The Life Story of
LYDIA LOUISE WILKINS BALL
Lydia Louise Wilkins Ball was born February 5, 1904 at Garfield Ward, Jefferson County, Idaho, in a little log room cabin on grandpa and grandma Cole's place, which is where Billie and Clara Lords live now. When I was born, Grandma Dabell from Grant, attended mom. She was a midwife.
Grandpa and Grandma Cole homesteaded this place. My father's name was Andrew Cecil Wilkins, born Feb. 13, 1879 in Salt Lake City, Utah. He was nicknamed Tuff, which he was known by. His father's name was Charles Wilkins, born in 1828 and his mother's name was Ura Welch Wilkins, born also in 1828. My mother's name was Vida Lillieth Cole Wilkins and she was corn April 25, 1886 at Spanish Fork, Utah. Her father's name was James Mason Cole, born Feb. 8, 1847 at Mc‑Kn, Pennsylvania, and her mother's name was Emily Jane Griffin, born April 18, 1849.
We lived on Grandpa and Grandma Cole's place and my dad helped grandpa farm and I just can remember when we moved. While we lived there I can remember climbing fences and going out in a little orchard where they had a tall cherry tree. I used to like to pick them and eat them, but grandma always wanted to keep the cherries to make cherry pies. She was a wonderful cook.
We moved to Coltman next and we lived in a little log house on Uncle Jesse's place and dad worked for Uncle Jesse farming for several years. It was here I started to school and walked about 2 ½ miles. When I got up as far as Uncle Jesse’s then we would meet with three or four other children and walk on to school.
The next place we moved was on Uncle Heber Wilkins' place. He was a bachelor and he lived with us off and on. In fact, he lived with us later on until he died. We lived there for several years in a small log house. There were about four or five of we kids
then, but I was the only one to start to school there. We all had dinner nails to carry and a book sack over our shoulder and around our neck.
After we had lived there for several seasons, we moved to another place. My dad rented the farm, which was located on the north of the Mugleston farm by the swail in Garfield. It was between us. We lived there quite awhile and while going to school there, there was a Hadlock store where Arlo Coleman lives now. The schoolhouse was across from there and we would go out and get eggs and trade them to Mrs. Hadlock for candy. One day we had boiled eggs for our lunch and we traded them for licorice and Mrs. Hadlock found out they were boiled eggs. She wouldn't trade with us any more, so that was the end of us using eggs for our candy.
We kids used to play up and down the swail banks and we loved to do that most of the day. One day one of our milk cows got bloated down by the swail and the next day mom and my brother, Les, were going to skin her. I was standing there watching and Les took his long pointed knife and gave it a punch in the cow's stomach and did I get sprayed. I howled for hours and what a mess to clean up. "That's my brother."
Our log house had two rooms and we had strat ticks full of nice clean straw and mom would make her bed and then our bed would be on top of that and at night she would pull the bed down on the floor and we kids would get in bed; some at the top and some at the bottom. She would try to divide us up as evenly as she could, I would sleep with my head under the covers all night, as I was so afraid of mice and I still am. Every fall dad would kill pigs for our winter meat and mom would cure it in brine in a barrel and we would make sausage and was it good‑‑we'd fry it in patties and put it in a crock jar, then pour the hot grease over it to keep it so we could use it a long time.
We lived here for 2 and 1/2 years and dad farmed it. It belonged to Will Hall, then to the Tanner family, which they used for sheep corral and to lamb their sheep out.
We then moved to Ucon. We lived on a farm on the corner as you go over the tracks. We used to have an old buggy horse and a single buggy. Mom would hitch him up and we kids would sit down in the bottom of the buggy next to the dash board and mom would really take us for a ride. Old Ginger would really travel. We would go to Rigby where mom's folks lived. That was before the highway was paved. One time Uncle Jesse's family came in the sleigh to get coal and flour and groceries and they came over to our house. They asked me to go down and stay for a week and I did. When we were riding along Aunt Gen asked me to have some of her candy. She took a sack out of the groceries and put my hand in the candy and it was hand soap and they laughed and laughed at me and did I feel silly. I never forgot that but Aunt Gen laughed all the way home.
