Our Horatio Alger House

FOREWORD This sketch, along with many other autobiographical sketches, was written 'Yhile I was a part of a Learning in Retirement class sponsored by the Five Colleges in western Massachusetts. The reader may well be skeptical at my remembering some of the details reported here almost 70 years after they happened! I freely admit that I have no documents to back up my words. We had in our family what I later learned in seminary could be called "an oral tradition." We learned that the Old Testament existed in stories and the New Testament existed in sermons repeated from one generation to the next before they were ever written down. My father enoyed talking and he was not in the least bothered by the accusation that you had heard his story before. Since getting "the Smith House" was one of the major achievements of his life, he never tired of telling others how it all came about. He loved to quote the actual conversations as he remembered them even attempting the accent of the speaker.. I did check with my brother, Neil Hartman, ofMoorestown, N.J., and my sister, Doris Haiifnan, of Amherst, Mass., on some of these details. "The Smith House" is still there and just a year ago as we were driving down to Lebanon to visit Ruth West, we parked beside the house and walked all the way around it. Since it occupies four building lots, there are streets on three sides of it and a public alley on the fourth side -- a typical pattern of "streets and alleys" in Ohio small towns. We are sorry to report that Cedarville College did not find it practical to use the house as a dormitory. They have sold it to a private owner who now occupies it. Justin J. Hartman Hadley, Mass. August 5, 1995