The Villisca axe murders

I spent the first ten years of my life in Taylor County, Iowa.  During those years my parents and I moved at least 3 times, but our address was always Villisca.  My parents were switchboard operators, back when you had to call "Central" even if you only wanted to talk to your neighbors down the road... unless they were on your party line.  Our house was where you went to pay your bill; we were "Central".  For a brief time my parents were switchboard operators in Villisca, but the place I remember best was Guss, a small, unincorporated town with a blacksmith shop, our switchboard house and a general store; our mailing address was still Villisca.

It was on the Internet that I learned about the famous axe-murders in Villisca, and a grisly tale it is.  When I first read about it, I asked my mother if she'd heard the story.  She had not.  More recently, I asked my sister who is 14 years my senior if she was familiar with the axe murders.  Nope, she wasn't.  I understand the reason, of course:  those murders took place in 1912.  Just Google "villisca axe murders" and you'll find enough to keep you reading all day long.  I'll share a link here just to get you started; it's one of the shorter accounts, and you'll find it HERE.

Of course there are ghost stories; you can pay $10 and tour the place, or spend the night there for a minimum of $428 for up to six people.  Cliff and I have gone right past Villisca a time or two in the past;  I wish we had done the tour.  

There have been several stories about the house on some of those ghost-chaser television shows.  In my opinion, ghosts are like Santa:  If you don't believe in them, you'll never see them.  Cliff and I toured the Stanley Hotel once; the tour guide wanted a volunteer to stand in a certain place where some people in the past had "felt something weird" going on.  I volunteered, but told him I didn't believe in ghosts, so he was probably wasting his time.  I felt nothing.

It's a small world, thanks to the Internet.

I have often reminisced here on my childhood years.  My earliest memories are of the switchboard house in Guss, Iowa, although I was born in Missouri.  Pictures taken on my first birthday, though, are in front of the switchboard house.  
My parents moved often, and I recall at least two other places in Taylor County, Iowa, where we lived:  Once in a farmhouse owned by Ted Davies, and once in either Nodaway or Villisca, where my parents were the telephone operators.  So I think they may have had at least two stints as "Central" in Guss.
When you do a search of this blog using "Guss" as the key word, there's a page of entries about Guss that come up.  Alvin Mitchell is often mentioned.  His blacksmith shop was right across the road from us, and Daddy loved to hang out there.  
I got an email today from a niece of Alvin's.  Even though we don't remember one another, we have some shared memories and undoubtedly crossed paths back around 1950.  Here's what she had to say:

Donna - I was googling around hoping to find a picture of my Uncle Alvin's blacksmith shop in Guss, Iowa which got me to your blog. (I was hoping for a picture as it was when I was a kid to use on my blog.) Coincidentally, a classmate and I have been doing some reminiscing about Guss and its environs and I have been trying to remember the name of the people who ran the switchboard - which I remember seeing as a kid. I think you and I must be about the same age. I was born in 1943. Do you mind telling me your maiden name and how old you were when you moved from Guss? 

I agree with what you wrote about the blacksmith shop being cave-like. One of my early memories of it was being warned not to look at the brightness when my uncle was welding - that it would blind me. Of course I looked anyway.

Aunt Lois and my mom were sisters. She died in January 2009; buried at Guss with Alvin. I remember card parties at their home. The tables would be set up downstairs and the kids would go upstairs to play. Perhaps you and I attended some of those same parties? However, I was very shy and would only talk to the kids I knew, i.e., my cousins.

Twenty years ago when people said, "It's a small world", they didn't know the half of it.  This Internet has made it tiny indeed.  You just never know who you will run in to on the World Wide Web.  That's why I choose to make my blog show up in a Google search; I love making connections like this.  
By the way, Romona is a blogger and shares memories and pictures from her childhood.  You'll find her blog HERE.

A trip to the Guss cemetary (Part 3 of our road trip)

After we checked out the Methodist Church, I asked Cliff to turn down a gravel road near there.  I wanted to see if there was anything left of Ted Davies' place.  I used to see his farm across the fields from our yard at the switchboard house.  Daddy sometimes helped him on his farm for pay, and we lived in a rental house belonging to him for a short while.  When I spent a week in the hospital at the age of seven, it was Ted who paid the bill.  He was a gray-bearded fellow who sometimes rode by on a horse, and I always felt there was something mystical and cowboy-like about him.  My dad heard rumors that Ted had killed a man in Texas and moved to Iowa to escape the consequences of the deed.  His wife Lucille was a full-blooded Indian, much younger than he.  Mother would go to their house just to visit, or to wallpaper a room or two, and I always went along and played with their children.  They were rather strange kids; the youngest, Louis, threw tantrums if things didn't go his way and would beat his forehead on the sidewalk until it was raw and bleeding.  Nobody intervened, as far as I know.  It scared me when he did that!

