Valuable Rubbish

Marie told me a fascinating story the other day about the last house that she lived in with her brothers and sisters. I have a picture here. It is a really big house. It had eight bedrooms, kitchen, living room, dining room, and two bathrooms. Her father framed this house, but had help with the plastering, putting in a furnace and the electricity. Electricity in those days was fairly new. Marie's brothers did a lot of the work with their father.

Her father worked for a paper mill. Her family had always lived in company houses and paid rent to the company.
The houses that they lived in were lighted by gas so the lights were dim.
They finally saved enough money to buy land to build this house, but it was on swamp land. Marie was nine years old when they got to move into this house.
It was situated with a large hole on one side of the house that needed to be filled in with dirt. Her father came up with the idea to go to city hall. He asked that the rubbish collectors fill this hole with trash and he would fill in the hole with dirt.
Marie and her siblings that were old enough would watch for trash from homes where people had died. Sometimes the trash had shoes in it that had not been checked by the deceased relatives and they often found money in the shoes. Her parents used that money for shoes for their children. Marie said they also went blueberry picking to earn money for school clothes.