Stephen Stocking Homestead at 4607 N. Main St. in Hemlock NY

Little Red House on the Corner - The Stephen Stocking House at 4607 N. Main Street Hemlock NY

Livestock dealer, farmer, butcher — Stephen Stocking was a man of many trades, making a living in a variety of ways in order to provide for his large family. In the fall of 1841, at age twenty-seven, he married Sarah Parkhill in Erie County, New York. By the spring of the following year they were settled in the growing community of Hemlock Lake, where Stephen worked as a hired farm laborer.

Baby Ellen — they called her “Nellie” — was born a couple years later. She was nearly two when brother John arrived; they named him in honor of Sarah’s father. Johnnie was scarcely six months old when he died in March 1847. His parents buried him in the Hemlock Cemetery. Not quite a year later they welcomed another baby boy to their home: William.

Will was six months old in August 1848 when his father bought a half-acre building lot on the northeast corner of Clay Street and Main. Before the snow flew the family were snug in their new frame-built home. Three more little girls — Jennie, Lucella, and Caroline - arrived in quick succession. Little Carrie was five before baby Charlie was born in 1856. Their family was now complete.

The Stocking house was crowded with youngsters, yet they found room for Sarah’s widowed sister Caroline and her toddler daughter, Mary. Caroline and Mary lived with Stephen and Sarah off and on for more than a decade. Mary was in her late teens before mother and daughter were able to maintain their own household.

Samuel Gilson, a shirt-tail relation of Sarah and Caroline, was a widower in his early seventies. For several years, beginning in the middle of the 1860s, he lived with the Stocking family. And when they left Hemlock to move westward, he went with them.

The year 1870 was a milestone for Stephen and Sarah. On the first of March their thirteen- year-old son Charlie died — the baby of the family. He was buried in the Hemlock Cemetery. In the fall Stephen sold his house and packed up his family and moved them to Washtenaw County, Michigan. He lived in Michigan a scant decade, dying in November 1880. His obituary made note that “Mr. Stocking was an upright and active businessman, a good neighbor, a faithful husband and father.”

Mary Justin was sixty-one years old when she bought the Stocking house for herself and her elderly mother. In addition to the half-acre Stocking lot, she also bought a quarter-acre to the rear of the property, paying a total of $825. When the house would be sold in subsequent years, the three-quarter-acre lot would not be divided.

Ira Justin was a well-beloved Baptist Elder in Hemlock and Honeoye. He’d ministered in the two communities since the 1830s. He and his wife Sarah had seven children: three girls and four boys. Mary was the eldest; she had never been married. After Elder Justin died, Mary and her mother came to this small house. For two years mother and daughter lived here quietly, until Sarah Justin died in the summer of 1872. She was buried in Purcell Cemetery outside Honeoye, with her husband in death as she had been in life. For the next quarter century, Mary Justin lived here alone.

She was eighty-seven when she sold her house and moved to Rochester to live with a niece. Mary died in Rochester at the advanced age of ninety-four, out-living all her siblings. She was buried in her family’s plot in Purcell Cemetery.

Just prior to the turn of the new century, Horace P. Hoppough bought Mary Justin’s house, but he never lived here. This was to be the home of his son George and his wife Lillis.

The four children of H.P. Hoppough and his wife Sarah were all born in Canadice between 1850 and 1863: John, George, Charles, and Fannie. When the children were nearly grown, Horace bought a farm on the outskirts of Hemlock, then in 1876 moved into a house in the village (4541) where he lived the remainder of his life.

Second-born-son George was twenty-two in 1875 when he married his sweetheart Lillis Barnard; she was eighteen. They settled down in Canadice and after a few years a baby girl arrived to brighten their home. Lottie Bell Hoppough was born the ninth of October 1881; she died twenty-three days later and was laid to rest in the Bald Hill Cemetery. There would be no more babies for Lillie and George.

They’d been married nearly twenty years when they moved to Hemlock, occupying the house on the corner of Clay and Main Streets that George’s father bought for them. (He retained title until 1903 when he gifted the house to his daughter-in-law Lillie.)

George worked all his life as a teamster, driving his splendid team of workhorses for various employers, even after the arrival of the automobile. He enjoyed good health until his late sixties when he became confined to his home. A newspaper piece of late October 1924 mentions that he died at home, “at the age of 71 ... following an illness of four years.”

For the remaining few years of her life Lillie shared her home with Lewis Hoppough and his wife Adelle, whose children were grown. Lew was George’s cousin. His general store downtown on the east side of Main Street just north of the creek, was a haphazard depository for an eclectic collection of goods. “You could buy most any farm implement [at Lew Hoppough’s store], or groceries, or anything else you could think of. It might not be on display, but it would be somewhere buried under harnesses, or what-have-you,” Mr. Burton Deuel of Honeoye wrote in his 1983 memoir.

