Aunt Rose

Sometime during my early days in grade school, my Aunt Rose bought a lot on Wilde Street in Manayunk near the church and had a house built on it for herself. At one time I spent a week or so living there with her and was impressed with all the people living nearby and mostly with the fact that most of them seemed to work at the mills at the bottom of the hill along the canal. Early in the morning I could see or hear them walking down the hill and in the afternoon as they came home again.
Manayunk was a mill town in those days with the knitting and paper mills mostly along the Manyunk Canal. The kids from the school and the neighborhood would play a lot and congregate in front of and on Aunt Rose's porch and this annoyed her a great deal. She had pieces of metal with sharp pointed burrs put on top of the railing to discourage them. Some time later she sold that house and moved away. She bought a house in Germantown where she lived for a couple of years before she died. Tom lived there in Germantown with her for a while until, in summer after being on vacation for a few days, he returned to find Aunt Rose dead in bed.