Clara and I used to play their big Edison phonograph and we would dance around the dining room until we about wore the floor out and the music too, but it was so much fun.
Mr. Williams rented this place and the biggest part had to be broken out o£ sagebrush. They cleared it and diked it and planted. We lived there quite some time. Dad started working on the section of the railroad. He didn't farm any more, but they still kept a team of horses and some milk cows, which we had to herd in the summer. I didn't do too much of that. When I was about 14 years old, I started working out doing housework for different people. From then on I had to keep myself in clothes. Being the oldest of the family, I always helped mom scrub the clothes on the board. It was an all day's job, then toward the last they had an old washing machine and we would take turns turning. It was about as tiresome as washing on the board. I finished the 8th grade in Ucon and I thought I would like to go to high school and I had to find a place in Idaho Falls to work for my board. That is the way most people did and I found one and I ended up going in the front door of school and out the back door. That's as far as that went.
I got started going to the seed house and I worked up at St. Anthony several years and they had a boarding house just for girls who worked at the seed house. I also worked for a little coffee shop in Rigby that my aunt ran. That is where I first met Mitch. His folks lived on a farm up in antelope called Mud Springs. They were living there until his father got pneumonia and died. Then they moved down to Ucon in a little house right to the side of us. He had a pretty saddle horse he thought so much of and was his only transportation.
I worked at the seed house that last year and he went to California and worked. When the seed house let out in the spring I came home and he came home in June. We wrote to each other all winter and I've still got all our love letters he and I wrote over 51 years ago.
When we got married he borrowed his older brother's car. It was called a bug. It had one seat and you climbed on the back of the seat and slide down into the seat. We had two of our school chums, Harold Lowe and Lottie Paul go with us. We went to Smith's Chevrolet and President David Smith married us at the garage. We had enough money to buy us something to eat and Mitch had enough so we could go to the show and none left over.
We lived at his mother's place for awhile and some at my folks, then he got a job working for his brother‑in‑law. He was a water monkey for the thresher machine, which his brother‑in‑law ran. I remember it was $15.00 a week. It seemed like a lot then. We rented a two‑room house. It was actually four rooms, but we had only two as another couple lived in the other two rooms for $6.00 a month. We found an old cook stove and old iron bedstead and some old chairs and table his sister sold us. We had wooden boxes for cupboard and to sit on. A straw tick full of nice clean straw was nice to sleep on. We had a nice wedding shower and got lots of things that helped very much.
We continued to live in Ucon and we lived there until our oldest boy was 13 months old. Mitch worked for the Miskin Scraper Works and at the potato cellars. Some weeks all he would get for a week's work was seven or eight dollars. The wage was 25¢ an hour at the potato cellar and then he got on at the Miskin Scraper Works and he got $4.00 a day and was that super. Then he got a chance to go on a farm to work on a share‑crop basis for Arthur Hudman. I didn't want him to quit his job and go farming, but he wanted to so badly to be on a farm. We went down there in Coltman and lived in their upstairs for a couple of months and they built us a little two‑room house to live in. It seemed very nice to move into it. It was very cold in the wintertime, though; as they put no insulation in it.
It was here our daughter Lola was born and the way she got her name was our neighbors on the north of us didn't have any children and the doctor was Dr. Tucker from Lewisville. He came about 7 in the morning and he stopped at their house and Arthur Hudman was in bed and then he found out he was at the wrong place. She told me that that was supposed to be her baby, so I named her after her, which was Lola. When we would go to church, she would always rush up and get her and keep her until church was out.
We really had a skinny summer. No money much and we had an old jersey milk cow and a dozen laying hens and we planted a garden. We would have a little cream after we made butter, and we would take it to Ucon and sell it so we would have syrup for our bread. We ate lots of eggs, bread and milk and green onions and we survived.
