.
It was a good living. A comfortable life. It was where Grove was born in 1933 and raised.
Then, in the 1970s, the federal government forced him and 1,800 property owners to sell out. The premise was flood control, using a dam built in 1972, and that worked more than once. But a major goal also was to create a recreational area, according to multiple reports. And, today, boaters, campers and anglers enjoy Raystown Lake, the single largest lake within the confines of the state of Pennsylvania.
Grove has never dropped a fishing line in the man-made lake, and he vows he never will.
If bitterness creeps into his long stories - he can’t tell a short one - his wife, Carol, suggests his audience doesn’t have time to listen to how they got only $75,000 for their 210 acres. His late brother Dean, who died in January, also got a meager settlement, and together they lost three family businesses and several generations of memories at Trough Creek.
But Clair Grove has moved on. Five miles as the crow flies, 15 miles by highway, to be exact.
He and Carol landed at Warrior Ridge, where they ultimately bought 131 acres on and around the mountain, 51 acres of them amply dotted with maple trees. Across a valley, up an unnamed hill in sight of Raystown Road, they built a “new” home in 1984 - into the side of the hill.
They did it with ingenuity, a miserly touch and the ability to repurpose anything old and broken into something useful.
“I’ve never had anything new,” Carol said. “I put a block of salt in my food processor and tore it up. I just figured I’d get a new one. No, he fixed it.”
“I don’t like throwing things away,” Clair said. “Two or three years down the road, I’ll need it.”
Carol said she doesn’t mind. Their earthen house is full of old stuff, or things at least previously used. She made coffee on the couple’s 1902 wood stove that more than warmed the kitchen when snow still was on the ground. She cooked lunch on and in it. Clair bragged that it was made by Pennsylvania Gov. William Scranton’s grandfather - “Wyoming Dockash & Scranton Stove Works” is embossed on its ornate door.
Several Hoosier-style cabinets - popular in the early 20th century - as well as an oversized cupboard from the old Hillcrest School hold some of her kitchen wares. Clair’s cousin was demolishing the old school, and Clair got crash doors and windows at a good price, too. His front metal and glass door seems a little out of place among the heavy timbers, but it has served the couple well.
Across the open dining area of the kitchen and into the living room is the furnace. A real one.
“My people were iron people,” Clair said, explaining that his great-grandfather, as a wiry 14-year-old, worked the nearby Paradise Furnace, today a national historic site. When the furnace shut down later, Clair’s family got one of them, which he took and cut down to serve as his fireplace in his new homestead.
An iron mine entrance - or so it seems - is next to the fireplace.
“If a fellow has an iron furnace, he ought to have an iron mine,” Clair said, with a chuckle. “This is the way I remember the mine looking up on Tussey Mountain.”
Behind the door is a handmade trolley that rolls in and out of its resting place on rails, mimicking a mine cart. Clair uses it to bring in wood to feed his fireplace and wood stove. He rigged all of it from scrap wood and iron, except for a 100-pound piece of pig iron that keeps the trolley from rolling right into his living room.
The piece of iron is nondescript, except for the letters “C.I. Co.” on it. He says that stands for Colonial Iron Co., which operated out of Johnstown in the mid-19th century.
Leaning against the stones of the fireplace are various tools once used in the mines. Behind that wall is his wood room, and like Carol’s canning room across the other backside of the house, you can see mountain rocks jutting out.
In the canning room is a General Electric refrigerator that was rebuilt in 1938 and still works. The room is not artificially heated or cooled and remains a constant 42 degrees, Clair said, making it perfect for cold food storage, including Carol’s canned green beans, fruit and pickled okra, grown outside.
The house walls are 18 inches thick made out of oak heartwood with concrete supports. Clair got the concrete by calling local companies, asking for cement left over from other nearby jobs, and paying pennies on the dollar. One support post is out of the old barn and home back near Trough Creek; some overhead beams are the size of railroad ties.
The flooring between his first floor ceiling and his second story once was the floor of a skating rink in Huntingdon.
Three arched windows that allow the morning sun to shine in his upstairs came from a bank in Altoona.
And, the list goes on.
“Carol and I built the house from scratch,” he said. “We have maybe $15,000 to $16,000 in it.”
Clair doesn’t have much money in his work truck, either. It’s a 1930 Model A that formerly was part of a fleet owned by an Altoona bakery sold for scrap in 1947. He ended up with one, replaced the cab with a truck bed and learned how to keep it - and its fussy starter - going.
He uses it to haul wood and other farm supplies - he saves his pretty, yellow 1928 Model A for parades and car shows and he will fearlessly drive it up to Warrior Ridge where his sons work the “sugar trees.”
Clair no longer works the trees. “I’m 82. I can’t do that,” he said. He started slowing down after recovering from colon cancer in 2002.
Younger family members have taken over the business first started in 1914 by Clair’s grandfather, who was the first commercial producer of maple syrup in Huntingdon County, he said.
It doesn’t get any easier as they remain at the mercy of the weather. Normally they tap the trees the first week of February; this year, like last year, it was too cold.
On the second Monday in March, Steve and John Grove and a half-dozen other men climbed all over Warrior Ridge, drilling holes, inserting taps in maple trees and connecting them to small plastic tubing that snaked all over the mountainside. Those tubes were connected to larger lines that twisted down the mountain, where, a month later and warmer weather, sugar water flowed to large tanks in the hollow below.
That sugar water then was hauled over to the sugar camp across Raystown Road for cooking and bottling.
“This is a fairly intense operation for four to six weeks every year,” said son, Steve, who now largely is responsible for the operation, that is followed by gearing up for traditional crop planting down in the valley.
Sales are by word of mouth and through local grocery stores and markets, but Steve knows something about marketing.
“People are finding out it’s only half the sucrose as regular sugar, and diabetics can use it in moderation,” he said.
His father wanted to clarify also that they aren’t tapping the sap of the maple trees.
“Everybody calls it sap, but sap is the lifeblood of the tree,” Clair said. “We’re not taking that; we’re taking the fruit of the tree.”
“We’ve been at this for 101 years,” he added.
Clair often interjects memories from Trough Creek, which now is home to an environmental research and education center operated by Juniata College.
Clair is fond of the college, which paid his brother $1,000 for the old home place after the federal government took it, and he is fascinated with its research.
“I always thought a mouse is a mouse is a mouse,” he said. “But they say there are 14 different kinds of mice in a small area over there. It’s mind boggling to me.”
Juniata College paid homage to his family by naming the area Grove Farm.
Clair hasn’t traveled too far from Huntingdon County very often in his long life, except for a stint in the Air Force that took him to Spokane, Wash., where he met Carol. Ironically, her family had roots in Somerset County.
They’ve settled just fine into their adopted home on Warrior Ridge.
“It’s home and everybody’s welcome and that’s what’s important,” Carol said.
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Information from: Altoona Mirror, https://www.altoonamirror.com
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