"About this time, oil was discovered at Oil City, a hundred miles or so from us [actually about 20 miles away!]. A man came one day to lease land for drilling wells. My brothers were hoeing corn. He said, 'When you get grease underneath, you can send your boys to college and they needn't hoe potatoes anymore.'
That pleased my brother, John, very much. He often repeated what the man said. He wanted to go West and grow up with the country. But, he never did. He graduated from Ann Arbor Law School and practiced law in Warren County, [PA] where he was elected District Attorney. Later, he was appointed U. S. District Attorney for Western Pennsylvania by Teddy Roosevelt and moved to Pittsburgh, where he lived the rest of his life. He went to Ann Arbor with Gib Sloan. Gib was a Democrat and was elected judge in our County, Clarion. John was engaged to marry Gib's sister, Jennie, but a Presbyterian preacher moved to our town, and John married his daughter, Susie. Once, when she was wanting an expensive mattress, I heard him say, 'I was never happier in my life than when I lived in Pine Hollow and slept on a straw mattress.'
"My second brother, Henry, was the only one who never taught school. He was Father's right hand man on the farm. He was very muscular and strong. One day when he was sixteen, he bought a barrel of salt at the store. It weighed hundreds of pounds. The men in the store expected to help him put the barrel into the wagon. They didn't help him right away, and he thought he was supposed to do it by himself. So, he picked it up and put it in the wagon. After that, when anyone performed some feat of strength, he was called 'Dunkle stout.' Henry was the first to get married and move away.
"Then my fourth brother, Valentine, took over the farm and ran it until Mother sold it. He went to Allegheny College, Meadville, Pennsylvania, where he graduated and was a Methodist minister at Pleasantville and places near there until he came to Washington. The Summer after he graduated, he and Lura rented a cottage at Lake Chautauqua. I went and stayed with them. Merle [son of Valentine and Lura] was a baby, just beginning to talk. We took turns taking care of him while the other two went to the lectures in the amphitheater. When it was my turn to keep him, I would tell him stories how I had got into the boat to cross the lake. The engine would go 'choo, choo,' and we were off. When I would stop, he would say, 'More lek!' meaning 'lake.' Once, Lura tried taking him to a lecture and sitting in the back row. But, when they got there, he wanted to go on -- 'go to the lek.'
"Alfred was next in line, was more patient with me than Cyrus, and would help gather walnuts. Alfred went to Warren and worked in a freight office at a railway station. Later on, he came to Idaho, where he lived the rest of life. [sic]
"Grandfather Dunkle had given Father forty acres of timber land. Father cleared it and left walnuts and chestnut trees growing. Each one of us children had a walnut tree, and Alfred helped me gather mine. When we gathered chestnuts, we didn't have the trees divided. One of my brothers would climb the tree with a pole and scutch the chestnuts off. The rest of us would gather them up, and each of us would give him a share of what we picked up. We each had our own cloth sack -- poke, we called it. We would hang it behind the kitchen stove to dry.
"Cyrus was the seventh boy born in a row (the oldest one [Oliver] had died in infancy), and for that reason he said jokingly that he should be a doctor. He graduated from West Penn Medical College and practiced in Oil City and Pittsburgh. His son, Cyrus, worked for the government in Ordnance. He lives in New Jersey. A year ago, he came to California on business and visited us. [Throughout his 90+ years, the younger Cyrus Dunkle was very active in family history research.]