We stayed there for two years, then went on trying to farm, renting on crop rent. We had a plow and 3 old horses. We lived down west of Ucon on a farm for two years, then another farm near Ucon. We rented and we still were farming for Mr. St. Clair when we bought our fifty acres out at Garfield. In the meantime we had another baby boy before we moved out there.
We had bought us a new Dodge touring car and when we moved out there, we had to trade it in on the farm for a down payment and so all we had for transportation was a little old Model T car, without any top or running boards and only 1/2 of a windshield, and that wasn't too nice when we would get caught in a rain storm, which we did a lot of times. One time when Lola was with us and we went to Rigby, it got awful cloudy. When we were coming home and it caught us by Groom's place and we got under the trees as much as we could and did the rain ever come down and also hail. We had to sit on the sack of sugar to keep it from getting wet and the hail pounded Lola's arms and she cried. That was really a summer. We had an old granary we moved on to take the place of a kitchen and we had a shell of a garage we moved on to sleep in. The granary had large cracks between the boards. Some days the wind would blow so much dirt in there would be gritty baloney sandwiches for dinner. We lived that way about four months.
We didn't have a corral for our cows and we would sit out in the yard and milk them and we finally got a big old bulky truck to haul potatoes and the chickens roosted on the frame underneath the car. We took a few of them when we went to the show at Rigby. We saw one fly out from under the truck. When we stopped, we saw there were more and we chased them around and finally caught them. We were under a streetlight and when we put them in the cab of the old truck, they still squawked and so we went on home without going to the show. The kids were really disappointed. We built a basement and finished it early in August 1937 and moved in and it seemed like heaven. We had not any electric lights or water. We hauled the water and had coil‑oil lights. It wasn't too bad until winter came and it would blow snow over the windows and it was so dark with only a couple old coil lights for lights. We would clean the snow away one day and soon they were filled in again. We lived that way until the next summer, then we had one of our friends and his wife come down and they helped us wire the basement for electricity and the day they were turned on Clara Lemon, our friend, ran through the house and turned on every light and was hollering "Whoopee" and that was a lot better.
We worked hard and raised quite a few potatoes. I would go out and pick then come in and get dinner for all of them and I worked in the winters at the potato house. We had to haul water in barrels in the wintertime. We lived in the basement for five years and then we built the house and that was sure a treat to be able to see out. The basement was so deep, we had to stand on a chair to see out and I was never so glad to move in the house and now I'd have to be hog‑tied to live in a basement again. It was o.k. at the time. In the summer I planted flowers and a garden and berries and planted several apple trees and lilac bushes and the like and lawn. The kids went to Garfield school. Lola and Dean finished grade school there and Bud finished at Ucon. The school buses started taking them to Ucon.
We ran the farm until Mitch rented it to Joe Sievers for a couple or three years and then we sold it to them, We came up here and we had this small piece of ground and we built the house we are in now. That was in 1965. After we moved up here, I didn't work in the potatoes any more.
Mitch's brother, older than he, helped me a lot with my yard‑planting and fixing it up and raising a garden. When we started here, it was one big weed patch clear up to your waist and hard and dry and it was quite a hard job. We bought a little garden tractor and Mitch always plows wherever we have to have it dug up. It was a lot of hard work, but was fun and we sure do like it up here.
In 1959 we went to the Temple Project Class and were married in the Temple in Idaho Falls March 5, 1959. We celebrated our fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1965, August 2.
I have been sealed to my parents June 12, 1965. My mother will be 91 years old on April 25. My father has been dead since Oct 5, 1943. Our family didn't attend church as much as we should of. My brothers and sisters and I went to Sunday School and night church when we were young. Then after my father died, mom went regularly until she wasn't able to go any more. She lives clown to Idaho Falls nursing home and she never misses her meetings down there. We had 7 girls and 2 boys in our family, which are all living yet.
We had three children. 1. Dean now 51, married Ann Hanni and live in Dunasomuir, California. They don't leave any children. 2. Lola Maxine, now 50, married Vernal Young from Rigby and they have two children, Linda married Jack Danks from Lewisville and they have two boys, Bret and Chad. and 3. Bud (Eldon A) now 48 and he married Betty Crystal and have Blaine who married Barbara and they have one boy named Brandy. Their second son, Brad married Susan Ralston and they have two girls, Crystal and Sarah. And one boy, Ben, 16, is still at home.
