The Life of Calla Della (Lancaster, Frank) Jacobs - Part 1b, Catawba

The place was most certainly the focus of family activity for many years. My Grandmother was probably born in the house in 1883. She was the youngest in a family of fourteen children. Large families were not unusual in those days. Death was no stranger, and four of Grandma’s siblings died in infancy. Ten grew to adulthood, but three were taken in their early twenties.

There was a time when business was transacted every day in Catawba. It was an active village in the late 1800s. My mother once talked to her Aunt Lydia about it. Lydia was Grandma’s eldest sibling - 23 years older. She told Mom she could remember when there was a Post Office, depot, store, several saloons and a church. There were more houses in the early days, more than the eight or nine Mom remembered. There were also three large tobacco barns, a dock, and a ferry boat that carried tobacco wagons across the Licking River. The district had been a leader in growing tobacco, but the plant is hard on the land, and the soil eventually gave out; times changed, the railroad pulled out, and people drifted away.

Lydia, born in 1860, was twenty-three when Grandma was born, and had been married five years. Three of her sons were older than their aunt. Most of the rest of her siblings were already grown, and Grandma probably grew up with the two brothers that were closest in age, Clarence, known as Bud, (b. 1878) and Ben (b. 1881).
I think she was closer to Ben (above w/Grandma) as he was only two years older, and I remember her telling stories of experiences they shared while growing up. One particular story still intrigues me.

When she was a girl Grandma said it was not uncommon in the evening to see a ball of light suddenly pop up from the ground and hover a few feet above. When she and Ben chased after one of the hazy spheres it would recede, traveling away from them at a speed to match their own. The orb would eventually drop back into the earth. I’m not sure, sixty years have passed, but I think she called them jack-o’-lanterns, maybe because they reminded people of Halloween pumpkins. She said she never saw any after she grew up.

Mom and her brother, Charlie, went back to Catawba in 1992 for a last visit . They said the area had not really changed that much. Roads that were narrow dirt lanes had been paved. Telephone poles lined the road. Catawba was in decline when they were young. For a while it was a ghost town with a few decaying building. Even those were gone. But off the road, hidden in a tangle of brush and weeds sat an old abandoned house shrouded in vegetation. One building still left., and they recognized it - like going back in time.

Nothing else remains of those bygone days except for three gravestones in the backyard corner of a newer house. Those mark the graves of my great grandparents, Charles and Julia Jacobs. They died in 1912, a year before Mom was born. The third grave is Ben's, their youngest son. He was twenty-two years old when he died in 1903. The gravestones were placed there many years later by a Grandson - a man named Raymond Jacobs. The stones don't mark the actual site of the graves as all the references were long gone, but Raymond knew they had been buried in the back of their own yard, next to their son and near the church. They may not be under their stones but they're close by.
GO: Part 2, Della's first husband