Underground shelter serves as a reminder of grandfather's life on the farm

On the warm afternoon of April 19 as a breeze coursed over the countryside north of Danielsville, Margie Dias and her daughter, Daphne Elrod Black, stood in the shade of two oaks that towered over the backyard where World War II veteran Charlie McElreath and his wife, Maneta, made their home for nearly six decades.

a safe haven for the family during stormy weather.

The shelter is a few feet away from Miller McElreath Road but is virtually hidden by the vines and trees that today line the roadway.

McElreath roofed the in-ground shelter with 18 inches of cement held firm with interlacing steel bars and gravel, Dias said. The walls are cement blocks filled with concrete - made the same way as he made his block home.

Though they called it a bomb shelter, the family used it when thunderstorms threatened.

Dias recalled one storm when she was young, when McElreath ushered his family, including his six children, into the shelter. They came out the next morning to find the windows and the back door blown out of their home, though the shelter was so secure they never noticed how bad the storm had been.

"You could shut the door and you wouldn't hear anything outside - no wind, you couldn't hear the rain," Dias said about the shelter, where McElreath kept a bed and lots of canned food. Neighbors sometimes would join the McElreaths in the shelter.

McElreath was a decorated soldier - Bronze and Purple Heart medals - who fought in World War II. He participated in the 1944 D-Day invasion at Normandy Beach and was part of U.S. Gen. George Patton's Third Army that marched across France and into Germany.

Black said her grandfather was shot in the arm and seriously wounded just three days before the war in Europe ended. His hand was virtually shot off, but medics were able to sew it back. His feet suffered frostbite while fighting on the snow-covered landscape of Europe and it gave him problems the rest of his life.

He also paid another price for serving in Patton's army, one that lingered many years after the soldier returned to his Georgia roots.

"He used to tell us how he was going to hell because he had to kill all those people,"

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