Caroline Dunkle Miller, daughter of Michael Dunkle and his wife, Carolina Boyer, was raised in rural Pine Hollow, in Perry Township, Clarion County.  She became a teacher and a homemaker.  Throughout her almost 97 years, Carrie was vitally interested in issues of the day.  Following is a transcription of Carrie's tape-recorded reminiscences in 1956, at the age of 92.  The tape was originally transcribed by Carrie's son, Art Miller.

Michael Dunkle	Carolina Boyer Dunkle

"I was born August 31, 1864, in a big white house on top of a hill overlooking the Clarion River in western Pennsylvania.  I was the youngest of eight children who grew up.  I often compare my mother's family to the poem, 'They grew in beauty, side by side, they filled one home with glee.  Their graves are severed far and wide by field and stream and sea.'

"One of my earliest memories is of my fifth birthday.  My mother had hid a pair of black cloth shoes, or gaiters, and white cotton stockings in a bureau drawer.  I, being of an inquisitive nature, was looking through and found them.  I didn't tell anyone; and, when my birthday came, I pretended to be surprised.  I felt quite grown up and took a basket out to the woodpile, filled it with chips, and brought it in for my mother to use in her wood cook stove.

"My grandfather [Henry Boyer - see his bio on this site] was a shoemaker and made my everyday shoes of calf-skin.  He had a vat and tanned the hides.  I was warned not to go near, as I might fall in and be drowned.

"My sister, Olive, was the oldest and worked hard to help my mother feed and clothe us all.  My brothers came in a row.  I was the youngest.

"My oldest brother, Peter [see his extensive memoirs on this site], was my hero.  He taught school and was gone most of the time.  But, winter evenings he would read poetry to us as we sat in a circle around an open fireplace with coal burning in a grate.  I recall his reading Urias Green and His Flying Machine, Betsy and I Are Out, and Over the Hills to the Poor House.  I would be sitting on one of Mother's braided rugs in front of the fire.  Sometimes I would go to sleep there.

"I didn't like to go to bed in the dark.  I was afraid of spooks.  I slept with my sister.  She would be knitting.  I was hard to wake and get ready for bed.  They threatened to go to bed and let me lay.  One night they did, and when I waked up I made a bound through a dark room and onto the bed.  Olive waked up and got me undressed and under the covers.  She took me in her arms and warmed me.

"I have very pleasant memories of those evenings:  Father sitting in a big rocking chair; Mother and Olive taking turns at the spinning wheel and knitting.  My brothers would often be playing games on a slate.  We were very saving of paper.  They played fox and geese, marbles or checkers.  One of my brothers would bring in a pail of apples from where they were buried in the garden.  We had a cellar for vegetables and apples, but apples kept better buried.  Often there would be a row of apples roasting on the hearth.  We had chestnut and walnut trees.  Father had a half-bushel measure that he would bring corn in to shell for the chickens, and sometimes we would parch some of that.

"The school teacher boarded around.  I was glad when it was our turn to have him.  Then we would have ham and mashed potatoes for supper.  Cornmeal mush and milk was our supper when we were alone.

"My parents were very hospitable, and when traveler or peddler came into our neighborhood, he always stayed at our house.  Mr. Gwinn, Will's father, came once a year with a wagonload of woolen goods from a factory to trade for wool.  We had a flock of sheep and a shearing pen.  It was fun for me to watch them shearing sheep.  We had mutton occasionally.  I remember Mr. Gwinn saying his oldest son wanted to go West.

"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.]

"The first Dunkles came to the Palatinate in Southern Germany in 1739 and to Eastern Pennsylvania, where my father was born in 1801.  His father moved West to the Allegheny mountains when he was a boy.  They didn't have bread to eat until they raised a crop.  My father walked two miles to the nearest neighbor, hoping to be offered a piece of bread and butter, but Mrs. Hagen didn't give him any.  Salt was scarce, too, and he learned to eat food without salt.  I can remember that in the Summer when milk was plenty, Mother made milk soup for supper and put very little salt in it to suit Father.  The rest of us salted to suit ourselves.

"Father was a mild man.  I don't remember that he ever corrected any of us.  Mother did what punishment was needed.  He died when I was eight-years-old of heart failure.  I remember Uncle Peter saying at the funeral, "He was a good brother."  After supper, Cyrus and I would make a race to get on his knee.  He would take one of us on each knee.

"One of my fondest recollections is of Christmas.  We would hang our stockings from the mantle in front of the fireplace.  Mother and Olive made doughnuts and taffy and put in the stockings.  Christmas eve, Peter or Henry would wrap a sheet around them, knock at the sitting room door, and come in.  I was half way afraid of them, but it was fun.  They would throw out nuts and grab at us when we would stoop to pick them up.

"Another gala day was the Fourth of July when we would have a Sunday School picnic.  People would take baskets of food and put it on a long table made of boards, and while the band was playing patriotic music, we would march in a line of twos to the table where we divided and each went on a different side.  John played a tenor drum in the band.  I felt quite rich one Fourth of July when Mother gave me a nickel to spend.  I bought an orange with it.  I didn't know I would be living on an orange grove in California.

"Memories of my childhood came flooding back in 1946, when I drove East with [Carrie's daughter] Hazel, her daughter, Carolyn, and Olive's daughter, Leila.  They took my picture as I sat on the porch of the house where I was born eighty-two years before.  They also took pictures of the barn Father had built not later than 1850.  They were astonished that the ridgepole was so straight and the barn looked so new.  It really was nearly one hundred years old.

