LEWISBURG — Grace Schwab, who turns 105 on Tuesday, remembers daily life before electric lights, indoor plumbing and automobiles.

But for all the conveniences that didn’t exist in the early 1900s, there was a degree of neighborliness that doesn’t exist now, she said. She’s not sure we’ve got the better part of the bargain.

“People aren’t a bit like they were when I was growing up,” she said.

“Neighbors were there to help one another,” she said. “If someone’s barn burned down, the neighbors would come out and build them a new one.”

Today, once in awhile, you find people like that, but not as a whole, she said.

“And you never had to even think about locking your door.”

She thinks lawbreaking “is only going to get worse.”

Schwab is believed to be the oldest resident in the Valley. She contracted the Spanish Influenza of 1918 and almost died in childbirth in 1927, but she’s in fairly amazing good health today.

She needs the help of a walker, but age has not affected her mental agility. She takes no prescription drugs.

“I cut out all my prescriptions 15 or 16 years ago,” she said. She studied the use of herbs, vitamins and minerals and takes only those. Her food is simple, usually unprocessed. She eats meat, but very little. Her favorite snack is black raspberry ice cream and her favorite personal culinary concoction is pistachio salad — a layer of cottage cheese, layer of crushed pineapple, sprinkled with dry pistachio instant pudding and topped with whipped cream.

The “secret to longevity” so many people seek from her is not a special diet, exercise or potion. Here it is: “Love thy neighbor.”

Fellow Heritage House resident Mary Bush attests that it’s a philosophy Schwab lives by every day.

She’s first to send food down to a new resident, loan a can opener or help with a chore. She’s been doing that for 15 years at the residence, although some heavier tasks, like changing bedding, are now too tiring for her.

Even so, it takes intervention to get her to stop helping out. “She can’t say ‘no’ to a neighbor,” Bush said.

“I get pleasure out of the people who are around me here,” Schwab said.

If people are berating someone, “Grace puts in a good word for them. She’s never said a bad word about anybody,” Bush said.

“Nobody is all bad,” Schwab said.

But for a long life, she hastens to add that smoking and drinking and “messing around” are not compatible either.

Schwab lives alone but has a couple helpers who come in and spend time with her in the morning and evening, Bush said.

She regrets her eyesight is no longer good enough to do crafts or read. When daydreaming, Schwab said, she thinks about the past without a favorite era.

She can recall as far back as 1907, when she was 2. Her mother was taking her older sister and her to get their pictures taken and gave her older sister her pocket watch chain to wear as a necklace. She said she cried until she got one, too.

She recalls her mother churning butter on the back porch before dawn, with only an oil lamp burning in the kitchen.

She remembers where she saw her first car — in Hatch Hollow, “it still exists” she says — and how it was bright red, but not bigger than a golf cart and how it scared the horses.

She remembers when you had to crank the phone and you had a distinct ring — her family’s was two long and two short — to distinguish your calls from others people’s on the same line. And everyone on the line could hear what you were saying.

She remembers going to her first movie, and it starred Mary Pickford.

She remembers going to school in a one-room schoolhouse in Erie County and then teaching in one, even getting special dispensation to teach an extra year after she got married. At the time, married women weren’t allowed to continue teaching.

She remembers seeing Franklin Delano Roosevelt drive by in a car. She liked him.

She married Ralph Donaldson and had three children. A daughter died as a baby, but her two sons, Robert, born in 1927, and Richard, born in 1933, survive.

Her happiest days, she said, were those spent with her children.

Schwab said every facet of women’s “liberation” has come with a price.

“Now, there are a lot more things a woman has to worry about,” she said. “Like getting a good job. Before, her husband took care of her.”

Working while raising children seems too high a price to pay, she said.

“I wouldn’t have given up the days of being with my babies for anything,” she said. “They were so precious. I can’t understand a woman wanting to give up one single day of those precious baby days.”

Schwab lived most of her life in Pennsylvania, with a stint of a few years in Texas with her third husband. Afterward, she came to Lewisburg because one of her sons lived here. She can trace her ancestors back to John Alden, who came over on the Mayflower. She has eight grandchildren, 14 great grandchildren and 16 great great grandchildren.

She still knows many poems by heart. She recites her favorite, L’Envoi (the Dispatch) by Rudyard Kipling, almost perfectly. It’s about a place she looks forward to, where will no longer be hard, people will get to rest and be happy, “where no one will work for money, and no one will work for fame...”

Maybe, Schwab thinks, she isn’t there yet because there’s something she has to do yet.

She said she’s asked God about that many times. “I wish He’d tell me what it is, and I’d do it,” she said.

Perhaps He works at cross purposes, however, letting Schwab’s good nature keep her healthy.

“God has a sense of humor,” Schwab said. “Once, when I was taking a pill for my eyes each morning, I held one up and said a prayer asking Him to let that pill help my sight.

“Then I discovered I’d taken the wrong pill.

“I said to God, ‘You knew is was wrong all the time didn’t you?’

“I laughed and so did He.”