I was surprised to see that the old house was still standing at the end of that long, long driveway.  There are barns that weren't there when I was a kid, and the old wooden barns are gone.  I would love to have gone up the drive to get a closer look at the house, but there was a "no trespassing" sign warning us from doing that.  There used to be a working windmill right in the front yard supplying a livestock tank, and chickens pecking and scratching everywhere.
A recent search on the Internet told me that Ted was buried at the Guss cemetery, so that was our next stop.  

Indeed, we found that grave.  But first we passed the headstone on the graves of my sister's mother- and father-in-law.  

These people lived just on the other side of Hampel's store, so there wasn't much to keep my sister from meeting the love of her life right down the road.  Ada had a box of empty thread spools and other odds and ends that she kept on her entry porch for kids to play with, and I had as much fun with those as with anybody's store-bought toys.   And then, a real surprise...

The blacksmith and his wife, and with a picture, too!  

Now, when I knew them they were a young couple with three kids; after we moved to Missouri, they had three more children.  I imagine this picture might have been taken for a later anniversary.  My parents used to play cards with the Mitchells, and Daddy would spend idle time at the blacksmith shop smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and talking to Alvin and other local men gathered there.  I can't forget the time I talked the Mitchell boys into setting their bed on fire.  
Now that I think of it, my parents played cards with everyone around Guss except for Ted Davies and his wife, who never made an appearance at any of the Canasta parties or Stanley parties or get-togethers.  Maybe they just didn't play cards.    
I saw lots of tombstones with names that seemed familiar to me, even though I couldn't connect a face to the names.  
I had a good time in Guss and had seen all I wanted to see, so we got back on the road for our camping adventure.  More about that in the next entry.

Part 2: A sentimental journey

I was born in Iowa, and we lived there until I was in the third or fourth grade.  My parents were the local telephone operators in Villisca, Nodaway, and Guss; but the house at Guss is the one I remember best, and where we lived the longest.  
The GPS wanted us to travel north on I-29, but I had already planned on using 71, which is pretty much of a straight shot to where we were going.  Besides, portions of I-29 are under water in Iowa.  I wanted to take a little side trip to Guss; although I was very young, I have fond memories of the place and the people who lived there.  I've mentioned all this before, as well as the trip I took there in the mid-nineties with my nephew, his wife, and my mother.  

Guss, 1912 (found on the Internet)

Guss is not really a town at all, although it's listed on some maps.  Our GPS had never heard of it, so I crawled the Internet to find out how to get there.  The Methodist Church, which was just up the road from our house, is still alive and well; so when I found directions to that, I knew I had it made.  My confidence that we were on the right road was boosted when we saw this sign:  

  Gravel road, by the way.  

Here's what's left of Edgar Hampell's store.  

Here's how it looked in 1996, with my mom walking around the property.  Looking at this picture, I realize the house next door was abandoned at that time.  It is now inhabited.  

This is the inside of the store; the floor is mostly rotted away.  The counter with the cash register was on the left.  I had many a delicious hand-dipped ice cream cone there.  
Edgar, Blanche, and their son Gail lived next door to the store.  Blanche was a wonderful housekeeper and there was never anything out of place in her home.  

Whoever lives there now, they seemed like an unkept bunch, people of varying ages sitting out in the yard suffering from the heat.  

This is where the switchboard house once stood, the place I remember so well from my early childhood.  Only two things I recall are still there, so I cropped the above photo to show them better:  

The pump that was just outside the back porch, and the hill where the celler was (where you see bare dirt).   

The Methodist Church doesn't really look so different after all these years.  We attended the Church of Christ in Hepburn, but Mother let me go to vacation Bible school here, and we always went to their Christmas programs.  They also sponsored community plays in which my mother sometimes took part.  

In 1996 Mitchell's blacksmith shop was still standing; it was almost directly across the road from the switchboard house.  Now it's gone, and I couldn't even tell it had ever been there.  

Right next door to where the switchboard house used to be we saw this old house, occupied by some more free-spirit people (I didn't smell a meth lab, though).  I did not recall that there was a house so close to ours, but I called my sister this morning and she said yes, that was Mr. Maxwell's house.  I remember him and his house, I just didn't know he lived so close to us.


My next entry will be a walk around the Guss cemetery.  These little glimpses into my childhood are probably boring to most of my readers, but I promise that after I'm done with them and get back to the actual camping trip, you will be entertained.