Grandpa and Grandma Cole homesteaded this place. My father's name was Andrew Cecil Wilkins, born Feb. 13, 1879 in Salt Lake City, Utah. He was nicknamed Tuff, which he was known by. His father's name was Charles Wilkins, born in 1828 and his mother's name was Ura Welch Wilkins, born also in 1828. My mother's name was Vida Lillieth Cole Wilkins and she was corn April 25, 1886 at Spanish Fork, Utah. Her father's name was James Mason Cole, born Feb. 8, 1847 at Mc‑Kn, Pennsylvania, and her mother's name was Emily Jane Griffin, born April 18, 1849.
We lived on Grandpa and Grandma Cole's place and my dad helped grandpa farm and I just can remember when we moved. While we lived there I can remember climbing fences and going out in a little orchard where they had a tall cherry tree. I used to like to pick them and eat them, but grandma always wanted to keep the cherries to make cherry pies. She was a wonderful cook.
We moved to Coltman next and we lived in a little log house on Uncle Jesse's place and dad worked for Uncle Jesse farming for several years. It was here I started to school and walked about 2 ½ miles. When I got up as far as Uncle Jesse’s then we would meet with three or four other children and walk on to school.
The next place we moved was on Uncle Heber Wilkins' place. He was a bachelor and he lived with us off and on. In fact, he lived with us later on until he died. We lived there for several years in a small log house. There were about four or five of we kids
then, but I was the only one to start to school there. We all had dinner nails to carry and a book sack over our shoulder and around our neck.
After we had lived there for several seasons, we moved to another place. My dad rented the farm, which was located on the north of the Mugleston farm by the swail in Garfield. It was between us. We lived there quite awhile and while going to school there, there was a Hadlock store where Arlo Coleman lives now. The schoolhouse was across from there and we would go out and get eggs and trade them to Mrs. Hadlock for candy. One day we had boiled eggs for our lunch and we traded them for licorice and Mrs. Hadlock found out they were boiled eggs. She wouldn't trade with us any more, so that was the end of us using eggs for our candy.
We kids used to play up and down the swail banks and we loved to do that most of the day. One day one of our milk cows got bloated down by the swail and the next day mom and my brother, Les, were going to skin her. I was standing there watching and Les took his long pointed knife and gave it a punch in the cow's stomach and did I get sprayed. I howled for hours and what a mess to clean up. "That's my brother."
Our log house had two rooms and we had strat ticks full of nice clean straw and mom would make her bed and then our bed would be on top of that and at night she would pull the bed down on the floor and we kids would get in bed; some at the top and some at the bottom. She would try to divide us up as evenly as she could, I would sleep with my head under the covers all night, as I was so afraid of mice and I still am. Every fall dad would kill pigs for our winter meat and mom would cure it in brine in a barrel and we would make sausage and was it good‑‑we'd fry it in patties and put it in a crock jar, then pour the hot grease over it to keep it so we could use it a long time.
We lived here for 2 and 1/2 years and dad farmed it. It belonged to Will Hall, then to the Tanner family, which they used for sheep corral and to lamb their sheep out.
We then moved to Ucon. We lived on a farm on the corner as you go over the tracks. We used to have an old buggy horse and a single buggy. Mom would hitch him up and we kids would sit down in the bottom of the buggy next to the dash board and mom would really take us for a ride. Old Ginger would really travel. We would go to Rigby where mom's folks lived. That was before the highway was paved. One time Uncle Jesse's family came in the sleigh to get coal and flour and groceries and they came over to our house. They asked me to go down and stay for a week and I did. When we were riding along Aunt Gen asked me to have some of her candy. She took a sack out of the groceries and put my hand in the candy and it was hand soap and they laughed and laughed at me and did I feel silly. I never forgot that but Aunt Gen laughed all the way home.
Clara and I used to play their big Edison phonograph and we would dance around the dining room until we about wore the floor out and the music too, but it was so much fun.
