Memoirs of Lloyd Moss: 1910 - 1914
In 1920 we were living in the York River home. On the 12th of July, 1958, I tried to find the site of this house, but long before I got in sight of the river I was stopped by a high wire fence. The whole area had become a military reservation of some sort, so I had to give up looking. Sometime in the spring of 1911 we moved to Williamsburg to a house on Duke of Gloucester Street near what is now Burdette's Ordinary and across the street from the Palmer house which, unlike the other houses, was built of brick. Our house fronted directly on the street. I don't remember a back yard though there must have been one. Neighbors on the north were the Donegans and the Lees. The Lees had a couple of girls with whom we played. One of them had a tricycle, the first one I had ever seen. She let me ride it occasionally for very short periods after a great deal of persuasion. Later, after we moved away, we heard that one of the girls had polio. The Donegans seemed to be all adults. They had a phono-graph with a nice big horn and once we were invited over there to hear the comic record "The Carpenter" on it. That record is now a classic oldie.
The house on the other side of us was large, chrome yellow, and had a rambling porch around two sides of it. The people living in it were named Armisted and I somehow got the idea that they were a little higher on the social scale than we were. I don't remember any children there. Our play area seemed to be confined to the sidewalk in front of the house. I had learned not to run away anymore. I remember walking to the stores with father. One grocery store may have been known as Murphy's and it had a hand-powered lift to the second floor that really fascinated me. This was on the same side of the street as we were, as was Lane's Drug Store, the Courthouse and a hardware store that I have forgotten the name of. There were no paved streets in the town but a few of the houses had a paved sidewalk, brick or cement, in front of them. In some way we had acquired a boarder, a teacher named Tracy, a nice sort of fellow who appeared to be in his thirties, well spoken and well educated but for some reason not able to work. He had a little educational program with Virginia and me. Around breakfast time every day he would ask us who the president was and what was the longest word in the English language, etc. Father bought a farm but for some reason we couldn't move in right away so he worked on it in the meantime.
On December 24th Herbert was born. I remember there being some kind of a stir going on at the back of the house and I wasn't allowed anywhere around it. And then it became decidedly apparent that there was a new baby in the family.
Sometime in the late winter or early spring we moved to the farm located across the railroad on what was then the Newport News road. The farm was bounded on the north and east by the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, and on the south by a farm owned by the Wicker family. I well remember walking all the way to the new house with Mr. Tracy. The front door was locked, so he pushed open the window on the left, (mother and father's bedroom), then helped me climb in so that I could go around and open the front door for him. A little later the folks drove up in a buggy, mother holding baby Herbert in her arms.