19




C:i That's how he started buying coal. He needed that coal, and some-
 times he'd get two and three carloads a winter, if he had it
 booked and sold.

J: Did you have a professional landscaper come to your house on
 Michigan Avenue?

C: Oh for heaven's sakes, nol The colored men would come and do it,
 And of course, we had big oak trees. We had a terrible time get-
 ting along. It was a fight, just like it is now; you can't get a
 good lawn.

J: When were you married?

C: 1922.

J: Who did you marry?

C: Austin Ulrich Conrad. Ulrich, is German. I can't tell you the
 story, but something about his grandfather getting out of Germany
 under...It's quite a story. I don't who has it, but I wish I had
 written it down. But he escaped some way and got into the United
 States. Then that family, I think, originally homesteaded in New
 York state near Seneca Falls. But somewhere in the West, Wisonsin,
 some of them were also, I think. And Uncle Jake was a Florida
 state senator (28th district, 1913, 1915), and Austin Conrad was a
 page for him at about twelve years old. Uncle Jake came down here
 and bought, I'm afraid to say because it'll sound like too much.
 But I think it was acres and acres and acres of land. Then they
 put up a planing mill. It was a big thing. They had three little
 trains. They ran the tracks all through the piney woods, and they
 would bring the wood into the Conrad Lumber Company. They would
 cut it and lathe it. Then we went in turpentine business. When
 all the first growth pine was cut over, they took the little pines
 and slashed them. We started the turpentine business in Barberville.
 There's a law that you can only do an inch a year or something. We
 have pictures of that. It was quite something to go out and watch
 them dump that. It was hot and furious and the flames came up, and
 they put the pure turpentine, and then the resin would go to one
 place and the turpentine to another. Then what was left was per-
 fectly wonderful for making fires with. They gave it to everybody
 in DeLand. We'd come out and get sackloads of it at Barberville.
 Every Satufday night from the time we were married, Austin and I'd
 leave here at five o'clock with a payroll and the colored men from
 the lumber yard would meet us under a tree on the Glenwood Road.
 He'd call out Joe, Tom, and they'd step up and get their money.
 They always had to have a little extra. They paid them with tokens.
 Don Johnston could give you quite a bit on that token business.
 They used the tokens at the commissary. That's where Austin worked
 when we first married. He also kept the books out at the lumber
 yard.

J: It was almost like a little town?