Under her care the boy formed studious habits and a taste for good literature that have lasted to this day. He is a great reader, and what has once been read by him is never forgotten if it is in any way useful.
When Edison was a child he was deeply interested in the busy scenes of the canal and grain warehouses, and particularly in the ship-building yards.
He asked so many questions that he fairly tired out his father, although the older man had no small ability. It has been reported that other members of the family regarded the boy as being mentally unbalanced and likely to be a lifelong care to his parents.
Even while he was quite a young child his mechanical tendencies showed themselves in his fondness for building little plank roads from the pieces of wood thrown out by the ship-building yards and the sawmills. One day he was found in the village square laboriously copying the signs of the stores.
To this day Mr. Edison is not inclined to accept a statement unless he can prove it for himself by experiment. Once, when he was about six years old, he watched a goose sitting on her eggs and saw them hatch. Soon after he was missing. By and by, after an anxious search, his father found him sitting in a nest he had made in the barn filled with goose and hen eggs he had collected, trying to hatch them out.
His remarkable memory was noticeable even when he was a child, for before he was five years old he had learned all the songs of the lumber gangs and of the canal men. Even now his recollection goes back to 1850, when, as a child three or four years old, he saw camped in front of his home six covered wagons, "prairie schooners," and witnessed their departure for California, where gold had just been discovered.
Another of his recollections of childhood is of a sadder nature. He went off one day with another boy to bathe in the creek. Soon after they entered the water the other boy disappeared. Young Edison waited around for about half an hour, and then, as it was growing dark, went home, puzzled and lonely, but said nothing about the matter. About two hours afterward, when the missing boy was being searched for, a man came to the Edison home to make anxious inquiry of the companion with whom he had last been seen. Edison told all the circumstances with a painful sense of being in some way guilty. The creek was at once dragged, and then the body was recovered.
Edison himself had more than one narrow escape. Of course, he fell into the canal and was nearly drowned—few boys in Milan worth their salt omitted that performance. On another occasion he fell into a pile of wheat in a grain elevator and was almost smothered. Holding the end of a skate-strap, that another lad might cut it with an ax, he lost the top of a finger. Fire also had its peril. He built a fire in a barn, but the flames spread so rapidly that, although he escaped himself, the barn was wholly destroyed. He was publicly whipped in the village square as a warning to other youths. Equally well remembered is a dangerous encounter with a ram which attacked him while he was busily engaged digging out a bumblebee's nest near an orchard fence, and was about to butt him again when he managed to drop over on the safe side and escape. He was badly hurt and bruised, and no small quantity of arnica was needed for his wounds.
Meanwhile railroad building had been going on rapidly, and the new Columbus, Sandusky & Hocking Railroad had reached Milan and quickly deprived it of its flourishing grain trade. The town, formerly so bustling and busy, no longer offered to so active a man as Mr. Edison's father the opportunity of conducting a prosperous business, so he decided to move away. He was well-to-do, but he determined to do better elsewhere. In 1854 he and his family removed to Port Huron, Michigan, where they occupied a large Colonial house standing in the middle of an old Government fort reservation of ten acres, overlooking the St. Clair River just after it leaves Lake Huron.
The old house at Milan where Mr. Edison was born is still in existence, and is occupied at this time (1911) by Mr. S. O. Edison, a half-brother of Edison's father, and a man of much ability.