US brothers rediscover their roots in Crossgar

US brothers rediscover their roots in Crossgar

25 July 2012 - by Joanne Fleming

TUCKED into a quiet corner of Crossgar is a windmill stump, which once made a cramped but unique family home.

Wesley Harris and Ross Harris returned to the home their resourceful parents created off the Saintfield Road this week, after emigrating as children and living their adult lives in the United States.

For Wes, who has returned to Northern Ireland before, it was another fleeting look back at the unusual building he called his childhood home. But it is the first visit back to Crossgar for Ross, who was born after the family moved out of the windmill and into the village.

With Stanley and Molly Harris raising five girls and four boys, their’s was a hard working and at times harsh existence in 1940s Ireland.

But, as he looks around the dilapidated interior of his old home, Wes reflects that at the time they didn’t feel at all disadvantaged.

“There was no electricity or running water,” he said. “The bottom part was the kitchen, which we lived in, and the second and third floors were bedrooms. A staircase ran round the side.

“There was a fire on each floor and I certainly don’t remember feeling cold. It felt normal to us as children. Now you look at it and think — how could we all live there?”

Wes bears his County Down scars, however, on one arm which was damaged in a machine used while helping out at the flax harvest.

“I remember pulling the flax, soaking it and spreading it out over the fields,” he said. “My arm got caught in the machine, though. It was a tough business.

“I remember having tea out in the fields too.”

Ross’s memories are naturally sparser but clear — running across the fields to see the Huttons, the primary school in Crossgar and even eating Rice Krispie buns.

Stanley Harris and Molly (Mary Irvine) Gibson originally emigrated from Ireland and married in New York, but unusually they returned home, as Ross explained: “When the stock market crashed they came back. Then with World War Two they could not go back.”

Economic considerations would once again push the family back to America, with Ross at the age of six and Wes, a Down High School pupil, leaving at 16.

Ross, who now lives in San Diego, followed his mother’s nose for business while Wes, who lives in northern LA, developed a fascination with cars.

“Race cars now took over my life and I became an auto mechanic,” said Wes, who became heavily involved in stock car racing.

Reflecting on the changes he has witnessed in Down during his occasional trips home, he admits to not initially recognising the rural Crossgar of his childhood.

“Now there are more businesses and more houses and drivers,” he said. “The first time I came back I was in Saintfield looking for the stump. I remembered it was in the country.”

The windmill stump they call home stands on land owned by the Heron family and planning permission has been granted to restore the building, which dates back to the 1700s.

“We do not know how high it was but there were a lot of windmills round here,” said Ross. And admiring the artistic stone cornicing his plasterer father ran round the interior of windmill, he speaks again of their pride in their parents, who made a seemingly unliveable building home.

“Our father took an interest in doing things that were different, totally different,” he said. “If you told him you could not do it, he would do it.”