South Phila. Childhood

Sometimes in the morning when I am drinking my first cup of

coffee, before I become engaged with reading a book, or 

paying bills, or some other activity, my mind drifts and a memory from my early childhood will come back to me.  This morning, I was thinking about the hucksters who came up the alleys behind our our row homes in South Philadelphia.  This was a remarkable event because they rode horse drawn wagons!  Their wagon beds were piled high with vegetables and they had a swinging silver panned weight hanging from the framed wagon structure.  

Housewives would go out into the alley and buy a pound of carrots or green beans (which we called string beans) and the huckster would pile them into the weighing pan.  The horse waited patiently, and other housewives gathered at their back gates for their turn.

These vegetable hucksters came from "The Neck" which was some mysterious place south of where we lived and also south of "The Dump" which was a place my parents would go from time to time in search of something.  Once we went there for a medicine cabinet which my father installed in the bathroom of our row home.  Every year in December we drove down to the Neck for our Christmas tree, which cost about $5.  

Many years later, I was idly searching around on the neck and I came across an old etching of the a farm at the neck and this interesting piece of information which I found again today from a different source:

Philadelphia RowHome magazine Winter 2009 by Omar R - issuu

https://issuu.com/gono/docs/gohomephilly.winter09

Jan 5, 2010 - Senick said his family lived on Stone House Lane, around where 3rd and Pattison is now. ... The Neck apparently was first settled before the Revolutionary War by Germans, Swedes and French, among others, by people who were doing what came naturally for a time when the economy was dominated by ...

Although I visited their web site, I couldn't find the article quoted on this teaser.  In the original tidbit, it was mentioned that the original settlers were Germans, some of them left here after the Revolutionary War, when several thousand Hessian soldiers had been hired out of German (not yet a unified country) and employed as Mercenary soldiers.  Wounded, deserters, and imprisoned Hessian soldiers, left behind after the war, often settled here.  Since many of them had been originally peasant farmers in their home duchies, they returned to farming in America.  In the marshlands where the Schuylkill and Delaware meet, in the area known as the neck because of its shape between the two rivers, they drained the swamps with canals, built small truck farms, and lived harmoniously for a couple of centuries, joined by Swedes, Irish, and others who were happy to find free land where they could throw up a shack and farm, or raise ducks, pigs, rabbits and other livestock.

Since this land was considered 'waste' being marshy swamp land, it was mostly ignored until Philadelphia filled up, and then areas were turned into land-fill and dumps.  Eventually, in the early 1900's and particularly after the second World War, the land was confiscated by the government, the people driven off their small plots, their shacks and cottages burned, and the polluted marshland filled in and turned into the industrial, refineries, ship-yard and airport uses of today.

Since my father's heritage is half German, half English, I have always been interested in the early German settlers of the area where I grew up.  Also, when I was a child, my mother was a Sunday School teacher at Gloria Dei, "Old Swedes" Church, and I have also always been interested in the first Swedish settlers in the area because of that early association. 

So much of what was when you were a child disappears as time marches on, that you can't help feeling nostalgia for the irreplaceable past - a place you can only visit in your memory.