Local 4th-, 5th-graders learn what their lives would have been, at Barnhisel House

GIRARD

In the farmhouse on U.S. Route 422 that is now 174 years old, the original owners raised six children — one boy and six girls.

Their lives, as the St. Rose School fourth- and fifth-graders who toured the Barnhisel House on Friday were about to learn, were quite different from their own.

But that was the point, as the week-long tours of the house for area school kids finished up. Girard and Liberty intermediate schools toured Monday through Thursday.

“In fourth grade, they have to take Ohio history,” said Ray O’Neill of Vienna, a Barnhisel House docent who was stationed outside the house at his blacksmith forge. “This is one of the better things we do for the community.”

The tours were as efficient as they were informative. Seven groups of kids came through every 20 minutes, stopping in their turn to watch O’Neill at his anvil, pounding molten hooks from small metal rods he’d melted in hot coals.

With him was Ken Miller, who pumped air into an old bellows behind the bed of coals in the portable forge.

“I’m the handyman — the indentured servant,” Miller said.

O’Neill wanted to know if they believed he was going to give the hooks to teachers so they could hang up bad kids on the classroom walls.

They did not.

He told them that when they went inside the house, they were going to have to wash his dirty shirts by hand. If they didn’t believe that, they were disappointed.

Waiting for them in one of the house’s two kitchens, the summer kitchen, were two wash tubs of water, a washboard and several clothes baskets. There was also some dirty laundry that included at least one of O’Neill’s shirts.

Read more of what they learned that made them thankful they were born many decades later in Saturday's Vindicator or on Vindy.com.