Honeytownnews.com

  Welcome to HoneyTown News:

         Oh sure, there's lots of honeytowns. Not as many as there are FRANKLIN's,                 
and in most cases, Honeytowns are rather small towns. In the case of the Honeytown,         
of which i write, it wasn't even a town.                                                                                 
         Made up of a collection of small farms,it was a community of a dozen homes and families.    
My eariest recollections were of growing up in that CLARION COUNTY area near EMLENTON, 
where if you now take the PETERSBURG exit off Interstate 80, and travel east towards         
CLARION, under the first underpass ( MASTER ROAD ) - look to your right at the valley.         
That's the Honeytown of which I speak. (CLARION COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA).                       
         Over sixty-five years ago, I began roaming that valley and the hillsides you see there  
Shireys had first settled on part of the PETERSLAND GRANT. Samuel first built a fancy four   
 story log home around 1835, then a large barn, a wagon shed, then later adding to the big 
 log house, and after gas wells were drilled, he built what we called the tennet house -          
which I have always believed was really for his oldest son.                                                   
         My parents bought that part of the Shirey estate from Samuels grandchildren. You      
can read some of my stories of growing up there in my book, HONEYTOWNNEWS :GOSSIP,  
GOSSIP,GOSSIP.                                                                                                                  
         I cannot really establish what really placed in my mind or the time when I took an       
interest in the goings on there, but I can say without a doubt, that NELLIE's questions about   
the life that surrounded me there, drove me, to ask all those questions of neighbors and       
family. On my long treaks home from the school bus, Nellie and her mother, would invite     
me in to listen to the radio, - - STELLA DELLAS and LORENZO JONES. But it was their            
questions that sent me about that neighbood to find answers. Many of those answers            
came from Ressie, who was to be my fifth and sixth grade teacher.                                      
          It seems that, The area that surrounded our community had gone through some        
name changes over the years. TURKEY RUN CITY became just TURKEY CITY, and ALUM        
ROCK was actually called RICHMOND in its earier years.                                                       
          But HONEYTOWN had always been HONEYTOWN because those first settlers, had        
found that the fertile fields above the spring frost line - made for a great place to grow          
apples, grapes, pears, peaches, plums, and garden produce.                                                 
          So everyone had an orchard and several bee hives. From all over the country,people  
came for fruit and honey. It just became normal for folks to say they were going over to       
Honeytown. And those beekeepers found that there were many other crops that added         
 different flavors and prolonged the seasons, such as clover, and buckwheat, and wildflowers 
like goldenrod.                                                                                                                      
           It naturally became the heading of my news report to the local paper back then,        
sixty years ago. If I missed a week, people would write the paper, wanting to know,           
where the Honeytown News was at.                                                                                      
           Its true that many of those readers never knew where Honeytown was actually         
located, but my news could have been about almost any field, woods, or swamp. And the      
names of the people living there, could have been known by many in that Clarion County      
 Area.

In Loving Memory of Rick A.Wingard, son of Guy, and brother of Cindy's, here is the following:

 
LOVINGLY MADE BY GUY, AND DECORATED BY CINDY, WITH A SPECIAL THANKS GOING TO LYDIA NELSON FOR MAKING THE PHOTO FOR US.
As a baby, a quiet little boy
I thought he surely would be a politician
but the first words he ever uttered: NO, NO, NO
like his Grandpa King
he worked to be a trucker
Big Wheels Rollin'
then came a fateful day
when they put him back together
no more driving big rigs and no more    motorcycles
but like his Grandpa Wingard
who used to say
take any job and do your best
til something else comes along
so he put  his skills to work
finely tuning engines, putting things together
working as a machinist
and what he would most likely be noted for
making friends along the way
then came the day
his Lord lay down beside him, said time for you to rest
so somewhere out there
where only Faith and imagination can fathom....
"RICK & BIG WHEELS ROLLING"
WE LOVE AND MISS YOU RICK!!!