The Love Affair...

What would you do, if you loved someone and wanted to impress
them, if you are a guy and the one you love lives on an island?
Would you be willing to row a boat in rough waters to the island,
from the island you live on?

I was reading another blog that told of the blogger finding the school that his mother taught at. Which reminded me of this man and the woman, who was a school teacher.

Before the turn of the 1900’th century, there was a young lady who left the island she was raised on called Prudence Island. She moved to a boarding house after high school so she could attend the college. Her dream was to become a teacher. She met a young man who took her fancy… and she his…

She went back to the island to teach in a one room school house. The island had maybe 50 residents, and I am not sure if that was summer time count or winter. As there were summer homes there. The only way to get to the island was by boat/ferry. Even to this day, that is still the only way to get to the island.

Prudence Island is a small island in Narraganset Bay. Kind of in a triangle between Jamestown, and Bristol and Newport. South of Providence. The bay can get awful rough at times.. and it isn’t easy going the rest of the time. So leaving the North end of Jamestown, where Aaron lived, to row a skiff across the bay to Prudence Island, was not an easy task. Yet he did it several times that summer. He courted Harriet for quite a while. Finally winning her hand in marriage. Traveling to New York City to a church called Church on the Corner.
Why they chose there, why they went to New York, as there were many of churches in R.I. ……. I don’t know.

Aaron ran a stable, and a delivery wagon and buggy. He took people from one side of the island of Jamestown, to the other, so the clients could catch the ferry to the mainland of Warwick and Newport on the other side. Later he would have a grocery store, and then in the 1930’s he had a Ford dealership, gas station and grocery store combo, in Jamestown. Going on to a Dodge dealership in Newport and Ford dealer ship in Middletown. (now you know why I am a Ford fan)

This union brought on 3 sons and one daughter…of which one of those son’s was my father.

Last I knew the little one room school house still is standing on Prudence Island and the last teacher taught in the 1981. That teacher was the nephew of Harriet, and my cousin, Bill Bacon.