Papa said that he didn't want to raise his boys in town, so he bought the farm on Frisby Road which I now own. On November 7, 1918 my family and I moved to the farm. Where we lived before was on a hillside. I remember, as we pulled into the gate with all the family in the wagon pulled by two horses whose names were Old Joe and Old Fred, that I happily exclaimed,"I can roll George in the buggy in this yard!"(We had a wicker baby buggy. It was gray). George was about four months old at this time.
Later on Uncle Sandy and Aunt Allie moved over on the Cooper Road where they lived for many years. It was a very short distance from where Mammy and Pappy lived. As you can imagine we cousins spent many happy Sunday evenings playing together.
I remember we would come to church in the buggy. After church we would go on over to Mammy's for dinner. We would leave the buggy in the front yard and take the horse to the barn. We cousins would be playing in the buggy and Aunt Allie and Mama would be screaming at us to get out of the buggy because it was liable to run over the hill with us in it.
I remember that one Sunday morning as we were going to church Papa let me hold the lines! As soon as we got there I ran to tell Wade about it. He remarked "I'll bet Uncle Sherman had hold of those lines too!".
Nell Ragan and I were talking about this one time and she remembered the buggy too. She said it was the thrill of her lifetime to get to ride in Uncle Sherman's buggy. She said she always had to stand up behind and hold to the back of the seat.
The first buggy we had had metal tires like a jolt wagon, but later we were really in style because we had solid rubber tires which made riding much easier.
Before we got a car, I remember Papa would take the team and wagon and go to town to get supplies. He usually didn't get back home until after dark. I would worry myself so--afraid something had happened to him. Many times I would call over to the toll-gate keeper and ask, "Has Papa come through the toll-gate yet?".
The toll-gate was a pole placed across the road. It was located right at the end of Worsham Lane. The toll-gate keepers were Frank and Hannah Morris. Different rates were charged for different kinds of vehicles. The Morris family lived in the toll-gate building. As one approached the gate someone would come out and raise the pole and take your money thus allowing you to proceed on your journey. The way the pole was: there was a post that was opposite the side of the road from the house. There was a pin through the pole and the top of the post. The pole extended about 3 feet beyond this post. There was a box on that end of the pole full of rocks and the other end extended completely across the road and over to the toll-gate house. They had a horseshoe fixed on the edge of the porch with a long rope attached to that end of the pole. When someone wanted to go through, they would just unhook it from from the horseshoe and the weight of the rocks on the other end would raise the pole almost straight up so one could go under it. Then with the rope that was on the end of the pole, they would pull it back down, hook the end of the pole onto the horseshoe and wait for the next customer to come along.
Then, in 1926, we bought a 1919 second-hand model T Ford. It was black with a cloth top. Papa was the first to drive, as a friend had taught him to drive. Mama was always so uneasy as they rode in the car. It ad tires that were about three inches wide. The roads were rough and had ruts which had been made by wagons. This caused the tires on the car to be cut a lot of times and as a result we had lots of flat tires!
I remember when I was learning to drive. We started to church one Sunday morning. Nell McIntyre(a cousin) was with us. I started to turn the curve down below our house, which at that time was almost an elbow turn. Evidently I was driving a little fast. The wheels had wooden spokes and one of the back wheels went down and spokes flew in every direction.
Later on Thelma was driving the car. The road was still narrow and rough.There was a wire fence that was almost in the edge of the road. The car didn't have a bumper and the fenders were real long and sharp. The car got out of her control and she hooked the fender into the fence and stripped the fence for about ten feet.
George, being the youngest, never drove the first car we had.
We raised around thirty five to forty turkeys each year. They would roam all over the countryside--to the neighbors, up in the woods, and over on the north side of Collett's Hill. I remember so well how along late in the afternoon when it began to get dark that the turkeys would go to roost out on the rail fences, etc. I was always so anxious when Papa or Mama would go to drive the turkeys "in" and it was beginnin to get dark and they had not gotten back. I would stand and watch back towards the "big pond" and to the end of Collett's Hill wondering if I would ever see them again! At this time the timber north of the "big pond" wasn't there. It was a field and one could see more clearly then than now. When I saw them coming into view it would certainly lift a burden from my heart!
