Footprints of the Pioneers

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Chapter 24—The Room on the Side of the House

J. B. Frishie

“ON YOUR way back,” advised Elder T. G. Bunch, president of the Michigan Conference, “stop at the Rumseys, near Potterville. There you will find old Sister Rumsey, ninety-two years old, who was a Carman, and whose memory reaches back to the beginnings of our work in Michigan.” FOPI 201.3

So I did. just short of the little center of Potterville, I turned in where I saw a substantial brick house sitting among its maples and commanding its big barns. A little old lady came to the door to greet me. “Is this Mrs. Rumsey?” FOPI 201.4

“I am one Mrs. Rumsey. Perhaps you want to see my daughter-in-law”-who then left the kitchen and came forward. When I gave my name, the screen door opened wide in welcome, and I stepped into the dwelling noted as the house where a room was built on the side expressly for Elder and Mrs. White, as for Elisha in the Shunamite home long ago. Prompted occasionally by her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Rumsey gave me a racy and interesting story of the early days. FOPI 201.5

She was born Cora Viola Carman, in 1853. Her parents and her uncles, George and James Potter, were the first settlers there, in 1844. It was all woods then. They used to have great bees, with their ox teams, to pile up the trees they had felled, and burn them. Anyone who wanted logs to saw into lumber could go out and cut them anywhere; the owners were glad to be rid of them. Her uncle George brought in a sawmill, and he did a big business with it. FOPI 203.1

Mr. Carman’s people were strict Methodists, but he had no interest in any church; and his wife’s people never had any religion. One day in 1855 Carman and a neighbor were drawing logs to the mill, when the neighbor said, “John, why don’t you go down to the schoolhouse at ‘ ‘West Windsor’? There’s the smartest man there to talk Bible anyone ever did hear.” FOPI 204.1

“So,” says his daughter, “my father went down the next night to hear Elder J. B. Frisbie, who had come up from Battle Creek. Of course he didn’t know his name or who he was then. He went down there and he came home and said, ‘I stepped in the schoolhouse, and the preacher had a chart hung up with the most awful animals on it I ever saw. I’ve lived in these woods for years, and I never saw animals with ten horns on them.’ Well, the next night he hitched up his ox team to the sled, and took his wife and baby-that was me. The preacher got up and he said, ‘I see there are some here this evening who are new, so I will take a little review.’ And he did. FOPI 204.2

“The upshot of it was, after a few days my father asked Elder Frisbie home with us. ‘Elder,’ he says, ‘you go in the house, and when I’ve unyoked the team, I’ll come in.’ It was awful cold. So when he came in, he says, ‘Well, Elder, I don’t know what I ever asked you here for. I’ve never had a preacher in my house before.’ ‘Well, I know,’ Elder Frisbie says, ‘It’s to study the Bible.’ And that’s what they proceeded to do. Finally we all came into the truth. And my father lived and died in the message he received that day. He was past ninety-five when he died.” Anyone who will read the reports in the Review and Herald along in those times—reports from White and Loughborough and Cornell and Frisbie—will see the name of John Carman many times-committeeman, counselor, financial backer. FOPI 204.3

They lived then in a log house, which apparently grew year by year from the first cabin; for it came to have seven rooms, lathered and plastered and papered, which is something for a log house to boast of. James and Ellen White often visited them, and once when he was sick they brought him up in a democrat wagon on a bed, and he spent three months with them. “I was eight years old,” said Mrs. Rumsey, “and I helped my mother a good deal in the house, but they lent me to Elder White. They would take him out on the lawn in front, right there, and I waited on him. I could keep the flies off, and cover his feet when they got out. And sometimes he would say, ‘Now, Cora, you go in the kitchen and help your mother awhile. I’m all right. ’ FOPI 205.1

“Well, one day father said to Elder White, ‘What do you think of my building a brick house?’ And Brother White said, ‘John, you’re a mechanic; you can build the house yourself. Go ahead. And when you do it, build a room on it somewhere, where Ellen and I can come and rest.’ So father built it. He hauled the brick from Lansing, but all the woodwork, timbers and boards, and doors and window frames, he sawed out and he made himself.” FOPI 205.2

