I have finished transcribing some more recordings of meetings of the Alexander-Crawford Historical Society. The first one I am going to share with you is an interview with Hazel Frost who lived most of her life in Alexander, Maine. This may not be all genealogy information, but it is such a good description of the life that some of our ancestors lived that I hope you will excuse me for submitting it. Like the previous tapes, it's too long for one mailing list message and I will split it into two messages. I hope you enjoy it. As in the previous transcription summaries, names and other words that I could not transcribe are in italics. Any comments, explanations, and additional names are in parentheses, and sections in quotation marks are exact quotes from the tape. Jane Dudley began with the following introduction: "It is Tuesday, September 9, 1980, and this is Jane Dudley of the Alexander-Crawford Historical Society visiting with Hazel Frost at her home on the Flatt Road in Alexander. Hazel, tell me about the Townsend House and the Townsend Road." Hazel Frost said, "Well, the Townsend House had 21 rooms in it. It was a double house. They was two pantries, two kitchens, two dining rooms, two living rooms, and then they was - up in the attic and down they was eight bedrooms." At one time according to Hazel Frost, this had been a single house, and two brothers bought it and made it into a double house. They divided the farm so that each worked half the farm land. Jane Dudley asked about the age of the house and Hazel Frost said, "They was a woman came to my house when I was there and she was in her eighties and she said her grandfather built the house." Hazel didn't know the name of the man who built the house, but said it was always called the Townsend house. She and her husband had bought the house in 1932 from Charlie Brown and didn't know who the owner before Charlie Brown had been. Hazel and Jane discussed that the road from the church down to Route Nine (The Airline Trail) was called Townsend Hill and perhaps the people who built the house were named Townsend. The Joe McLean family lived in the north side of the house. Ernest McLean who ran for governor of Maine about 38 years previously was born in that house. Hazel Frost and her husband, Lyston Frost, lived in the Townsend house for 39 years. They had five children, three boys and two girls. Two of the children were born in the Townsend house. Hazel's maiden name was Cousins. She was a sister of Orris and Harold Cousins. There were eleven children in their family. Hazel was born on Pocomoonshine Road in a house which was torn down about three or four years previous to the interview. A new log cabin has been built on the site. There are still flowers in the yard from Hazel's mother's garden. Mrs. Cousins had a green thumb and "had the most beautiful roses, glads and peonies." Mrs. Cousins had a yellow wisteria bush called Golden Glow. Hazel Frost described the kitchen in the Townsend House. "Well, it was a large kitchen, and there a sideboard. My refrigerator set in the right hand corner by the dining room door. My stove which was a - what I used mostly was a wood stove. I didn't have the electric stove at first. And, it was a big Kineo stove. King Kineo. Black with a polished top. You didn't have to black the top of it. No, all you had to do was just clean it off. And, that was practically all there was, the sink and the sideboard in that big kitchen." Jane Dudley asked about where Hazel rolled out pie crust, if there was a table in the kitchen. Hazel replied that there was a pantry. "The pantry had a big sideboard in it and it had shelves in one end of it and up one - partway up one side and then there was a big cupboard for your dishes. That's the end of the side - end of the kitchen - end of the pantry. We used to take and keep all of our tin dishes, cooking dishes and things like that in there. Under the sideboard there was a barrel that we kept flour in that was on trucks so all you had to do was take hold of it and it would roll right out to you. And, I had a board that stood in by there that I cooked on. And the sugar barrel was the same way. A flour barrel, just like a flour barrel. It was lined with paper and that - we used to have that - fill that with sugar in the fall. And, that too was on a truck. It would roll out to you. And, then they was two shelves beyond that - from there to the corner where I kept my bake tins and there was a big crock where I kept bread - like a bread box. Usually I had two crocks - six gallon crocks." They usually bought the flour at a store in Woodland, Maine. This was in the 1930s. Hazel said she "used mostly Mother Hubbard's. I used that for a long time, and then I got to Robin Hood, and I've used Pillsbury's Best." Jane asked about how many loaves of bread Hazel used to bake in a week. "I baked eight to a time, and I baked on Saturdays, and if it was just the average people around there, I would bake Wednesdays. At harvest time when I had extra help in I would bake Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, so that would be twenty four loaves of bread a week at times." They discussed the temperature control for the oven in the wood burning kitchen stove. Hazel said, "There was a big timer on the oven, you know a register, and you built your heat up until it was 300 and I baked my bread at 300. There was a little dial on the oven door with the temperature gauge on it. There was a hot water font in the stove, and when I built the - had the fire I had hot water." Hazel and her husband sold butter for several years. Hazel said, "One day I churned 125 pounds of butter. Of course, we churned it by gasoline engine, and this churn - you had to take the butter out, weigh it, and find out how much salt, and I used to put a little sugar in my butter, too. Find out how much you needed, put it back in the churn and the churn worked it. You put it into a different gear and it would work there. Of course you drained off your buttermilk and washed your butter and weighed all that butter and put it back in and then started the churn going again and it would run your - work your butter so all you had to do was print it. My husband used to help me print the butter." They used two pound wooden butter prints. "He would print it, press it into the print and then he would dump it onto a wet paper and I would do them up and stack them and we had wooden slats that would just take the height of the butter and we'd stack them one on top of the other." They had a big chest that they put blocks of ice into, and then put the stacks of butter in one end. Cream was kept in the same chests. They had to replace the blocks of ice about every three days.