Diary of a Series

By Daisy L. Townsend

The Story Behind the Sarah's Legacy Series

The fascinating account of how the Sarah's Legacy series came about.

In Diary of a Series, you'll discover

• Language: English
• Publisher: Daisy Louise Townsend
• Release date: Jun 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9780578284057

Daisy L. Townsend

Daisy Beiler Townsend wrote in magazines and periodicals such as Guideposts, The Upper Room and The Secret Place for many years. In earlier years, she her husband, Donn, wrote more than 100 songs and had a family music ministry and Christian nursery school. Later, they were missionaries to Japan with OMS International. Daisy also was a certified Christian counselor with the National Christian Counselors Assn. They live in Pennsylvania and have three children (one deceased) and six grandchildren.

Book preview

Diary

of a

Series

Daisy Beiler Townsend

The Story Behind

 the

Sarah’s Legacy

Series

Copyright 2022 Daisy Beiler Townsend

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-0-578-28405-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the author, except for brief quotes used in reviews.

Scripture quotations taken from the King James Version (KJV) public domain and scripture quotations taken from the Amplified Bible (AMPC), Copyright 1954, 1958, 1962, 1964, 1987 by The Lockman Foundation Used by permission. www.lockman.org the Amplified Bible (AMPC).

Other Books by Daisy Beiler Townsend

Homespun Faith

Sarah’s Legacy Series

Sarah’s Legacy

Sarah’s Legacy Shared

Sarah’s Legacy Tested

Sarah’s Legacy Lived

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my beloved American History teacher, Vonda M. Yunker. She birthed in me a love for American History when I was in the eleventh grade by her enthusiasm for the subject. Because of her influence, I enjoy both reading and writing historical fiction and the research that goes along with it. I recently had the pleasure of reconnecting with Mrs. Yunker by phone and thanking her for doing her job so well.

Acknowledgements

I want to thank my husband, Donn, for doing things I’m not good at which are necessary to publish a book, such as developing the covers of my books with the use of Photoshop, as well as helping me navigate the sometimes turbulent waters of publishing. I appreciate him more than I can say.

A big thank you to Mary Ella Young who served as my Beta Reader for this book.

And most of all, thank you, Holy Spirit, for enabling me to write and publish books. I would never attempt to do it without your help.

Prelude

In late fall of 1973, my husband, Donn, and I exited Interstate 80 in Jackson Center, Pennsylvania. We turned left, looking for a place to eat lunch. Surveying the barren surroundings, I thought, What is this?!  I had no idea I was looking at the outlying area of the Sandy Lake community that would become home to us for many years.

Donn had accepted an engineering position at Magnetics in Sandy Lake, and we were here to look for housing with his supervisor. Those were the days before Google, and I had no idea what this part of northwestern Pennsylvania would be like. As we pulled into the parking lot of the drab Fork and Spoon restaurant, apparently our only option for lunch, I wasn’t impressed. However, the arrival of our twins seven months prior to Donn finishing graduate school meant we were in no position to be choosy about our location. We had accepted the first job offer Donn received.

Since no rental homes were available in Sandy Lake, we ended up renting a house in Franklin, a town about 14 miles away. After seven months of living in an efficiency apartment (married student housing) with our twins, I wasn’t willing to consider living in anything but a house. Eleven months later, a little house at the corner of School and Walnut Street became available, and we moved into the Sandy Lake community.

Every time I stepped out the front door of that house, I looked longingly at the old Potter place at the top of the hill on Broad Street. It looked more like a castle than a residence. If only I had some reason to get inside to explore. Once again I had no clue that dear friends of ours would buy that house, and ten years later, we would live in half of it for three years.

Living in that historic landmark whetted my appetite even more to research the history of the Potter place. During this process, I discovered that I loved doing research as much as I loved writing. We also discovered that we loved living on Broad Street. It was the best of both worlds—woods behind us but only a five-minute walk to the post office.

Eventually, we decided to look for a home of our own on Broad Street. Sam and Betty Morton’s house, just down the street from the Potter place, was for sale. (The Morton’s had been teachers in the Lakeview area and had lived in that house for forty years.) Donn was immediately interested because it had a large garage, so we made arrangements to see it. They offered us a great deal, but in spite of all the positives, for some reason, I hated it. So we waited.

 A year later when we were still waiting, I told Donn, Let’s look at the Morton’s house again. Maybe I can figure out why I hated it, and maybe we can fix it.

So we looked again. Nothing had changed. Wallpaper hung in strips from the walls upstairs where the owners had started to remodel to put in an apartment. The floors on the second level were covered in partially removed old linoleum. While those things didn’t thrill me, I knew they weren’t the main problem. They could be fixed. The main problem was the overall impression of darkness and gloom in the house. It seemed irredeemable.

