User:Dshelsel

My father was born in Wehrum,PA at his parent's home at 95 Broadway, in 1927. The family moved to Akron, Ohio two years later, in 1929, and my father has no memory of Wehrum, at least not of Wehrum at a time when it was populated. (When asked as a child where he was born, my father was credited as saying, "I was born, back home, upstairs, in the front room" -- a reference to his parents' bedroom at 95 Broadway in Wehrum and, of course, what he'd been told.) His brother, Edward (1918 - 2008) and his sister, Fern (1921 - 1986) were also born there. My grandfather, Edward Raymond, worked for the Lackawanna Coal Company -- for a time in the town's railroad station, and, later, as a mine supervisor. I can remember my grandmother, Esther, regularly traveling to Pennsylvania in the 1960s in order to attend annual gatherings of former residents of the long abandoned town of Wehrum. The gathering was known as "The Wehrum Reunion." She died in 1980, after the Wehrum Reunion stopped being held, and she was sad when the tradition of the Wehrum Reunion died before she did. For many years, dating into the 1970s, my grandmother stayed in touch with her Wehrum neighbor and dear friend, Mabel Caltrider. (Mabel was Catholic, and my grandmother was a Methodist -- and their close friendship, evidently, was considered to be fairly progressive in those days.) To some extent, my grandmother's relationship to Wehrum, long since a ghost town, strikes certain resonant chords with the 1985 movie, "The Trip to Bountiful," or at least it does in my mind. I can remember my grandmother telling me that my grandfather rerouted a natural cold water spring that ran through the backyard of their house in Wehrum so that its course artificially passed through the basement of their house, thereby providing a means to refrigerate milk and other perishable items indoors. I visited the site while on a bike ride a couple years ago. In the woods, I found the foundation of 95 Broadway -- and the remnants of the cold water spring. There are many other foundations hidden in the woods, but otherwise the town of Wehrum is long gone and, to the casual eye, it is simply a wooded track of land.