Francis Ashley Carlisle, May 19, 1908

Chicago Ill.
May 19 08

Dear Mother and All.

With the trembling hand and failing sight of full thirty years I take my pen to refresh your memory that your oldest baby is still able to make himself heard in the land.

I am feeling quite venerable this evening, not so much from the weight of years as from the weight of an old spade with which I have been digging up our beautiful back yard in which, if things go as usual I shall produce a bumper crop of robist weeds of all known + unknown varieties. Each year for a period of two weeks or more I have the garden mania and worry the earth into humps and mounds which as summer advances is the tramping ground of children, weeds, and vain hopes.

I have a few things up naturally and some artifically that I have examined to see if there are prospects of incubation. All have done well except the pickles (they never say cucumbers here) Which I believe must have been planted bottom side up.

We are flurishing as far as health is concerned. though some time ago I was laid up with tonsilitus, making the usual resolution to have them taken out which also as usuall I have forgotten.

page 2

My eyes are not failing as rapidly now though they are bad enough. They have been very good to me at the shop and changed me out a biplathe on which the work is not generally close so that I am able to make a fair showing and as I become more familiar with the work will be able to do better.

Our church work has enlarged to two missions and Sunday Schools so that O now have an assistant pastor and two lady missionaries to help me out but the work is still harder for me. In Pullman I hope to build a church this fall but it will be a hard proposition as they have laid off over seven thousand men within shops alone and other shops have done as much in proportion. With the lazy mans luck my job holds good and I have all that I can do.

Well this is quite a letter for one so old don't you think? So I will stop and send love to all.

For 30 years you son
Frank



For more see:
Camfield Family Letters
Descendants of Sarah Ann Wisner
Michael Camfield


Carlisle, Francis Ashley (Chicago, IL) to “Dear Mother and All”
[Anna Camfield Carlisle]. Letter. 19 May 1908. Digital Images 1-2.
Privately held by Apple, [ADDRESS FOR PRIVATE USE,]
Snowville, New York. 2009.
[Carlisle Family, Box #1, Correspondence, 1908,
Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. 2008.]