Lew Hoppough was rather eccentric, and his peculiar ways were noted and remembered by his customers. Burton Deuel recounted several tales in which Lew Hoppough featured. “It was around 1925,” Mr. Deuel wrote, “when I was working the farm with my father-in-law, Wilbur Ashley, we hired a young man who was about six-foot-one-or-two — quite a big fellow. It was wet and muddy that fall so he wore high topped leather shoes. He said he wanted a pair of mud rubbers — heavy ones — to wear over his shoes.

“So [Mr. Ashley] took the young man to Lew Hoppough’s Store in Hemlock. When they went in the store, Lew looked up and said, ‘Hello, Wilbur. What can I do for you?’

“‘I’ve got a young man here that wants a pair of heavy mud rubbers.’ “‘What size?’ asked Lew.

“‘Well,’ the young man said, ‘my shoes are size thirteen. I think I would have to have rubbers about a size fourteen.’

“Well, Lew went over to a cluttered counter and dug out some rubbers from underneath some harness and binder twine — size fourteen, just what the young fellow wanted. If you asked Lew for something out of the ordinary, he’d say, ‘It’s here somewhere, if I can find it.’”

The two Hoppough families shared the little house, until Lillis died on March 24, 1930, her seventy-third birthday. Both she and George were buried in the Union Cemetery in Livonia.

Lillie Hoppough’s only surviving sibling was her younger brother Robert. At the first news of his sister’s illness early in 1930 he’d come home from Illinois to be with his sister. As executor of her estate, he sold the house a month after her death to Mary Scidmore for nine hundred dollars. Mrs. Scidmore rented the house to Hugh and Gertrude Drain and some few months later sold it to them, realizing a profit of $22.50.

Married seven years, Hugh and Gertrude were the parents of six-year-old Carl, their only child. Mr. Drain worked as a salesman in the hardware store downtown, and eventually would come to own the business.

For more than half a century the Drains lived in Hemlock; both Mr. and Mrs. Drain were well-known and well-loved in town, busy in church and civic affairs. Giving a picture of Hemlock in the 1930s and 40s is best done in Hugh’s own words. In anticipation of celebrating the nation’s Bicentennial in 1976, several memorial pieces were printed in the Livonia Gazette. Hugh Drain wrote an article for the paper that appeared August 7, 1975, which is excerpted here in italics:

There was a time when there were three general stores [in Hemlock], a grocery store together with a hardware, a lumber [yard], a meat market, a coal yard and three hotels ... What for many years was known as the Knapp store operated by George Knapp is now converted into an apartment building ... The hardware store once operated by John Beam, later by Bacon & Wemett, then by C.E. Wemett Co., still later Drain Hardware is now operated as a gift shop ...

[No longer in operation are] the coal yard operated by Mark Burch ... [and] the Lehigh Valley Railroad, which came here in 1895 ... When the railroad was in operation there was a good market for baled hay and straw. It would be a pleasing sight today to once more see the wagons piled high with a load of hay or straw and drawn by a team of horses ...

One of the buildings owned by Bernhardt Lumber [was] at one time operated by the late John Dooley as an implement sales and service store ... For many years the late Burd Naracong (the only name I ever heard him called) operated a blacksmith shop [downtown where Harold Cornish later built his appliance store]. When farmers no longer used horses on the farm, [Mr. Naracong] established a service station in front of the shop from which he dispensed gasoline, oil, and automotive needs ... The late Carl Scutt operated a garage on the south side of the creek [on the west side of the road] ... At one time an automobile agency and garage [was operated] by the late V.P. Owen on the south end of the village. That building is no longer there ...

A building erected by the Odd Fellows on the south side of the creek [on the east side of the road] is now operated by an outfit known as the Boots and Saddle where they operate a night club. There was once a barber shop and pool room in the building [on the north side of] the Collins store, but is now being operated as a restaurant. Attaching to the rear of this building is a building erected by the late O.K. Westbrook and was for a time operated as a moving picture house.

Mr. Drain’s memories portray a poignant picture of life in Hemlock before WWII. But coming events were to reshape the nation, the village, and the Drain family in the 1940s. Son Carl graduated from Hemlock High in 1940. In the fall of 1942, he and Jennie Boyd were married. They’d not long to be together, for Carl joined the Army five months later; she never saw him again.

Stationed at New Guinea in the Pacific theater, Corp. Carl Drain was killed when the airplane he piloted crashed in the jungle during a violent rain storm. Four other passengers died as well. His family were notified the next day, December 11, 1943, that their husband and son was Missing in Action. His body was not recovered.

Nearly forty years later, Carl’s remains were returned to his loved ones after the wreckage of his aircraft was discovered by an Army search team in the New Guinea mountains. On May 22, 1982, Carl was interred with full military honors in the Oak Ridge Cemetery in Lima. Present were his wife (now remarried) and his parents — both wheelchair-bound. Gertrude wept throughout the ceremony with the hands of her former daughter-in-law resting comfortingly upon her shoulders.

Three years later Hugh Drain died, August 31, 1985. Mrs. Drain outlived him, dying just one day prior to the seventh anniversary of her husband’s death. Both are buried alongside their son.