We were standing in the room then, which is now her own, and she fingered lovingly the paneled door, mortised as tight as when, eighty years ago, her father’s hands put it together. “All this work, all this house,” she said, “my father made. He had planned the house to be square, but when Elder White suggested a room for them, he added this on the side of the house. The neighbors told him it would spoil the looks of the house, but I can’t see that it did. It looks all right to me from the inside, anyway.” FOPI 206.1

I looked around the spacious room on the side of the house, much lived in, bright, engaging. And I asked, “Did Elder and Mrs. White stay here much?” FOPI 206.2

“No,” she said. “They stayed in our log house much more. That was right back there, outside this rear window, you see? After this house was built, they were going everywhere, to California and New England and Texas and all over, and they didn’t have much time to spend here. But it was made for them, and sometimes they came and stayed in this room. They bought this furniture, and put it in here.” FOPI 206.3

“I’ll tell you about the church,” she said. “One time Potterville had over one hundred members, but now all that are left of us go to Charlotte to church. Back in those days, after my father and others had accepted the truth, there was no church building of any kind anywhere around here. My uncle George wasn’t a member, but he thought there ought to be a church for the good of the community. So one day he said to my father, ‘John, why don’t your denomination build a church here? ’ FOPI 206.4

“‘Can’t do it,’ said my father. FOPI 206.5

“‘Yes, you can,’ said Uncle George. ‘Everybody here wants a church. I’ll saw all your lumber free of charge, and I’ll give one hundred dollars in cash. Go out with a subscription paper and get signets. ’ FOPI 207.1

“Well, my father talked to my mother about it. Mother thought it was folly; how could these poor people build a church? But father, when he got an idea in his head, was not one to give up easily. In February he hitched up the horse, and drove up to Grand Ledge, to see the Fischels, and around to some other little companies. They all wanted this church. So they came together, cut down the trees, and sawed them into logs, and with their ox teams hauled them to the mill. Uncle George sawed the lumber free, as he said he would, and they had a building bee and they put up that church. There were a lot of people here. They brought their straw ticks and stuffed them with our straw, and they filled the barn with themselves. They put up that church in ten days. FOPI 207.2

“That was after this house was built. I was seventeen then We had a big church here at Potterville. And Sister White has preached in that church many times. My father built a pulpit especially for her. First they had just a stand, but she didn’t like that, so she asked father to build her a pulpit that would come clear down to the floor, and she stood behind that and preached. Where the church was torn down at last, that pulpit was taken to Lansing, and I guess it’s there in the church now. The pews didn’t fare so well-the benches, the seats, you know. They were made of basswood, and basswood is hard to get, but it’s the best lumber for beehives; so when the church was torn down, someone got those hoards and made beehives of them.” FOPI 207.3

“People had leisure in those days,” she said. That’s surely something to think about, when we remember how our ancestors tore the forests, pulled the stumps, made their fields. Built their houses, sowed and reaped their harvests, fashioned their clothes, ran their homes, and sometimes had picnics and corn huskings and sugaring-off-and meetings! Well, but they didn’t have to go on long auto trips to quiet their nerves, nor to picture shows to get keyed up, nor to bathing beaches to relax; and though there were dances, they didn’t go to them. They had leisure. FOPI 207.4

“Fred Griggs’ parents came along here the next spring after we accepted the truth,” she said, “in a springboard. They were going to the conference at Battle Creek.” That must have been in 1856, and Adventist Battle Creek was very young. The “conference” was a conference, not an organized body. “They had leisure in those days. They persuaded father to go to that conference. Father and mother both went.” FOPI 208.1

And I warrant they were well confirmed in the faith. Potterville was a stanch church in the early days, and until recent years. Why, I remember seeing the old church before it was torn down, myself. As I bade them good-by, Mrs. Cora Viola Carman Rumsey, in her ninety-third year, turned again to the cutting out of garments for some of the children, a work she had laid aside when I came in. She harked from the good old days, when people had leisure. FOPI 208.2