Remembering Hampel's store

Here's your daily dose of Baby Donna:  I'm standing beside our mailbox in Guss, Iowa.  You'll usually see me wearing a bonnet in my baby pictures because I was so bald; my mom got tired of people thinking I was a boy.
  
There was one other place of business in Guss, Iowa, besides the blacksmith shop:  Hampel's store, just a short walk up the road.  In fact, you'd be able to see it in the above picture if it wasn't for the mailbox hiding it.  The shed you see was behind Hampel's store.  If Mother had an old hen that had stopped laying, she'd wrap a twine around it's legs so it couldn't escape and I'd carry it upside down, squawking all the way, to Edgar Hampel; he'd give me some change (not much, maybe a nickel) and put the hen in a cage in that shed to be shipped off to market.  Edgar always had a cigar in his mouth, and the smell of his cigars permeated the store.  

Here's the abandoned store as it looked in the mid-nineties.  There used to be gas pumps out front under the overhang.  By the way, that's my mom in the picture, and she was also in the blacksmith shop picture on the other entry.  
Edgar and Blanche lived in the house next door to the store, which you can see here.  She kept a wonderfully stylish home.  She had Better Homes and Gardens magazines stacked neatly on an end table, and the interior of her house looked very much like some of the pictures in the magazines.  Back when Canasta was all the rage, my parents went to card parties at the Hampel's house.  I went too, of course; but I wasn't playing cards; I passed the time however I could, patiently waiting for snack time.    
Walking into Hampel's store, on the right you'd see bags of livestock feed just inside the door, stacked almost as high as my head (which probably wasn't that tall... I was a kid).  I loved to climb up on top of that pile and survey the store from my perch.  I remember once playing Old Maid with some little boy atop the sacks of feed.  The feed came in cotton print material that was used by most housewives to make clothing.  My mother made most of my dresses out of chicken-feed sacks when I was small.  
To the left as you entered was a case displaying various wonderful flavors of ice cream, and I ate many an ice cream cone in that store; oh, the agony of having to choose between butter-brickel, black walnut, and chocolate ice cream.  Toward the back of the store there was a display case with cookies of various sorts.  What fun it was to look through the glass and admire those lovely cookies!  
Hanging from the ceiling were those big, slow-moving fans that stirred the air during hot summer weather.    

There was one of these signs on the screen door as you walked in.  

And a soda machine like this.  


My parents must have kept a running tab at Hampel's, because I remember asking for some frivolous thing I wanted to eat, and my mother answering, "We can't afford it." 
"Can't you charge it?" I asked. 
Mother laughed and laughed, and tried to explain to me how things weren't free just because you charged them.  It didn't make any sense to me.  From what I'd seen, you picked up whatever you wanted in the store, said "charge it", and went home with it.    
On the fourth of July, everyone in the community bought a few fireworks and gathered together in front of Hampel's store to light them off.  I was afraid of the "chasers", which were then commonly called by a name that is no longer used, and I don't want to get in trouble by saying it here.  We used the same term when playing "Ring around the Rosie".  Looking back, it seems horrible and racist; but we didn't know what we were saying.    
Those were good times.  I wouldn't trade my childhood for anyone else's, spoiled little girl that I was. 

When I was a little girl

The first house I recall living in was the switchboard house at Guss, Iowa.  Now, Guss wasn't an incorporated village, although you can still locate it on most maps.  It consisted of half a dozen houses, a blacksmith shop, a grocery store/gas station, and a Methodist church.  I have letters my mother received when we lived there, and they were addressed "Villisca, Iowa".  So that was our official address. 

There I am in front of the switchboard house.  Mother and Daddy both did duty at the switchboard as "Central".  When a storm crossed the telephone wires or caused other damage to the lines, it was my dad's job to go fix that.   Daddy also helped out on Ted Davies' farm sometimes.
Directly across the road from our house was Alvin Mitchell's blacksmith shop; Daddy could often be found in that cave-like place, smoking his roll-your-own cigarettes and visiting with Alvin and whatever local farmers happened to be there.  
Things I recall about Alvin's blacksmith shop:  The peculiar smell of burning coal and hot metal.  A calendar with a sexy lady, I think maybe Marilyn Monroe, that my dad sometimes commented on. I didn't understand his comments, but he always had a big smile on his face when he looked at that calendar.  There was a pop machine there, and when I could talk Daddy out of a nickel, I'd buy myself a bottle of Tyler grape.  
In the mid-nineties, my nephew and his wife, my mother, and I went to Guss to take some pictures in what used to be a tiny community.  We were doing this because my sister and her husband were about to celebrate their fiftieth anniversary, and her son thought it would be fun to have some pictures of the area where his parents first met.  