That evening as I looked at the sparkling white woodwork in our bedroom in the Potter place, a light bulb came on. All the woodwork in the Morton’s house, including a wall in the dining room where they’d put in a closet, was painted what I immediately labeled, puke brown.  If we painted the wall and woodwork white, maybe I could live in that house.

Things moved quickly after that and within a few months, we had purchased 259 Broad Street (now 81 Broad Street) on an article of agreement. A friend, whom we’d been providing with a place to live, painted all the woodwork and the ugly wall a gleaming white. It was transformative. The real estate agent walked into the dining room one day and said, What did you do in here? It looks so different. Amazing what a coat of white paint can do!

When we finished redoing our children’s rooms, we moved into our new home in 1988. Ten years later, I began to wonder about the age of our house and the research bug struck again. I was in the beginning stages of my counseling ministry with only one client, and Donn was on his lighter summer teaching schedule at the Shenango Valley Campus of Penn State. A great time to begin our research! I kept good records that summer, as well as various diaries since then, and thought it might be interesting to my readers to learn the story behind the Sarah’s Legacy series.

Enjoy the journey!

June 25, 1998

Today, on a whim, Donn and I stopped at the Mercer County Courthouse to research the history of our house. I had traced the history of the Potter House about four or five years ago but had forgotten most of what I’d learned about doing research. There is a definite science that must be cultivated if one is to make any sense of the different resources at the Courthouse and what green horns we are! We couldn’t even find our current mortgage on the computer because of some idiosyncrasy in the program.

However, with a little help, we made a lot of progress tracing previous owners of our house as the enormous deed books yielded some of their secrets. Here’s what we found:

Samuel R. Morton (the owner we bought from in 1988) bought our house from Home Owner’s Loan for $2,000 on January 28, 1942.

Home Owner’s Loan bought the house at a Sheriff’s Sale (Sheriff C. G. Scowden) for $10 in 1937.

Florence Reiser (alias Mrs. Charles Clarkson, widow) re-mortgaged the house for $4,000 with Home Owner’s Loan in 1935.

Florence Reiser bought the house from W. J. & Mabel Gilmore for $1 on March 27, 1928.

W. J. and Mabel Gilmore bought the house from R. J. Dye for $1,500 on November 18, 1926.

R. J. Dye bought the house from George A. Dean (heir of A. D. Dean) for $1,000 on February 21, 1910.

A. D. Dean bought the property at Public Sale from the E. M. Patterson Committee for $850 on August 3, 1903, after Richard Vance Davis was declared a lunatic in 1900. Property was said to have a barn and other out buildings in good repair and a good orchard.

We were so astonished to find that a previous owner of our house had been declared a lunatic that it took a few minutes for us to realize that the trail seemed to end here. There was no reference to a previous owner. However, we discovered Sarah Davis bought land which sounded like the dimensions of our property for $187.50 from James F. Brown on January 4, 1875.

An 1860 map of Sandy Lake at the nearby Mercer County Historical Society showed no house yet on our property. The land was owned, as was much of the surrounding area, by James F. Brown, one of the sons of Alexander Brown. Alexander was the founder of Brownsville, which later became Sandy Lake. (The name of the town was changed in 1868 because there was a Brownsville in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, which caused problems with the mail.) Later, on an 1873 map of Sandy Lake Boro, our property still showed no buildings, which leads us to believe Thomas and Sarah Davis had our home built and were the original owners.

The 1880 Census showed Thomas Davis (age 60) and Sarah Davis (age 63), and several children and grandchildren living in Sandy Lake Boro. One of the children was named Vance (age 20 something, the second number was whited out). In the deed for our house, Richard Vance Davis had been mainly referred to as R. V. Davis—perhaps because he went by his middle name. His occupation in the 1880 Census was listed as Deals in clothing, boots, and shoes.

A Sandy Lake newspaper from 1880 listed an ad for T. Davis for a store that sells these items, so we surmise that Vance worked for his father although we forgot to look at his father’s occupation on the Census.

We think this is the family that lived in our house, but we want to look at the 1890 Census to find out whether Vance was still living at home then. We also want to check tax assessments for that period to find out when a house was put on the property, although that may be a period for which assessments are not available because of a fire in the Mercer County Courthouse.

June 27, 1998

Our main goal in tracing the history of our house was to determine its age. However, already this is becoming secondary to learning more about the people who lived here. We remembered that Isabel Dye, probably the oldest living resident of Sandy Lake at 96