Square brackets mark words that are uncertain in the handwritten original. This is a reading aid; the images above remain the source document.

Land for the schoolhouse, Ringer wrote, was given by Henry Chidester; the school and community were called Chidester. Her account says that an old union church was moved in 1872 from County Road 11 to the Chidester place, on land given by Henry Chidester. She identifies the present church as Pleasant Valley, built in 1915 and dedicated in 1916.

Ringer wrote that Henry Chidester’s son Ashbel kept a store and post office for several years. She reported that Ashbel’s wife secured the name Cuzzart for the post office, and that the community came to be called Cuzzart. She dated the first federal postal record to January 5, 1886, with Albert Engle as postmaster.

Her account says that a Reckart bought the store from Ashbel Chidester in 1905 and built the present store and post-office building. It also records a destructive tornado on June 29, 1944, and a severe snow on May 10, 1923.

For 1938, Ringer wrote that community residents met to decide whether to obtain electric service from West Penn Power Company; donations and enough customers brought the line to their homes, and power was turned on November 22, 1938, at 1:00 p.m.

The second page lists earlier local occupations and enterprises: farming, timber, a school, a shop, a distillery, molasses and saw mills, a cane mill, a tanbark yard, and a blacksmith shop. Ringer recalled parents earning money for children’s school clothes by picking chestnuts for Baltimore and Washington and by gathering tea leaves for oil and flavoring. She wrote that then-current residents earned livelihoods through farming, trucking, timbering, and stripping coal, and that the names Reckart and Livengood were more numerous than Chidester.