Hill–Davis family on the porch at Mt. Perry, Ohio — c. 1938–1941

A group of ten on the small covered porch of a white clapboard cottage, photographed from beyond a wooden picket fence and gate, c. 1938–1941 — the Hill family home at Mt. Perry, in Perry County, Ohio, northeast of Somerset and about twenty-five miles beyond Zanesville. This is the maternal Hill–Davis side of the family — a different world from the columned, stucco Bexley house on N. Cassady Avenue it was once mistaken for: a modest vernacular Victorian cottage with jigsaw-cut porch trim and turned posts, the kind of house that anchored a rural Ohio family.

The full cast, left to right

• Homer Edward Davis (1900–1982) — in white shirt and tie at the far left. Chuck’s maternal great-grandfather; father of Dorothy, who would marry Robert Earl Wildermuth in 1946.
• Theodore “Ted” Roosevelt Hill (b. 1912) — Bessie’s younger brother, the one Hill sibling who later left Ohio for Texas.
• Christine (Miller) Hill — Ted’s wife. (No archive page yet.)
• Louella “Lovella” (Hill) Beardmore (b. 1917) — Bessie’s youngest sister, married Charles Beardmore in 1938.
• Dorothy Marie Davis (b. 1925) — Homer and Bessie’s daughter, Chuck’s maternal grandmother, a young teenager here.
• Bessie Marie (Hill) Davis (1905–1950) — Homer’s wife, Harvey and Clara’s daughter, Chuck’s maternal great-grandmother.
• Betty (Davis) Wolfe (b. 1926) — Dorothy’s younger sister; “Aunt Betty” of the 108 Hillcrest Drive holiday dinners.
• Janetta “Jeanette” (Smith) Hill (b. 1864) — Harvey’s mother, the eldest person in the frame at about seventy-five; Chuck’s maternal great-great-great-grandmother.
• Clara Victoria Ullmann Hill (1885–1941) — Harvey’s wife, the matriarch; Chuck’s maternal great-great-grandmother.
• Harvey Hendershot Hill (1882–1951) — the patriarch, the older man in the dark suit at the far right. The two Davis–Hill fathers-in-law bracket the frame: Homer at one end, Harvey at the other.

Why Mt. Perry, and why c. 1938–1941

Harvey Hendershot Hill was born in Monroe County in 1882 and died in nearby Bremen (Fairfield County, just across the line from Mt. Perry) in February 1951 — placing the Hill household firmly in this Perry/Fairfield corner of Ohio. The date now brackets tightly: his wife Clara Ullmann Hill died 15 October 1941, and she is in the frame — a firm upper bound — while Louella appears under her married Beardmore name (from 1938) and the Davis girls, Dorothy (b. 1925) and Betty (b. 1926), read as young teenagers. Together those put the gathering at roughly 1938–1941, on the porch of the Hill home before Clara’s death broke the older generation of the family.

The frame spans four generations of the maternal Hill line at once: Janetta (Smith) Hill (b. 1864); her son Harvey and his wife Clara; their daughter Bessie with her husband Homer Davis; and Bessie’s daughters Dorothy and Betty — the great-great-great-grandmother through to the grandmother of Chuck’s own generation, on one small Mt. Perry porch.

Source: Eesley family archive, maternal Davis–Hill line; all ten figures and the Mt. Perry location identified by Chuck Eesley, 2026 (labeled photograph). One figure — Christine (Miller) Hill, Ted’s wife — does not yet have an archive page.