Wendell —It’s been almost 90 years since T.A. and Patty Cooke rocked back and forth in the pedal swing on the front porch of their bungalow.

The old swing rocked their daughters and grandson, Chuck Jordan, his daughter Amy, who now rocks her own daughter, three-week-old Jordan Setzer in the ancestral home.

The house at 503 East Third Street has been home to five generations of the Cooke family. Built in 1921, it is now the home of Amy and David Setzer and daughter Jordan.

“It’s very special,” said Amy, who first lived in the house as five-year-old. “I remember my parents coming home from the hospital with a brand new baby (sister Anne Edmundson), and I thought it was the coolest thing.”

History has repeated itself many times over in this house that was moved by Amy’s father from Main Street on the site of where the Wendell United Methodist Church annex stands now.

He had lived there as a boy. From 13 to 18, Chuck Jordan stayed with his grandmother Patty when she needed help getting around after she had become blind.

It was a case of both helping the other out, Jordan recalled.

“They told her it was good for this mischievous 13-year-old to stay with her, and of course they told me I’d be good to keep an eye on her,” he said. “The school was only about a block away, and I’d come home, even before I lived there, and see my mama, my aunt and grandmother sitting on the porch or around the kitchen table, always drinking those small Cokes.”

The house became the property of his aunt Alta Ruth Spain after his grandmother died. Spain sold the home to the Methodist Church in 1982 for Sunday school classes. It was used that way until 1996 when the church was going to tear down the building and offered it to Spain if she would move it.

Spain contacted Jordan, a builder on Emerald Isle, and he bit.

“Once we made that romantic commitment to do it, we had no idea how much cost it was going to be,” said Jordan with a laugh.

The house had to be weighed to validate that the overhead bridge on N.C. 231 would hold it. It was a difficult move, Jordan recalled. But he doesn’t regret it.

“I’m just thankful I was able to do it,” he said. “It’s not grand, just a 20s bungalow, a Craftsman style house that I’m very fond of, “ said Jordan. “We tried to put it back to the original as best we could. We maintained the original Craftsman integrity, refinished all the floors and restored the plaster.”

But it also means more to Jordan than plaster and finishes.

He recalled Thanksgivings with his cousins and brothers standing on the four by four stair landing from the staircase in the dining room, putting on a Pilgrim play. And now, his daughter, Amy invites from 20 to 30 of the Cooke clan every Thanksgiving and Christmas to uphold the tradition.

Spain has even earlier memories of living in the house.

In those early years, her father, the owner of T.A. Cooke Hardware downtown, kept chickens and hogs in the back yard like most people in town during the day.

“It was one of the cleanest hog pens I’ve ever seen,” she said.

Her mother and father grew string beans, tomatoes, corn and artichokes in the vegetable garden, Spain recalled. There was both a wash house and a smoke house on the property.

Spain remembers a woman came in once a week and washed the family’s clothes from a tub and with a washing board. Relatives came over for hog killings in the winter and the pork was smoked in the smoke house.

“I can remember going out there with my mother to cut slices of ham for supper at night,” she said. “Things were simple back then. It was a simpler life and not so complicated as it is now. Of course you didn’t have the advantages you do now, but it was good.”

She remembers her mother playing the organ every Sunday at Wendell Baptist and recalled her career as a music teacher before she and her sister Pauline were born.

And every Christmas, the old stories come to the forefront when the family gathers again at the old T.A. and Patty Cooke house.

And the old pedal swing is still rocking.

“To have it stay in the same family, I think is really special,” said Spain.