George’s Coal
By Abraham Lincoln

Looks so much like raw hamburger like George Myers used to eat for lunch. I was a little boy of 6 or 7 years and used to set on the porch with George and his wife, Ida, and watch the Model A's and Model T's go past on the road in front of their house (now state route 722). When it was time for lunch, Ida called us in and George ate his raw hamburger and Ida ate something she cooked up, and she gave me a sugar cookie to eat.

Those were the days when finishing the 8th Grade was all the education anybody needed, according to George. That’s as far as he went and as far as anybody in his family had gone to school. George did real good on his 8^th Grade education.

George owned two coal yards and everyone in town paid him for the coal either he delivered or they picked up. He owned the ground on the east side of the railroad tracks where the D&U train parked coal cars on the siding by his coal piles.

George paid the Harleman brothers $20.00 to unload the coal cars and throw the coal on what soon became mountains of fresh coal. That coal was burned by every home in Gordon, Ohio. People used it in kitchen cook stoves and living room heating stoves until summer when the stoves stopped burning and houses were heated and air conditioned by opening doors and windows.

Those were the best of times and the worst of times and we all remember them with smiles.

At Gordon School, one-half mile west of town, in the country, is the two-room red brick school house called, “Gordon School.” The teacher had been there for many years teaching the first through the eighth grade. Her name was, Beatrice Brown, and she was a spinster who lived with her mother in Arcanum, Ohio.

She was strict and kept an orderly school with absolutely no nonsense of any kind allowed. Each grade got a recess for about 30 minutes when they finished the day’s lessons in any subject. Everyone had to go outside to play and some play days were better than others.

After the hour-long Noon recess ended, and everyone had to go back into the school house. Coal shed keys laying on your desk meant you had to go out to the coal shed and get two buckets of coal to feed the furnace at the back of the room. So the coal in the mountain pile across the tracks back home ended up in coal buckets at school keeping me and the other 23 kids warm in the winter.

George Meyers, the raw hamburger man, had somebody fill up his dump truck with coal and haul it out to school and shovel it through the coal shed window where it formed the coal pile us kids filled up the coal buckets from.

I remember during the War Years, when mother and I rode a train from downtown Dayton, Ohio to Hinton West Virginia. We saw miles and miles of train cars loaded with West Virginia coal outbound for places like Gordon, Ohio where I lived.

We also burned a lot of corn cobs because they were free and when mother didn’t have any money to buy coal with we used free corn cobs that were shoveled through the coal window in our shed.

(576 words)