"While on our trip, we stayed three days with [Carrie's sister-in-law] Lou, Henry's wife, and Bertha, their daughter.  Lou's other children and grandchildren came to visit us.  I still correspond with [Henry's and Lou's children] Ada and Ivan's wife, Mildred.  We also visited with my cousin, Ed McNany, and his sister, Carrie Karnes.  She still writes to me.  We also stayed all night with my dear friend, Ida Schell, who had been a pupil of mine.  We visited a friend, Rosetta Baker, who was born the same day I was.  We visited Fred Henry and his wife, who had gone to school with me.  And we saw Orrin and Sam Jordan, sons of the man who bought our farm.  The farm still belongs to the Jordan family.  Hazel took a picture of the Clarion River from the house.  We crossed the Allegheny River several times.

"I taught my first two months of Summer school when I was nineteen years old.  I received twenty-five dollars for the two months.  I was never prouder of money in my life, and as I was riding home in a one-horse buggy with Olive, I waved it in the air.  I bought a wine-colored silk taffeta skirt, a wine-colored silk velvet basque, and wine-colored kid gloves with the money.  I taught four months in the Winter in Toby Township, and that Spring two months in Freedom.  Then Ella Grazier and I planned to go to Edinboro Normal School, where my brother, Peter, had graduated.  But Ross Yingling, a teacher in Clarion Seminary, persuaded us to go there.  He made arrangements for us to occupy the end room on the long hall on the third story of that large building.  It being at the end of the hall, was a large room with beds for three.  He intended his sister-in-law, Alice Whitehill, should room with us, but Roxie Wilson came and talked him into letting her room with us, so Alice roomed with a music teacher.  This started the long friendship with Roxie Wilson, later Gwinn, that led to my going to Washington.

"The following Winter, Ella, Roxie, and I roomed together at Teachers' Institute in Clarion that lasted for a week.  From this time on, I taught continually until I went to Washington with Roxie.  She had come back to Pennsylvania to see her sick father.  I remember that about two years after we had lived together at Clarion, Roxie had told me at Cherry Run camp meeting as we sat together in a buggy that she intended to marry Will Gwinn and move to Washington, where he was homesteading on a wheat ranch near Garfield.  She told me that day to save my money and come to Washington where I could earn more.  So, instead of going to Chautauqua Lake, I went to Washington with Roxie.

"During my first two weeks with them I had to study to take the teachers' examination at Colfax.  I heard that Bob Elder, who had graduated from Edinboro Normal School in Pennsylvania and taken the teachers' examination at Colfax and received only a third grade certificate.  I believed that I would be very lucky to pass the exams at all.  When I went to Colfax, I had to write for two days.  I was surprised to receive a second grade certificate.  A third grade rating would allow you to teach for one year, a second grade for two years.  I thought I was all set to teach for two years.

"But, I met Cling [Lafayette Clingman Miller, of Boone, NC] that winter and was married on August first that Summer, 1893.  Early in the morning of that day, Cling came in a spring wagon for me where I was staying with Gwinns.  He had a pair of roan horses, Pat and Mike, of which he was very proud.  We drove to Colfax and were married in the Methodist parsonage, then we drove on to the homestead, eight miles from Lacrosse, Washington.  We divided our time between the homestead and the Gwinn ranch at Garfield, where Cling was farming for Mr. Gwinn for a few years.

"At the homestead, we papered the walls with old copies of the Garfield Enterprise that we got from Charley Gwinn, the Editor.  One day, I noticed Cling reading the papers on the wall as he was using the towel after washing.  I threatened to put the papers on upside down, and he said, 'Do you want me to read standing on my head?'  He was always an avid reader and read all the printed matter available.

"Marshall, Olive and Harvey [Carrie's children] were born on the Gwinn ranch; Cyrus was born while were on the homestead; and Dean, Art, and Hazel were all born on the homestead which we called the "upper place."  My family reminded me of my mother's family, in that I had five boys and two girls, compared to Mother's family of six boys and two girls."

More Reminiscences

"I enjoyed two Summer vacations at Lake Chautauqua very much when I heard Julia Ward Howe, Susan B. Anthony, Frances Willard, and Edward Everett Hale.  I saw Alonzo Stagg play ball there, and in the Ben Hur tableaux there he was, Ben Hur.  They lasted three evenings.  I talked so much about Lake Chautauqua when I lived with Gwinns, Will said, 'Carrie wants to go to Lake Chautauqua when she dies.'

"While at Chautauqua, I was in three classes:  photography, del sarte system, and Cumnock's elocution, a reading class.

"I was the pioneer of the Dunkle family.  My sister and husband came West when Harvey was a baby, stayed with us until they took up a timber claim in Idaho.  Percy, Clarence, Geneva and Merle came later and stayed with us for a short time.  I think Peter was next, then Valentine and Grace.  Valentine, Grace, and Merle's family were the only ones to continue on to California.)  Alfred and family, when they came West in 1909, stayed with the younger members of our family, while Cling and I, with Marshall and Cyrus, took in the Yukon Exposition in Seattle that year.  Then they went to Osborn, Idaho, to live.  Grace and Olive attended Lewiston Normal School together for one year.  Grace taught our Mud Flat school the next year and kept house while Cling and I went East.  The next year, she and Valentine went to Idaho, where she taught school until they moved on to California.  She has always seemed like one of my family, and her children like my grandchildren.  

"Geneva stayed with us when she first came to Washington and taught our school one year.  Cling was always a pioneer in his family.  His mother and his brother, George, followed him to Washington."