Mr. Williams rented this place and the biggest part had to be broken out o£ sagebrush. They cleared it and diked it and planted. We lived there quite some time. Dad started working on the section of the railroad. He didn't farm any more, but they still kept a team of horses and some milk cows, which we had to herd in the summer. I didn't do too much of that. When I was about 14 years old, I started working out doing housework for different people. From then on I had to keep myself in clothes. Being the oldest of the family, I always helped mom scrub the clothes on the board. It was an all day's job, then toward the last they had an old washing machine and we would take turns turning. It was about as tiresome as washing on the board. I finished the 8th grade in Ucon and I thought I would like to go to high school and I had to find a place in Idaho Falls to work for my board. That is the way most people did and I found one and I ended up going in the front door of school and out the back door. That's as far as that went.
I got started going to the seed house and I worked up at St. Anthony several years and they had a boarding house just for girls who worked at the seed house. I also worked for a little coffee shop in Rigby that my aunt ran. That is where I first met Mitch. His folks lived on a farm up in antelope called Mud Springs. They were living there until his father got pneumonia and died. Then they moved down to Ucon in a little house right to the side of us. He had a pretty saddle horse he thought so much of and was his only transportation.
I worked at the seed house that last year and he went to California and worked. When the seed house let out in the spring I came home and he came home in June. We wrote to each other all winter and I've still got all our love letters he and I wrote over 51 years ago.
When we got married he borrowed his older brother's car. It was called a bug. It had one seat and you climbed on the back of the seat and slide down into the seat. We had two of our school chums, Harold Lowe and Lottie Paul go with us. We went to Smith's Chevrolet and President David Smith married us at the garage. We had enough money to buy us something to eat and Mitch had enough so we could go to the show and none left over.
We lived at his mother's place for awhile and some at my folks, then he got a job working for his brother‑in‑law. He was a water monkey for the thresher machine, which his brother‑in‑law ran. I remember it was $15.00 a week. It seemed like a lot then. We rented a two‑room house. It was actually four rooms, but we had only two as another couple lived in the other two rooms for $6.00 a month. We found an old cook stove and old iron bedstead and some old chairs and table his sister sold us. We had wooden boxes for cupboard and to sit on. A straw tick full of nice clean straw was nice to sleep on. We had a nice wedding shower and got lots of things that helped very much.
We continued to live in Ucon and we lived there until our oldest boy was 13 months old. Mitch worked for the Miskin Scraper Works and at the potato cellars. Some weeks all he would get for a week's work was seven or eight dollars. The wage was 25¢ an hour at the potato cellar and then he got on at the Miskin Scraper Works and he got $4.00 a day and was that super. Then he got a chance to go on a farm to work on a share‑crop basis for Arthur Hudman. I didn't want him to quit his job and go farming, but he wanted to so badly to be on a farm. We went down there in Coltman and lived in their upstairs for a couple of months and they built us a little two‑room house to live in. It seemed very nice to move into it. It was very cold in the wintertime, though; as they put no insulation in it.
It was here our daughter Lola was born and the way she got her name was our neighbors on the north of us didn't have any children and the doctor was Dr. Tucker from Lewisville. He came about 7 in the morning and he stopped at their house and Arthur Hudman was in bed and then he found out he was at the wrong place. She told me that that was supposed to be her baby, so I named her after her, which was Lola. When we would go to church, she would always rush up and get her and keep her until church was out.
We really had a skinny summer. No money much and we had an old jersey milk cow and a dozen laying hens and we planted a garden. We would have a little cream after we made butter, and we would take it to Ucon and sell it so we would have syrup for our bread. We ate lots of eggs, bread and milk and green onions and we survived.
We stayed there for two years, then went on trying to farm, renting on crop rent. We had a plow and 3 old horses. We lived down west of Ucon on a farm for two years, then another farm near Ucon. We rented and we still were farming for Mr. St. Clair when we bought our fifty acres out at Garfield. In the meantime we had another baby boy before we moved out there.
