Dean and Bettie Batt and Irene Richmond assist
Staff writer
Power D. “Denny” Custer Jr. of Okemos, Mich., was researching Custer family history when he came across memoirs written by a distant relative, 72-year-old Raymond E. Custer in 1963.
“I still like to visit my birthplace, a little stone house on a steep bank of a spring fed creek,” Raymond Custer wrote.
This piqued Denny Custer’s interest and led him down the path that eventually brought him to the spot where that little stone house once stood.
He learned that Charles F. Custer moved from Petersburg, Ill., to Marion at age 22 with his parents and siblings.
The family stayed a short time before moving back to Illinois. However, Charles did not accompany them. He had met Emma Sarah Snyder. Emma, a school teacher, had come to Marion to visit her sister, Clara Kuhn, and decided to stay. She taught at Bethel, Cross, and Quarry country schools.
Charles and Emma were married Nov. 27, 1890. They lived in a little stone house at the top of the steep bank of a spring fed creek, one of the Chingawassa Springs feeding Clear Creek.
In the six years they lived there, they had two children, Raymond Earl and Anne Myrtle. Years later, Raymond Custer, who was an educator at Wakeeney, sought out his birthplace and mentioned it in his memoirs.
Visiting the springs
Denny Custer is a train buff, so he was naturally curious about the Marion Belt and Chingawassa Springs Railroad that existed from 1889 to 1893. Were there any remnants of it, he wondered?
He also began to wonder about that little stone house. Might it still exist?
After several unsuccessful trips to Marion, a breakthrough came when Custer learned about Dean and Bettie Batt of Marion and that Dean’s father had owned a farm near Chingawassa Springs. He talked to Dean on the phone, and Dean invited him to come to Marion and explore the historic places.
The Batts contacted Don and Vicki Kraus, who rent the land on which Chingawassa Springs is located. In 2005, their son, Nick, guided Denny, his wife, Karen, and Dean and Bettie on a tour through the area.
They visited Dean’s father’s farm and saw the barn built of wood from the former Chingawassa Springs hotel. They found the foundation of Quarry country school west of the springs.
Then they located the spot where the little stone house had stood, just to the east of the springs. All that remained was the basement, filled with debris.
“It was right there!” Custer exclaimed. Remains of the old barn built into a hill also were there. The stones from the house had been used as siding for a house in Marion.
“Nick led the way down that very steep slope and we stood in Clear Creek and drank from the spring,” Custer said.
Another visit
He later learned that Irene Richmond of Marion had written memories of Chingawassa Springs and several years of living on a small farmstead near there.
He was ecstatic to learn it was the same stone house that Raymond Custer had referenced in his memoirs. Richmond and her first husband, Lonnie Smith, and their three children lived there from 1939 to 1941.
Custer contacted Richmond, and in June 2007, he returned to Marion with his son, Greg. Nick Kraus, Vicki Kraus, and Richmond went with them to revisit the old farmstead.
A measurement of the foundation made it out to be 20x20-feet — 400 square feet with four rooms.
Richmond shared happy memories of the time spent there. They were happy to have a roof over their heads, she said. They heated with coal and cooked with wood.
The separator, kept in the full basement of the little house, was used to separate the cream from the milk produced by their Jersey cows. Chickens were kept for eggs and meat.
“No one had any money in those days,” Richmond recalled. “Eggs and cream kept us in groceries.”
Custer went down the bank to the spring and filled a dozen Mason jars with water straight out of the side of the hill. He kept one jar and later gave samples to relatives.
Custer was unsuccessful in locating a picture of the little house, so he persuaded Richmond to paint a picture of it as she remembered it. The 93-year-old Richmond has 23 credit hours in art from Butler Community College of Marion. She had not painted in a while but was willing to comply.
Denny made color copies of the resulting artwork and sent them to second cousins of the Charles Custer family.
One of the recipients was Dana Kyle Chipman, a great-grandson of Charles Custer. He received the picture at a special event in Washington, D.C.
On Oct. 2, Chipman, a career military man, was promoted to a three star General of the Army. He also became the 38th Judge Advocate General in the history of the Army.
Later in the evening, Denny Custer, Chipman’s second cousin, once removed, presented the general with three small gifts. One was the original painting by Richmond, nicely framed.
A second gift was an album of written histories about the Custer family and Chingawassa Springs. It included many color photos taken of Denny Custer and his hosts on trips to the springs. The last gift was a jar of Chingawassa Springs water.
“Marion’s past and present continues to shine, now in the nation’s capital,” Custer said.