This is what the blacksmith shop looked like on that visit; I'd venture a guess that it's totally gone by now.  No wonder it seemed so cave-like!  It barely looks tall enough to stand up in.  Isn't it strange how, when we visit places we knew as children, the buildings always look so small?  


Doing this entry, I wonder if some grandchild of Alvin's will end up on my blog, reading about his grandpa's blacksmith shop.  

When I was a kid

We lived in Guss, Iowa; I was six years old.  My parents were the switchboard operators.  
Guss isn't even an incorporated town; back then it consisted of our telephone office, a blacksmith shop across the road, and Hampell's store, just up the road.  Our address was Villisca, not Guss.
The people across the road were the Mitchells.  Alvin was the blacksmith and his wife's name was Lois.  She didn't like to do laundry much:  her wringer washing machine was in the smokehouse, and she'd pile all the dirty clothes out there on the concrete floor until there was a huge mountain of clothes.  Sometimes she'd go shopping and buy new clothes for her kids rather than do the washing, which drove my mom crazy.  
My dad would go over and visit with Alvin and other local men at the blacksmith shop.  I remember the pop machine there, and the taste of Tyler grape soda.  I recall the naughty calendar hanging on the wall with women in suggestive poses.
We'd go across the road to the Mitchell's house at night sometimes, and the adults played cards.  Me and the Mitchell boys would amuse ourselves in whatever way we could.  Sometimes we'd draw pictures, but it was pretty boring because the boys only wanted to draw pictures of cars.    
Gary Mitchell was a year or so older than me; Lloyd was perhaps a year younger.  That's what it seemed like, but after consulting zabasearch.com, they may have both been older than I.  
I remember Alvin telling my mom once that he was going to pick her up and carry her through the house; she told him he couldn't lift her, and he proceeded to pick her up and carry her through the house.  
For some reason, I wasn't too happy with that.
One summer day I went across the road to play with the boys as usual, and the older one decided we should play the "you-show-me-yours-and-I'll-show-you-mine" game.  In fact, he was going to force the issue and make SURE he saw mine.  I certainly did not want to see his!  
I hit him as hard as I could and went home and told my mom.  
I was scared to go over there again, so that was the last time I ever played with them.  
I really missed those boys.  They were the only kids around.  
Please don't think I was traumatized by this; no damage was done.  The main thing I remember is how lonely I was after this incident, having nobody to play with.  My mom didn't tell me not to go over there again, but I didn't want to play with them any more.  It was just too uncomfortable.

  

Thinking ahead

Cliff subscribes to a couple of Oliver tractor magazines; when he asked me yesterday how far it would be to Clarinda, Iowa, I couldn't help but wonder why.  See, I spent the first eight or nine years of my life in Taylor County, Iowa; I was born in a hospital in Clarinda.  
I could think of no reason why Cliff would want to go there.  
"Well, it's north and then west... maybe 150 miles or more from here," I said.
Checking Mapquest just now, I found out it's one hundred sixty-one miles.  Hey, I was pretty close, considering I've only been there once since I was a kid.  
So then Cliff tells me there's some sort of Oliver tractor show or swap-meet up there in March.  
I was excited.  
"Hey, that's great!  We can look up some places from my childhood."
"What are you talking about," Cliff asked me.  "You don't know anybody up there now."  
"Yeah, but I want to drive through Guss, where the telephone office used to be.  I want to see if Hampell's store is still standing, and I want to know if there's anything left of the blacksmith shop that used to be across the road from the switchboard house, the one Alvin Mitchell owned."   
Cliff just shook his head, but I think he's figured out it's a good thing that I want to go; that way it isn't all for him, and nobody has to be convinced.  
He's such an optimist, he thinks there's a possibility we could make it a motorcycle trip.  In March.    
Haaaaa!!  What planet is he living on?  Winter is NEVER going to end. 

This picture was taken in front of the switchboard house in Guss.  I remember that house, and the front porch where we'd sit on a hot summer night listening to the radio:  boxing matches sponsored by Gillette and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer.  
You didn't want to sit close to Daddy when he was listening to boxing.  He really got into it.  
I know the house is no longer there, because I went on a trek up there with my nephew, his wife, and my mom several years ago, so we could take pictures for my sister's fiftieth anniversary.  But I just want to see the area one more time.  
Thanks to our GPS, I don't think we'll have trouble finding it.  
I'm excited.