The "big pond" was a natural pond--not man made. Sometimes in wet weather it would cover about ten acres. It was mostly on the Eph Turner side. In winter time it was really a haven for ducks. One time I am sure that I saw as many as 10,000 ducks on the pond. One could make a noise and the ducks would fly off of the water. It would sound like thunder!
At one time the pond had a great quantity of fish in it and some nights there would be as many as thirty-five or forty people from town and the surrounding countryside with lanterns, fishing. It made it look like a small town!
There was also a part of the pond about fifty feet in diameter that seemed to be quick sand. Eph Turner said that when he was a boy that boys would gather at the pond and throw twelve foot fence rails(on their ends) into the pond and watch them slowly go out of sight!
Along about this same time a black man lived on the farm where we lived. He said a neighbor had a steer and someone saw the steer go into this part of the pond to get a drink. He said that the last thing they saw of this steer was his horns going out of sight!
In later years the pond went dry and they got a bulldozer out there to push in a lot of rock and dry dirt into this quick sand area and that took care of the situation. I guess you children remember the time that we all cleaned the side of the pond that we owned. It was a hard job but we look back on that time with fondness now, your mother and I.
This same black family, by the name of Meadows, had a twelve year old boy that died. They buried the boy somewhere in a fence corner. This black man's name was Ike Meadows and the field was always called the Ike lot. The name of the boy who died was Jerry. There was a "wet weather" branch which ran down through the middle of the field. They called this branch the "Jerry Branch".
I recall that one time the Ike lot was in corn. Maude, George, and I had to chop out and thin the corn in this field. It was a hard job and when we got through one day, we got to shouting and jumping up and down because the work was over!
There was a family who lived on this farm years ago. They had a daughter who gave birth to twins. They were still-born. It was said that they buried them somewhere around where the house was. When a post hole or something like this was dug and they hit something unusual they would say "wonder if this is where the twins were buried?".
I started to school in 1921. I remember my first day of school very well! I did not intend to go a step. I told them that I had to stay home and take care of George. I was really sincere in this. I was always overly concerned about everything and everybody! At this time there was a fence around the yard. They got me out to the front gate. I got hold of the wire fence with both hands and was screaming as loud as I could! Maude and Thelma together had quite a time getting me loose from the fence. They finally did, however, and we went to school.
My school teachers were: Minnie Huffaker, Martha Corder, Florence Jones, Sula Jones, Lula Alred, Mama, Mary Brian Bell, and Sally Huffaker.
My first grade teacher was Minnie Huffaker. I remember that she gave me a present that year for being the best one in school--conduct wise.
We lived on a dirt road about a mile from the school house. We went barefoot. There were all kinds of hickory nut and walnut trees alongside the road. The nuts would fall into the road and the horses and wagons running over them would knock the outside hulls off. The nuts would dry and be laying all over the road. As we came home at night we would stop and crack and eat the nuts. We spent quite a bit of time at this!
I went to school the first two or three years in an old log school house. Then the new house was built and school was held in it until about 1957 or 1958 when the schools were consolidated. Joyce attended her first school here also.
When I was in the second grade, there was a long bench up in the front of the building. The teacher would call each class up to the front to have their "lessons". While the attention was being given to the class up front, one of the boys who was two years older than I, and who was always "picking" on me, scooted over in the seat with me. He had long, dirty finger nails. He grabbed me by the throat and pushed my head back over the seat and dug his finger nails into my throat on each side and almost choked me to death. I was scared to make a noise for fear that the teacher would say we were fighting and whip us both. This made sores on each side of my throat.
I remember another incident. A boy from a very poor family did something that the teacher was going to whip him for. He had a jumper down in his overalls. The teacher told him to get the jumper off. He didn't want to, but she made him. He took it off and marched up to the front to take his whipping. He had on two or three strips about 2 inches wide running from the bottom of the shirt to the yoke. He had no underwear on. He turned his back to the teacher. When she saw his back she said "Go back to your seat".