We had bought us a new Dodge touring car and when we moved out there, we had to trade it in on the farm for a down payment and so all we had for transportation was a little old Model T car, without any top or running boards and only 1/2 of a windshield, and that wasn't too nice when we would get caught in a rain storm, which we did a lot of times. One time when Lola was with us and we went to Rigby, it got awful cloudy. When we were coming home and it caught us by Groom's place and we got under the trees as much as we could and did the rain ever come down and also hail. We had to sit on the sack of sugar to keep it from getting wet and the hail pounded Lola's arms and she cried. That was really a summer. We had an old granary we moved on to take the place of a kitchen and we had a shell of a garage we moved on to sleep in. The granary had large cracks between the boards. Some days the wind would blow so much dirt in there would be gritty baloney sandwiches for dinner. We lived that way about four months.
We didn't have a corral for our cows and we would sit out in the yard and milk them and we finally got a big old bulky truck to haul potatoes and the chickens roosted on the frame underneath the car. We took a few of them when we went to the show at Rigby. We saw one fly out from under the truck. When we stopped, we saw there were more and we chased them around and finally caught them. We were under a streetlight and when we put them in the cab of the old truck, they still squawked and so we went on home without going to the show. The kids were really disappointed. We built a basement and finished it early in August 1937 and moved in and it seemed like heaven. We had not any electric lights or water. We hauled the water and had coil‑oil lights. It wasn't too bad until winter came and it would blow snow over the windows and it was so dark with only a couple old coil lights for lights. We would clean the snow away one day and soon they were filled in again. We lived that way until the next summer, then we had one of our friends and his wife come down and they helped us wire the basement for electricity and the day they were turned on Clara Lemon, our friend, ran through the house and turned on every light and was hollering "Whoopee" and that was a lot better.
We worked hard and raised quite a few potatoes. I would go out and pick then come in and get dinner for all of them and I worked in the winters at the potato house. We had to haul water in barrels in the wintertime. We lived in the basement for five years and then we built the house and that was sure a treat to be able to see out. The basement was so deep, we had to stand on a chair to see out and I was never so glad to move in the house and now I'd have to be hog‑tied to live in a basement again. It was o.k. at the time. In the summer I planted flowers and a garden and berries and planted several apple trees and lilac bushes and the like and lawn. The kids went to Garfield school. Lola and Dean finished grade school there and Bud finished at Ucon. The school buses started taking them to Ucon.
We ran the farm until Mitch rented it to Joe Sievers for a couple or three years and then we sold it to them, We came up here and we had this small piece of ground and we built the house we are in now. That was in 1965. After we moved up here, I didn't work in the potatoes any more.
Mitch's brother, older than he, helped me a lot with my yard‑planting and fixing it up and raising a garden. When we started here, it was one big weed patch clear up to your waist and hard and dry and it was quite a hard job. We bought a little garden tractor and Mitch always plows wherever we have to have it dug up. It was a lot of hard work, but was fun and we sure do like it up here.
In 1959 we went to the Temple Project Class and were married in the Temple in Idaho Falls March 5, 1959. We celebrated our fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1965, August 2.
I have been sealed to my parents June 12, 1965. My mother will be 91 years old on April 25. My father has been dead since Oct 5, 1943. Our family didn't attend church as much as we should of. My brothers and sisters and I went to Sunday School and night church when we were young. Then after my father died, mom went regularly until she wasn't able to go any more. She lives clown to Idaho Falls nursing home and she never misses her meetings down there. We had 7 girls and 2 boys in our family, which are all living yet.
We had three children. 1. Dean now 51, married Ann Hanni and live in Dunasomuir, California. They don't leave any children. 2. Lola Maxine, now 50, married Vernal Young from Rigby and they have two children, Linda married Jack Danks from Lewisville and they have two boys, Bret and Chad. and 3. Bud (Eldon A) now 48 and he married Betty Crystal and have Blaine who married Barbara and they have one boy named Brandy. Their second son, Brad married Susan Ralston and they have two girls, Crystal and Sarah. And one boy, Ben, 16, is still at home.
