This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Surnames: Woods, Summers, Tarwater, Devling Classification: Query Message Board URL: http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/an/XNB.2ACI/400 Message Board Post: from the Excelsior Springs Daily Standard. We found this yellowed newspaper clipping in my grandmother's (Gladys Woods Devling) belongings after her death. LOG CABIN STORIES Even If Its a Log Cabin There's No Place Like Home Mrs. Wiley Woods Lives 38 Years in Log Cabins Thirty-eight years of living in log cabins and rearing her family makes Mrs. Wiley Woods, correspondent for Excelsior Springs Daily Standard for the past 34 years, somewhat of an authority on the subject. Though humble the various cabins were, she still insists that those were the happy days, and "there's no place like home." Her memory of log cabins is a one-room and attic dwelling hewn from large logs with a broadax, of which possibly, she states, not many in these days have seen. The cracks were plastered with lime and sand and sometimes old claymud, and the walls were painted with whitewash made from lime. She was born in such a cabin located on the southwest corner of Wallace district, on a hill northeast of what then was called "Old Mill Ford" a ford crossing on Fishing River on the farm of her grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Turner. Mrs, Woods' mother often told of the skunk that made his appearance in that same house through the floor and in their tussel with it! left its peculiar "perfume". She also told how she would enjoy listening in the late afternoon to her neighbor, Mrs. Riley O'Dell, also living in a log cabin down in the valley west, singing as she went about her work. Her mother, although she had a beautiful voice could never carry a tune but enjoyed listening to others. Her father, who was a music teacher, tried in vain to teach her. Mrs. Woods' parents were the late Mr. amd Mrs. W. D. Summers who were born in log cabins on the farm now owned by R. W. Turner in Wallace district where Mrs. Woods was also born, and her father on what is known as Ephraim Hutchings farm located on Ray-Clay line south of Excelsior Springs. The Bushwackers were bad during the days of her grandfather, Thomas Summers, who often related how he had to hide out during the civil war from the Bushwackers who roamed the country killing men. Just as the war closed her mother's uncle, Philip Siegel was killed near her father's home. When quite young! , her father use to delight in getting an old frozen piece of cornbread and going out in the chimney corner to eat it. Her great-grandfather Siegel was born in a log cabin on the farm now owned by his grandson, Hughey Siegel and her parents later lived in a log cabin for 10 years on the Siegel farm, southeast of Siegel cemetery and which is still standing. Improvements have been made however and new siding added. The first home purchased by her parents was one-half mile northeast of Wallace schoolhouse, a log cabin, in which they lived for several years until a new schoolhouse was built and her father bought the old one and remodeled it into what she thought was a very fine house, with two rooms down and one up. Mrs. Woods was married in 1904 to Wiley Woods, son of the late Isaac Woods also born in a log cabin. For two years they lived in the Woods house which was then a double log house with siding and ceiling. Their child, Mrs. Beatrice Rush, was born there. In 1906 th! ey bought the present farm and lived in a cabin which had been taken down twice and rebuilt in defferent places, all cracks again plastered with sand and lime. For 17 years the lived in this cabin and two more children were born, Euel Woods of Orrick, and Mrs. Gladys Devling of Plattsburg. In 1923 they built a new five-bedroom with four rooms down and one up, which burned with its contents in 1939. A new three-roomhouse was soon built by the help of neighbors to replace it. During the time this was being built the Woods' stayed a few nights at the home of their son but soon became homesick. Neighbors gave them a four-cap cook stove and a few other articles and their son-in-law, Robert Devling, North Kansas City, brought a truck load of donated things back to the farm place and they moved into the old log cabin again, despite the fact that it had been taken over by chickens and dogs and cats. They scrubbed the floors and lined the walls with cardboard, and there they li! ved and cooked for the men building their new home until it was finished. That first night they sat on boxes under trees and ate out of pans--but just the same she adds, "There's no place like home." Mrs. Woods recalls that her early training included plenty of work, as the four oldest children were girls and they did about every kind of work a man did. Her father used to say "Girls learn to work,fer it you don't now, someday you'll have to, and it will be a lot better to quit than learn in old age." Her mother bore the seven children and had a doctor only with the first born and never again until two weeks before she died at the age of 88. Her mother was always ready to help her father in all his work as he was not too well. She recalls her mother saying he would sit in the shade with her when she was a baby while her mother plowed with Old Bill and double shovel plow. Old Bill and a cow were all they had given them when they were married, but they always said, "there ! was no place like home."