The only whipping I ever got was for something that I didn't do. At that time there was a ditch about ten feet deep beside the school yard. The teacher had told us not to play on the bank because we were getting dirty--in fact, we would be filthy as hogs with red clay dirt all over us. One day there were eleven boys and one girl playing on this bank. They would pull each boy and girl up the bank. One boy on this particular day was pulling the girl up the bank and he was about to let her fall. I was standing back at a safe distance from the bank. I don't remember whether he asked me to help him or not. Anyway, I took hold of the stick and she being a big, fat girl was about to fall because this was too much weight for him. And as luck would have it, the teacher stepped to the door and saw what was taking place! She called the twelve of us in and gave us all a whipping!
On a lighter note--we had two cloak rooms at the front of the building, a foyer in the middle, then a door went from the foyer into the main building. We hung our coats and set our dinner baskets in the cloak room. When there were several children in the same family, quite a large basket was brought. There was no stock law at that time and the Steele family had a lot of hogs that ran outside. I remember one day that an old sow came into the cloak room and reached and got one of the bigger baskets in her mouth and raised her head high so that it wouldn't drag the floor. She ran out the door and across the school house yard. All the children ran after her from all directions. This excited the sow and she finally set the basket down and took off! You can imagine the tales that were told at the supper tables that night!
When Thelma was about sixteen years old, one day she and Mama were starting to do the washing. They looked down the road and saw a buggy coming. Mama thought it was a salesman that she had encountered before. This man was of the persistent type and she thought that she would never get rid of him. We had a small chicken house. She told Thelma to act like she was the only one there and she(Mama) would just squat down there in the chicken house unil he left. She thought that since Thelma was just a young girl that he wouldn't stay long. It so happened that the man wasn't old at all. It was "Doc Gray", a real young, single man! He and Thelma talked and laughed for about two hours! Mama said she was so cramped up, humped up in the chicken house all this time and she couldn't afford to come out, that she was about worn out! We all thought that was real funny!
I was very young when we got a telephone(1922). The party line had thirteen people on it. Each one had a different "ring" which could be heard in all the houses. I remember our ring was two shorts and a long. When it rang for us we knew that there was eleven more listening in to get all the news that we or whoever had called us was talking about. Joyce and Gary have the phone now. When you children were small you and your cousins spent many happy hours "calling and talking" on this telephone which at this time had been moved upstairs.
The toys we had were all homemade. I was the oldest; so, I made the toys for George and me. I made wagons, sleds, and a cart out some old disks. I think the disks were one horse corn drills that had a hub. I made an axle to go in the two disks and put a platform on it and we rode all over the yard and barn lot, which cut the ground up considerably.
We had a roan steer calf that weighed about 400 pound. We broke him to work in the sled. His name was Sweetheart Darling. Uncle Reuben Roberts had a horse named this; that's where we got the name. We rode him also. When we breaking him to ride, one would ride while the other one would hold down on the tail to keep him from bucking the rider off! Many pleasant hours were spent riding Sweetheart Darling.
Our dogs were Karo(named this because he liked Karo syrup so well), Ned, and Happy(whom Papa named after Happy Chandler).
Our cooking stove was a small cst iron cook stove. It was about two feet square and two feet high and had four caps. We had to build a platform to set it on to get it high enough to cook on. About 1926 a salesman came around selling Home Comfort Ranges. We bought one. It was a large stove with a warming closet and a reservoir. I thought it was real pretty and that we were "high class" after that! Every time we would have company I would want to take them to the kitchen to see the stove.
Under the oven there was a little compartment called the foot warmer. Warm air would come out of it and one could warm his feet there. We had two cats that came into the house very often. One particular day they had crawled back in the foot warmer and Mama didn't know that they were in there. Later she built a fire in the stove and after a while she heard cats squalling loudly. She didn't know where the noise was coming from. Finally she opened the foot warmer door and two heads shot out of there like bullets!
The"water room" was a little room off from the kitchen with a table where buckets of water were kept. We usually kept two buckets of water there all the time.
