Memoirs of Lloyd Moss: 1915
At some point during the school year mother and father must have decided that the school on the ridge was really too wild for Virginia and me so they took us out of there and sent us down to the school in Millstone, which was also a one-room school, and was located west of the Nancock-Hagerstown Turnpike. This road paralleled, very close by, the railroad, then the C. and O. Canal, and last, the Potomac River. I was completely fascinated by the mule-towed barges with families living on them. For a while I thought that would be a wonderful life to live. The railroad freight line was a busy one and I thought the life of the fellows in the caboose looked pretty good, too. At that time we could look across the river at the green forests of West Virginia, and I used to think that some day I'd like to see what it's like in that other state. Further up the river was a wonderful place called the Cumberland Water Gap that I hoped some day to see.
But to get back to the school: it turned out to be no better than the first one. The teacher was an old harridan, Miss McGusker. The boys were completely intollerant of anyone the slightest bit different, so I was quickly blacklisted because I spoke some of my mother's Cornish words. The penalty there for being different was being pelted with sharp shale stones. I often had to run for my very life and I think it was a miracle that I was never seriously hurt. One day, at recess, I had had to run so far that when the teacher came out and rang the handbell I was late getting back. Miss McGusker took a switch from the behind the door and started down the school steps to meet me. When I saw her coming I dropped into a post hole that the highway workmen had dug the day before. This made her so mad that she soundly thrashed the top of the hole over my head creating a dust storm all around me, but doing no harm. When everything was quiet above me I cautiously crept out and returned to the schoolroom and my own seat when she was writing on the blackboard with her back turned. I expected to hear more about the incident later, but didn't somehow. We had one very cold spell while we were attending this school, cold enough for the canal to freeze solid, and at recess we children had a lot of fun skating and sliding on the ice. Very few of us had skates, but even so the activity looked much like pictures I've seen of canals in Holland.
This part of Maryland is limestone country and in those days people made their own lime for agricultural use. While we lived there the manager of the peach orchard had limestone blocks cut at a kind of quarry just over the Pennsylvania line and transported in wagons to an open space in the center of the orchards. There, other men used the blocks to build a solid cube structure twenty feet by twenty feet by ten feet high, with six tunnels through it for fireplaces. When it was all completed, the men started log fires in the tunnels and kept feeding the flames with cordwood for ten days and nights. An immense amount of ashes had to be raked out from time to time to keep the fires burning briskly, and it was well known (and winked at) that the men on the late night shifts used these piles of hot ashes to their advantage. They procured a chicken now and then from some unlocked poultry house, wrung its neck, and with sticky red clay formed a big ball around it. They then buried the ball for a number of hours in the pile of hot ashes. When they considered it done they raked the ball out, split it in half and there was a nice baked chicken in the center with no feathers or anything to bother with - just eat it. At the end of ten days, the rock was reduced to powder and when it cooled down it was shoveled into bags.