Faces

Faces By Rachel Karas

100 Years of Memories

Laura Harper shares stories spanning 100 years

Laurina “Laura” Harper didn’t want a big party for her birthday this past year. She knows some would say she reached quite the milestone, but she didn’t want a spectacle. So, on Dec. 19, Harper hosted a small gathering of friends and family at her home in Orient to celebrate her 100th birthday just the way she wanted to – peacefully.

Harper has been involved with countless groups and communities around Grove City for the past 40 years, but she did not call Ohio home for the preceding 60 years.

Harper was born in New York in 1922 where she grew up as a firstgeneration Italian-American. With immigrant parents, Harper only spoke Italian until age 6 when she started attending school.

Her husband, John, also grew up in New York but the two wouldn’t meet until one special day in 1940.

They both got on a bus that was on its way to Ithaca, New York. John was going to see his mother and Laura was attending classes with plans to go home for the weekend.

When she got on the bus and saw the only open seat was next to him, she politely asked to sit and the two got to talking.

“By the time we got to Ithaca, he asked me for a date, but I already had a boyfriend and I had to say I was sorry, I couldn’t,” Harper says. “So, he wanted to know when I was going back and I said I was going back Sunday. And so he was at the bus station and he went back Sunday. And, as they say, that was it.”

The two got married two years later on Nov. 28. This past November marked 80 years since they got married.

After the wedding, Harper moved to Rochester with John so he could resume his work as an engineer. She continued

her education at the University of Rochester and eventually became an English teacher in the Brighton Central School District.

For the next few decades, they enjoyed their lives in New York, but as John got closer to retirement, they felt the pull to leave.

“It was always my husband’s desire that when he retired, he wanted to retire on the farm that belonged to his great grandfather, which he inherited, and that is this farm that I’m living in right now,” Harper says.

In 1975, after living in New York their entire lives, Harper and her husband moved into their farmhouse just 15 minutes south of Grove City and began a new life.

Although they were hundreds of miles away from friends and family, Harper said she began to meet new people and create a new family around herself.

She got involved with groups such as the Friends of Southwest Public Libraries, Grove City Cancer Thrift Store and the Concord Cemetery Association. Harper even started her own local sewing group that met once a month for nearly 40 years, only stopping when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

The people she met through those groups not only became lasting friends but also her support system when she suffered the loss of her family.

In 1984 John died at age 67, and a year later her mother died at 92. Losing both her husband and mother hit Harper hard, but she said with the help of others, she was able to find new joy in life.

One of the things she found new interest in was the one-room schoolhouse that sat on their property. Although it was built in 1888, Harper found that it was not protected as a historical building, and she made it her mission to change that.

She reached out to state officials and, after finding out what needed to be done, she worked with a historian to complete research and make a case for the schoolhouse. After six months of work, Harper’s schoolhouse was awarded historical status by the State of Ohio in the late 1980s. Since then, Harper has been fixing and renovating the outside of the building, including patching the brick and mortar and replacing the broken windows with vinyl covers.

Although she had hoped to completely restore the building using only her own savings, Harper says she doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to afford to fix everything.

“I hope whoever buys this property will love it as much as I do,” Harper says. “I would think that whoever buys this property would want to have something like that, and then they could clean it out and do whatever they wanted to do with it.”

As Harper looks back on her life, through changes and losses, she has gained valuable memories and met many wonderful people.

She is still in touch with many of her students from New York, and people she has met in Grove City have become as much her family as her nephews and nieces.

In her spare time, Harper enjoys making needlework art that she displays in her house.

Rachel Karas is an editor at CityScene Media Group. Feedback welcome at rkaras@ cityscenemediagroup.com.