In 1871, Emy Andrews contracted a surveyor to lay out lots on the westernmost sliver of her land butting against Bettsville's eastern boundary. In total, 82 residential lots were plotted along with a five-acre grove in the middle. In 1882, the village annexed these lots, extending it's eastern boundary from the center of Sullivan Street eastward to include both sides of Monroe Street and the land between Sullivan and Monroe Streets, bordered by Union Street on the north and Seneca Street on the south. It became known as the Andrews Addition, and it was the largest single annex ever made to Bettsville.
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| Birds eye view of Bettsville, looking east |
About 1940, my grandparents Vernon and Marietta Bramel purchased three lots #225-227 at the south end of the Andrews Addition on the northwest corner of Seneca and Monroe Streets. Vernon had arrived in town in 1927 at age 17, specifically to work at the quarry, and married Marietta Semer later that year. He and his two younger brothers had been taken to the orphanage in Maumee, Ohio after their mother died near Cincinnati in 1925. He was then farmed out to the Huffords, six miles north of Bettsville, who welcomed him into their family.
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| Vernon and Marietta (Semer) Bramel, married 1927 |
Marietta's clan, the William and Nettie (Russell) Semer family, came to Bettsville in 1917 after the conclusion of William's 15-year military career in Key West, New York City, and Pensacola. He too came for work at the quarry, his sister and brother-in-law, Joseph and Jane Dunlap having previously moved to Fort Seneca for the same reason. William Semer, a native of Van Wert County, Ohio, met Nettie Russell, a native of Key West, Florida, during his deployment to Fort Zachary Taylor in Key West. The Russells were one of the original Keys families, the so called "conch families," who migrated from the Bahamas in the 1830s after the United States acquired Florida from Spain. Many of these Bahamian families were descendants of British Loyalists who fled southern states in the aftermath of the American Revolution. William and Nettie were married on Christmas Eve, 1903. My grandmother Marietta was born at Fort Schuyler, Bronx, New York in 1910, the fifth of 11 Semer children. Grandpa Semer died tragically in 1920 from injuries sustained from a dust explosion at the Kennedy Refractories facility in Bettsville where he was the night superintendent.
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| William Semer family, Fort Totten, Queens, New York, 1914 |
Vernon and Marietta had been renting for $6 per month a two story house next to the railroad tracks south of Seneca Street, where all five sons were born. That same house was relocated a quarter-mile up the street to the middle lot of their acquisition, and I'm told the total cost of the land, house, and relocation was $900. Grandpa built a kitchen addition along the north side and then added a bathroom in the back. He built a large garage/barn structure in his spare time with cinderblocks he made at Marian Flack's shop, mixing cement and pouring it into molds. The neighborhood kids in the southern half of the Andrews Addition during that generation, the Bramels, Mowerys, Fogels, and others, came to be known as the "ridge rats" due to their proximity to the stony ridge running through the township. They were a close-knit bunch who wore that badge with great pride. In 1976, Grandpa received an inheritance from a relative he probably never knew.
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| My dad with his big brothers on "the ridge," 1936 |
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| Aunt Sally at the back of the Bramel home on "the ridge" ca. 1945 |
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