In 1928, when I was fourteen or fifteen, I was standing in the yard one day and saw this huge machine going over in the sky. It was going over the Turner Swamp. I had never seen anything that looked like it before. The shape was sort of like a big fish. It was of a light color and moving fairly slowly. In a few days there was an article in the paper about it. It was called a dirigible. Its name was Graf Zeppelin. It was reported in the paper that Dr. Hugo Eckner, a famous airship designer and navigator, was on board this airship that I saw. The Graf Zeppelin was the most famous airship the world has ever known--also the most successful! By the time it was retired in 1937, to be replaced by newer, larger dirigibles, the Graf Zeppelin had made 590 flights; flown more than a million miles(including 144 ocean crossings); and carried 13,110 passengers without a fatality. The Nazis ordered the famed Graf Zeppelin dismantled and used for scrap metal during the war. The Germans never built another one.
I was fifteen when the Depression struck in 1929. Papa was very sickly at this stage in life. The farm was mortgaged. I had to stay out of school to work on the farm. Some school terms I wouldn't get to go to school over maybe five or six weeks out of the seven months of school.This was to keep from losing our farm. This is why my education is so limited. (Proof positive that amount of formal education and being an educated person are NOT synonymous! j.d.)
Thelma had married Prent Stearns and they lived in New Castle. The Great Depression hit and they both lost their jobs. They returned to Monticello and lived with Mama and Papa two or three years.
June was due to be born in February 1929. She was one month premature being born the 22nd day of Januaey at home. She weighed around five pounds. She was lucky that she was born prematurely because the next month on the 29th of February there came a twenty-six inch snow, which was on for days. It would have been impossible for a doctor to have gotten out there then. To keep June warm, they built a fire in the wood cooking stove and let the oven door down and wrapped her up good and kept her on the oven door. She weighed twenty-five pounds at six months so the TLC really paid off!
Along in the early 1930s I remember we had an ice storm. The ice on the wires was an inch or more in diameter and the trees were in the same shape. I remember down in Turner's swamp the timber would break and for two or three days it sounded like big guns firing! After it was over, the brush was five or six feet deep. One could not walk in the woods for the brush.
The next year there came an ice storm, but it was on the ground instead of the trees. It was about an inch thick then. We didn't stack wood in for the winter like we do today. we got it in a load at a time--enough to last a week or two. At this time we were out of wood. We couldn't haul it with the team because they couldn't stand up. Neither could we--we just had to ease along. There was a dead tree not too far from the house. Papa and I cut it and sawed it into blocks. Papa crawled on his hands and knees and pushed these blocks which weighed around one hundred pounds. They could be pushed with all ease!
During this ice storm we had a sow that was missing. We were looking for her over in the hill. Papa's feet flew out from under him and his face hit the ice with a terrible thud. His nose started bleeding, but we continued looking for the hog. We were calling her. She was up in the hill and started down. It was so slick that she fell and started scooting on the ice. She came down over the rocks for possibly thirty or forty feet. Finally she got a "foothold" and went back up to where she started from. So we fed her a little and left her!
Boyd was born in the same house and in the same room as were Janice and Duard. Joyce and Steve were born at their Grandmother Shearer's house.
As to our neighbors, there were the Steeles: Mr. and Mrs. Steele, Lilly and Allie; and Nannie Southwood, Wanda, Lucy, Ethel, Layward, Ray, and Phyllis; The Eph and Martha Lee Turner family; and the Seber Green family. No better neighbors could be found anywhere than all these.
I remember that one of the neighbors was always borrowing the other neighbor's buggy to go to town or wherever they wanted to go. Finally they bought one of their own and the remark was made to Mama "I don't intend neither to lend nor to borrow"!
Another neighbor, Martha Lee Turner, bought a car in 1924, before we got one. We rode with her to a debate between Brother C. R. Nickols and a Baptist preacher by the name of Taylor. I was probably twelve years old then. Mama made a deal with Mrs. Turner that if she would take us to the debate she would furnish the gas.
We were closer to Clyde and Nanny than any of the other neighbors. We could always depend on them for help any time we needed it.
