Tough People: Dillings Tale Begins

When one sees the words “if this place could talk,” there is a tendency to conjure images of ghosts, thrilling romance or big money deals. But when one looks at the farm that now belongs to the Bakers, just a stones throw from Piney Creek Road in Huston Township, it’s difficult to imagine what of much drama occurred here.

Enter Ella Snowberger, the intrepid Morrisons Cove Herald reporter of 80 years ago, and some of the mystery surfaces.

Some of us first heard about the Baker farm a week ago when Jim Snyder, president of the Blair County Genealogical Society, and local resident Allen Edwards met in a cornfield at the farm to discuss ways to preserve and restore a family cemetery of eight bodies in repose for about a century.

The conversation turned to details about the lives of at least three of those interred in the corn field and a battle that left the female with physical scars she carried to her grave.

Located about a mile from Poverty Hollow, the farm was occupied by Catherine, Henry and George, brothers and sister, all unmarried, who lived on and worked the Dilling homestead.

Snowberger puts the year at 1880.

One of the earliest to be settled in the Cove, the farm is situated between the Piney Creek and Clover Creek, about a half dozen miles from Martinsburg.

“The Dillings were most estimable folks,” Snowberger writes in her book dated 1933. “Frugal and industrious, they were reported to have money.”

Ah, the plot thickens.

On this given day, Henry and George have dinner prepared by the hands of dear sister Catherine and head out to the fields but Catherine’s noon cooking was not over.

Snowberger tells us that two “strange men” came to the kitchen door pleading hunger.

“Something about the appearance of the men gave the woman the premonition of trouble,” Snowberger penned.

She was convinced there was something about them that set them apart “from the usual run of tramps who bed from door to door.”

She positioned the two on the porch and locked the back door while preparing the food.

“Their demeanor when they took the food confirmed her suspicions,” she wrote. “They had a hang dog look, a look of robbers.”

The two took their sandwiches and made appearance of moving on.

The day was now inching toward evening and neighbor Henry Rodland, did what he always did: he attempted to drive his cows to the spring that lay beyond the Dilling’s barn.

“The cattle were thirsty but they could not be driven, either by force or persuasion past the barn,” she wrote. “Some brute instinct seemed to warn them of danger.”

As evening fully fell, Mr. Rodland, perplexed by the actions of his cattle, shared his experience with the Dillings and they reached a general consensus that the wayfarers who had come to the house in the afternoon were now hiding in the barn.

They did not go to the barn that evening and instead unhitched the horses in the field turning them out to pasture and stored the harnesses in the wood house.

Check back next week and we’ll hear about the heroic antics of Catherine Dilling, who was deft at more than making a sandwich.