Miss Hamblin and Mrs. Pugh

The women of Mrs. Pugh's house: Beatrice Pugh, Mrs. Pugh, Esther Hull, Ruth Hamblin, and Annie Reynolds

My great-grandmother, Ruth Card Hamblin, came to Westchester County to work as a teacher around 1918. The daughter of dairy farmers, she was born on Winchell Mountain, on an isolated farm outside of Millerton in Dutchess County, in 1896. She graduated from the New Paltz Normal School and taught for a year in Nyack before coming to Westchester, where she lived for the rest of her life.

The elementary school where Ruth Hamblin taught

Ruth Hamblin and Esther Hull at the elementary school

In 1920, Ruth was working as a fifth grade teacher and living in the house of widow Harriet R. Pugh - at the corner of Main Street and Smith Avenue, close to the Methodist church - along with Harriet's son, daughter, and sister, and Esther Hull, another teacher at the school - as shown in the federal census.



Among my family photos from this time are pictures of Esther Hull, and of Harriet Pugh and her family, with my great-grandmother, as well as a picture of the school where Ruth and Esther taught.

Mrs. Pugh's house on Smith Avenue

Sometime in the early 1920s, Ruth moved out of Mrs. Pugh's house and into an apartment in the Ganun Building on East Main Street, where she met Ernest Waldie, a sheet metal worker who had come to the US from Canada around 1900. They married in 1923 and purchased a house on Brook Street for $3,000.

When she was older Ruth used to point out Mrs. Pugh's house to her grandchildren, including the window that had been her room, when they passed by. It was still standing a few years ago, but it had fallen into a state of disrepair, and was torn down to make way for a large office building.

Howard and Mrs. Pugh

Ruth and friends? colleagues? in 1922