Baldwin ? Back in 1937, after Lloyd Beeghley and Vera Crumpacker were married in the living room of her parents’ home near Centropolis, they moved into their first home. It was a typical, Kansas-style, white, framed farmhouse northwest of Baldwin just off U.S. Highway 59.

That was 66 years ago. Today, they’re still living there.

But they’re packing to move their household for the first time in their lives.

“This moving is all new to us,” Vera said, “but we’ve been taking it kind of slow-like.”

They’re leaving behind their farm for a duplex in Baldwin. They’ll pull up stakes after their farm auction Saturday.

Lloyd, 91, was born and reared just a mile away, on his parents’ farm. Vera, 85, grew up on a Franklin County farm near Centropolis, about 20 miles south of Lawrence.

They met as children when their parents, Daniel and Christine Beeghley and Albert and Anna Crumpacker, took them to church meetings and dinners. Sometimes they saw each other when their parents exchanged visits.

“I had to wait for Vera to grow up,” Lloyd said, “but she was worth waiting for.” He was 25 when they married. She was 19.

Lloyd Beeghley and his two great-grandsons from Modesto, Calif., walk through a field of young wheat on Beeghley's rural Baldwin farm. It was Justin, left, and Grant Flora's last visit before their grandpa's move to a Baldwin duplex.

Changing times

Instead of moving out into the world to find changes, the Beeghleys waited for change to come to them. But they didn’t sit idle.

“We had 160 acres, some pasture, but we planted wheat, corn and some oats,” Lloyd recalled. “We farmed with horses at first but sometimes I could borrow my father’s tractor when he wasn’t using it.”

Vera’s garden produced most of what the family ate. The winter’s supply of potatoes and apples was stored in the basement along with the jars of fruit, vegetables and meat she canned.

There was a small ice box in the pantry that would hold a 50-cent chunk of ice whenever the ice man could make it down their rutted road.

“We butchered once a year,” Vera said, “Made our own lard … didn’t have Crisco in those days.”

Lloyd and Vera Beeghley stand in front of their tidy rural Baldwin home where they've lived since their marriage in 1937. During the years they've watched conveniences like electricity, indoor plumbing and gravel roads come their way. After 66 years in the home, they're moving to a duplex in Baldwin.

They also had dairy cattle.

“Vera was a fast milker. I had to hurry to keep up with her,” Lloyd said.

The couple later raised beef cattle.

Vera made and mended much of the clothing.

“Things were pretty tight at first,” Lloyd said. “We’d go to town with $5, buy what we needed, and come home with some change.”

Life in church

Their children, Deanna and Norman, walked to Willow Springs School, a one-room building serving grades one through eight. Lloyd and his brothers, John and Everet, had attended the same school.

Like their parents before them, Lloyd and Vera are members of the Old German Baptist Brethren and live less than a mile away from their Willow Springs Meeting House.

Like most things the close-knit couple has done, they were baptized together in Lone Star Lake in 1944.

In 1937, newlyweds Lloyd and Vera Beeghley posed next to their 1930 Model A Ford before leaving for their honeymoon to the Missouri Ozarks.

“The church is all we’ve ever known, you might say,” Lloyd said.

After World War II, household appliances were scarce. In 1947, still without electricity, the Beeghleys signed up to buy a refrigerator at a Baldwin appliance store. Their name reached the top of the list in 1948. They used it for storage until their electricity was hooked up a year later.

“That Frigidaire is still running out there in the garage, and I think we’ve gone through two others we’ve used in the house,” Lloyd said, laughing.

In 1951, they took their first long trip to visit relatives in California.

“I was 40 and neither of us had seen the mountains,” Lloyd said.

But then Vera reminded him they’d seen mountains in Colorado in 1948.

In 1982, they bought a farm near Troy, Ohio, and put their 160-acre Kansas farm up for sale. In Ohio they’d be closer to their son and his family.

But they got no offers on the place.

“Maybe I priced it too high, and we thought hard about moving. But since my brother John and I are so close, we decided to stay where our roots were, ” Lloyd recalled somberly.

John Beeghley lives a mile away.

Growing older

After a heart attack and a bypass in the mid-1980s, Lloyd got out of the cattle business and rented out his pasture.

“Doctor said I shouldn’t be lifting those hay bales,” he said.

Earlier this year the couple sold their home and 80 acres to Mike Flory, who they met as a child and neighbor when he was growing up across the road.

“We just realized we can’t keep things up anymore like we have been, but I kind of hate to go away and leave,” Lloyd said.

Both said they’d miss seeing the occasional parade of farm equipment that passed by their window.

“It’s company,” Vera said.

Modest by nature and association, Lloyd pointed out that theirs had been a simple life and they’d done nothing exceptional.

“The Lord has been good to us, and we know who’s in control,” he said. “And, how much longer we’ll be privileged to be around, we don’t know that either.”