We turned into Franklin Street and rode such a little way—two blocks say. The house was easy to identify, even though the number had now been made 1415. It was now crowded in between a long row of brick and frame houses, of better construction, and the neighborhood had changed entirely in physical appearance though not in atmosphere. Formerly, save for our house, all was open common here. You could see from our house to the station at which we had arrived—from our house to the interesting potteries which I still hoped to find, east or toward the country. You could see north to the woods and an outlying Catholic Orphan Asylum.
Now all that was changed. It was all filled with houses. Streets that in my time had not even been platted now ran east and west and north and south. Our large yard and barn were gone. The house had no lawn at all, or just a tiny scrap in front. The fine commons at the back where all the neighborhood boys gathered to play ball, circus, top, marbles, was solidly built over with houses. I remembered how I used to run, kicking my bare toes in clover blooms in the summer. Once a bee stung me and I sat down and cried; then getting no aid, I made a paste of mud and saliva and held that on—instructions from big Ed Fisher, one of our neighborhood gang. I recalled how Ed and I played one old cat here with Harry Trochee, the gypsy trader’s son, up the street, and how we both hated to have to run up the street to Main Street to the grocer’s or butcher’s for anything. Here I could stand and see the steeple of Holy Trinity, clear across the city at Third and Pine, and hear the Angelus tolled, morning, noon and night. It was beautiful to me—I have often paused to listen—and to feel. Across the common of a Saturday I have wandered to the potteries to look in at the windows at so many interesting things that were being made.
“Shall we stop?” asked Franklin, as we neared the door.
“Please don’t. I don’t want to go in.”
Some little children were playing on our small front porch.
And next came the potteries themselves, over in the exact region where they should have been, but now swollen to enormous proportions. The buildings extended for blocks. Hundreds, if not thousands, of men and women must have been at work here. You could see them at all the windows, turning cups, saucers, plates, bowls, pitchers, tureens—thousands in a day. The size and the swing of it all was like a song. We got out and wandered about up and down the low red walls, looking at windows and doors, seeing the thousands upon thousands of bits of clay being shaped into the forms which they retain for a little while only to be returned to their native nothingness again. So may we be shaped and cast back broken—to be used some day for something else.
“The methods have changed,” said one man, talking to me through a window. “Twenty years ago a lot of the work was still done by hand, but now we do it all by machinery. We have forms like this”—and he held up one. “You see we put just so much clay in and press this down and that makes the exact thickness. It can’t be more or less. I make a hundred and twenty plates an hour.”
He made twenty while we looked on.
Another man, at the next window, was putting handles on cups.
After this there was nothing of interest to see, so we consulted the map and decided that our best plan was to go first to Boonville in Warwick County, the next county east; then northeast to Huntingberg and Jasper in Dubois County, and then still northeast through Kellerville and Norton into Orange County, and so reach French Lick and West Baden.