Biography: Clara Mabel Wimer
Clara Mabel Wimer was born on 26 October 1891, the fifth of nine children born to Ike and Maggie Robinson Wimer. The Wimers were of German heritage, and the Robinsons were Scots Irish . Clara's parents were farmers, living in Slippery Rock Township between the village of West Liberty and Jacksville, in Worth township, Butler County, Pennsylvania. The farm lies along the creek that today is dammed to form Tammarak Lake, and was approached by a long lane off of Barron Road. Ike and Maggie Wimer had nine children, seven daughters and two sons. Clara was the fifth child. She was of medium height, slight of build, and she had a pleasant disposition.
The story is told that one day Clara was sent to call those working in the barn to come to (noonday) dinner. The men had just completed unloading a wagon load of hay and pushed the empty wagon back out of the barn just as Clara was walking up the barn ramp. She was knocked down and run over by the wagon.
In 1911 at age 20 she married Bert W. Wilson, who grew up on the neighboring farm. (Note: Both Bert and Clara carried that recessive gene for red hair, and some of their grandchildren were redheads. On Bert's side the gene came through his mother; his uncle Sol Stoughton had red hair (so both John C. Stoughton & Mary Jane McCandless carried the gene). On Clara Wimer's side, her sisters had red hair, so both her parents (Isaac Wimer and Margaret Jane Robinson) also carried the gene.
She and Bert lived for a time with Bert's parents. Here their first five, possibly six children were born between 1912 and 1926. Then they purchased the farm across the road, and continued raising their family there, having two daughters and four sons in all. The house stood in a shady wooded area, and the farm included some wetlands around the creek. They had horses and a cow; Ruth kept a sheep and Russ remembers a pony in the small barn. They walked up the hill across the McClymmonds farm to attend McClymmonds school. Son Russell recalled being attacked by an owl as he walked down the lane from the house to the road one day, possibly wearing a fur hat. Clara dealt with several crises arising from the misadventures of her children. When John was four or five years old he wandered too close to a bear that had been raised from a cub and was kept chained by the barn on her in-law's farm. The bear grabbed John and held him. He was rescued by his sister Ruth (5 years older) who pulled him out of the jacket he was wearing, leaving the bear holding the jacket.
Another time the boys were playing with home-made bows and arrows and one of them got an arrow through the arm. Clara had to remove it.
The children could walk down the creek and arrive at their Wimer grandparents' house. Doing this, Russell once stepped on a broken glass jar and cut his foot badly, which Grandma Wimer had to bandage up. She disinfected the cut by pouring kerosene into it. On another occasion the oldest boy Ed, with a couple brothers along, drove a car down the road and decided to race with a horseback rider they met, the result being that the car turned over in the ditch. No one was hurt, but John rememberd that they broke off the pretty glass ball handle on the gear shift.
Clara raised her family there between the farms of her mother and her mother-in-law, with other Stoughton, Wimer and Wilson families nearby. Bert worked at the sawmill with his father, or later did work at the garage his father owned in Slippery Rock.
In 1929 Bert and Clara bought a farm one county to the north, near Nickleville in Venango County. The land was situated just off Rt. 38, north of the road between Nickleville and Rockland. Their oldest daughter Ruth would have been sixteen at the time of the move. Two years later, when Clara was thirty-nine, she had an infant daughter, Pauline, who died at birth.
By 1944 two of her children, Ruth and John, were married and a third,Russ, was engaged. She had five grandchildren, four belonging to Ruth and one to John. Sons Ray and Russ had been drafted into service in WWII, and John was in officer's training school in South Carolina. Her youngest child, Allene, was still in high school. Clara was diagnosed with advanced cancer in January of that year, and died on 23 March, 1944. She was fifty-three years old. She was buried at Nickleville Presbyterian Cemetery beside her infant daughter.
