he first twelve years of my life were
spent in Muncy, Picture Rocks, Sunbury, all in Pennsylvania, and
a portion of that time was spent in the State of Nebraska. About
three years were lived on the plains of that state, where there
was nothing at all to see except the wide open spaces, deer,
buffalo, (bison), coyotes, Indians and rattlesnakes. My people
sold their claim here which they had homesteaded and we then
lived in Waho and Fremont, Nebraska until we moved to Sunbury,
Pennsylvania, and from there to Picture Rocks. When I was twelve
years old I was sent to Overton, Bradford County, to learn to be
a farmer. I liked the work and after a year and a half I left
there and hired out on a farm at the princely salary of eight
dollars a month. I next turned up at Dushore, Sullivan County,
where my duties consisted of taking care of a horse etc, and I
stayed there, taking care of horses and helping in the barroom,
where I bottled one or two kegs of beer a week. When the boss was
not around I also tended bar. I next turned up at Wilkesbarre,
Pennsylvania, where I had a job with a soft drink bottling firm
at three dollars a week. As I paid three dollars a week board, I
found that I could not save much at this rate, so after a few
weeks I left here and went to work in a combination restaurant
and saloon as a waiter. This not being very satisfactory to me, I
secured a job as a clerk in a small grocery store whose owner was
not a well man and who was not in the store very much. In a month
or two it became evident that the store was too much for me and
so, as I had told the proprietor that my folks lived in Sunbury,
one fine morning he told me to get in the wagon with him and he
drove me to the station, where he bought me a ticket, then told
me to go home and stay home. I went to Sunbury where some pals of
mine lived and after fooling around a few days with them, I
freighted it to Muncy and walked six miles from there to Picture
Rocks where my folks really were. In Picture Rocks I got a job in
the finishing room of a furniture factory. In those days most of
the furniture was decorated with birds and flowers, all sorts of
colors and plenty of stripes etc. From here I went to a furniture
factory in Williamsport and then decided that I wanted to go back
to Overton to see the people there. When I reached Overton I
found that the people with whom I had first lived had invested in
a store that had a postoffice connected with it. I received a
warm welcome and was immediately placed in charge of the store
and postoffice. There were only two mails a day, one coming from
Forkesvill and one back in the afternoon. There would be only one
mail pouch to exchange when the stagecoach came through. I had
now become a leader in the community and as hardly anyone in
Overton had ever eaten ice cream and few had even heard of it, I
remembered how back in the old days, my mother had made ten
gallons of it every Saturday, about which I knew very as I had
had to turn the freezer, a tedious job. I told the older girls
about it and suggested that they get together and we would all
make some of it. They all brought the eggs, the cream and the
other fixings, including cake. But we had no freezer, so we
filled a dishpan with cracked ice and put the liquid in a small
bucket in the middle and went to work. It turned out fine and
they each had a big dish of ice cream with cake all around. It
was the first ice cream they had ever eaten. After this I
branched out in the housepainting business and painted thirty six
houses in the vicinity, including Forkesville, Dushore, Overton
and New Albany. As time went on I flirted around with several
different girls but finally settled down with Mary Dieffenbach.
Later on we were married and went to Williamsport to live. I
worked here for a time until I met a painter from Duboise who
talked me into a proposition there. I stayed here until word got
around that there were all kinds of opportunities for work in
Emporium. We moved there and I made out fine. It was here that I
learned sign painting. After this Mary's folks wrote for us to
come home, and as I never could stay long in one place, we dug up
and went to Overton, where I worked for five or six months.
Barnum's circus was in Towanda about this time and as father
Dieffenbach and his son Tom were going to see it, I went along as
supernumerary. At the circus I noticed that the band had no
drummer so I applied for and secured the job. I had drummed in
the Overton Band, so when I joined the circus band the job was
not altogether new to me. The next morning, I found myself in
Sayre with the circus and the day after that we arrived in
Binghampton. It was tough going so I jumped a freight and finally
arrived at a small town where I had had some friends, but found
that they had moved to Utica, so I walked the thirty miles to
Utica and found my friends whom I was very glad to see. I saw by
the poster's that Barnum's circus was due in Utica the next
Monday but I did not look them up. I left Utica and went to Ilion
where I got a job and stayed about two years, and then went to
Pottstown as my father had written that things were booming there,
but Pottstown was on the bum as there were no jobs to be had
there. I lived with my folks in Pottstown for a while but finally
located a job in the town which I held for about a year, then
hearing that Boyertown Casket Company was hiring help, I went
there and got a job finishing caskets. I now had charge of the
finishing department at Boyertown and held it until the manager
of the factory went to the casket factory at West Grove, when I
went with him. I stayed at West Grove, Chester County,
Pennsylvania, about seven years and in my spare time got to
raising breed chickens of which I had about twelve different
varieties, and, with an incubator, I soon had several hundred
chickens. I sold them all except a trio of each breed, and rented
a farm at the far end of town, where we had a nice big house
which was modern for those days, having a good lawn and all kinds
of fruit trees and berry bushes. Here I got my chicken business
going again and made an incubator that hatched three hundred
chickens at a time, so, in a couple of months, I had hundreds of
chickens running around the place. I then bought a horse, a cow
and some hogs. At that time we really lived, our cellar always
being filled with vegatables and fruits of all sorts. There were
four acres in wheat when we rented the place and the wheat went
with the place. When the wheat was ripe, we cut it, hauled it to
the barn, and threshed it out by hand with an oldfashioned "flail."
We sent the grain to the mill and had enough flour to last us at
least a year. After two years of this we had enough as it was
very hard work and Mary, (whom I always called Mother) and I
worked from sunup until long after dark, Sundays and holidays
included, so we moved back into town, taking with us a fine buggy,
horse, and a nice Jersey cow. About this time I perfected a
patent on which I had been working for a good while, by which I
could take a piece of common oak furniture and turn it into
quartered oak furniture. I sold the use of the patent to a dozen
or more furniture factories, and then sold the patent outright to
Joseph Rose & Company, on South Second Street, Philadelphia.
I called the name of the process Royal American Quartered Oak. I
was now receiving a number of offers to take charge of different
furniture factories which I told my boss about so he raised my
salary five dollars a week to induce me to remain with him. I
went along on this basis, but, these other people kept writing to
me to come along, so I finally gave a month's notice and went to
work for A. G. Bert at Yeadon, Pennsylvania, and we moved to the
adjoing borough of Lansdowne. After I had been with these people
about a year and a half, a furniture factory in Philadelphia
offered me thirty dollars a week. [Personal Recollections of
James E. Travis (unpublished)]
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