A New Millenium David and Wendy Benton

David Benton with '48 Chrysler restored for Brooke Grove Foundation

Finding the Hughes-Cunningham house was a fun moment for Wendy.  We lived in a brand new house just across Rt. 9 from Pleasant View, the farm built by Samuel Cunningham (Hugh's oldest son.)

Wendy in the tiny doorway made for Katie and Megan Ruth

One day Wendy came home and said, I want to take you for a ride to see a house.  We drove by and admired it.  It wasn't for sale.  It was just a beautiful old home.  A few months later we had the opportunity to buy it.  Now we enjoy sharing it with people who like old houses and a sense of history. Our family consists of three sons (Thomas Hart Benton, John Fremont Benton, and Jesse David Benton.) Tom is a project coordinator for ADRA in Darfur, Sudan, providing improved sanitation and drinking water for thousands of refugees there.  He loves climbing mountains, has climbed about half of the 14,000 ft. peaks in Colorado.  He and his uncle Roy summitted Alaska's Mt. McKinley in June, 2001. John, a Mechanical Engineer, works for Grove Manufacturing in Shady Grove, Pa.   He and his wife Jackie gave us our first grandchild, Miranda, on April 1, 2000, and a second granddaughter, Aubrey, August 17, 2002. Jesse's degree is in History, and he's teaching at Highland View Academy, near Hagerstown, MD, where he and his brothers attended high school in the 1990's. Wendy teaches grades 1,2,and 3 at Rocky Knoll School, an elementary school sponsored by Martinsburg Seventh-day Adventist Church.  She also teaches music and choir. David is Information Services Manager for Brooke Grove Foundation, Inc.  and spends most of his time at their Williamsport Retirement Village campus.  The car shown above is one of his projects; Brooke Grove uses it to illustrate their 50-plus years of caring for residents in Nursing Homes and Assissted Living facilities. Several times a year we build a good cooking fire in the fireplace and cook a meal in our cast iron dutch ovens and antique waffle iron.  By the time it's eaten and cleaned up we always notice two things: it's fun and tasty, but it sure would be work if all your meals and all your heating had to come from a fireplace every day!  Even with a few servants, it must have been an overwhelming amount of work just to survive year after year with a few hundred acres to tend and no labor-saving equipment that we take for granted.