Lilly and Allie Steele used to help me set tobacco. We would "swap" work. They had a dog named Bounce. During tobacco setting time Lilly and Allie would help me and Old Bounce would come with them. When an airplane would go over Old Bounce would get all excited. The "girls"(as they were called) would holler "Sic 'em Bounce", whereupon Bounce would run through the rows of tobacco all excited and barking. This was quite aggravating to me!
When I was a child our horses' names were Joe, Fred, and Capp. Later Papa had two mules, Joe and George. They were the ones that we had so long and did the hard work while Papa was there. George, whenever he would hear the dinner bell ringing, would start braying. We had them for years.
I bought Kate a little while before Mama and Papa left the farm in 1934. She was the mother of Bob. Bob was born June 19, 1939. He was the best horse that I ever owned. I bought Old Bill, a mule, and he was the worst animal that I ever owned.
It was in the year 1918 that a flu epidemic hit here. A great number of people died. One whole family of ten died, all but one. The story goes that a neighbor family went to bury their small boy. When they returned from burying their boy, their sixteen year old daughter had passed away also.
A few years later the flu hit again in 1930. All the members of this particular Denney family were sick at the same time. People were afraid to go into the home to help out. Mr. Denney later stated that two Baptist preachers came to the yard and hollered in and said "If there's anything that we can do just let us know". Then he said, "The devil(my uncle, Bill Caylor) came. He walked right in and found out what the sick people could use, then went and got it for them" Shortly after that a new baby was born to the Denney family and they named him William Caylor Denney. He now goes by the name of Caylor.
There was a time when Mama was in poor health for five or six years(1933-38). I was eighteen and Maude, who married at twenty-three, had left home. It fell my lot to do the washing for Mama. There were five years that I washed every week on a washboard. A pile of clothes for the family was almost as high as my shoulders. It took almost all day to wash! I had clothes lines and wire fences all around the house covered with clothes.
Once Mama went to Maude's after one of her children was born. Papa was helping me wash. The day was windy and very cold. We could sling the sheets up in the air to sort of straighten them out and instantly they would freeze and be as stiff as boards!
In 1937 I met Tella McCutchen. We dated from the first time we ever saw each other until we were married on January 20, 1938. I certainly was not financially prepared to get married! We lived with Papa and Mama until March 1939.
It began to look like I was going to have to do something else besides work on the farm. Several boys from around here were going to Illinois to work in the oil fields, so I decided to go too and see what I could do. I stayed there three or four days and never was as sick in my life. I put in my application for a job but didn't wait to hear whether I ot the job or not. I headed for Monticello.
When I got back home, I learned that Mammy(Mama's mother) had passed away just a few minutes before I got there. When the estate was settled Mama and Papa bought Mammy's property. Pappy had passed away seven years earlier. Mama and Papa moved over there.
This left Tella and me on the farm. Two months later on May 20th she got real sick. The doctor didn't seem to know what was wrong with her or to be able to do anything for her at least. Two months later on July 16th she passed away.
George and Billie moved out on the farm with me. We lived together until March 19, 1940. Then they moved to a house that Papa built for them above where Mama and Papa lived.
I "batched" for ten years from 1940 until 1950. I lived mostly on peanut butter, pinto beans, corn bread, and oats.
I had a dog at this time. His name was Jack. He was part bull dog. One day the car wouldn't start and I was pushing it out of the shed. It was a little bit of a down grade. I had the door opened so that I could guide it. It rolled pretty fast and caught my hand between the car door and the wall. It mashed my hand and arm and cut my hand badly. I finally got loose, but I saw that I was going to faint. I lay down on my back on the ground. I had some hogs in the barn lot. I knew enough to know that one of these hogs had me by the britches leg. When Jack saw this he really worked the hog over. This shows that a dog is always ready to protect his master.
I can remember when they had mile stones along the sides of the roads. I remember that there was one along the bank where David Pogue lived. It looked like an old time tombstone. It was about three feet high, eighteen inches wide, and about three inches thick. It told how many miles to another place(I don't remember just what it said). Papa told the story that there were two Irishmen who came to this country. They were walking along the highway and saw one of these milestones. One said to the other, "Walk lightly, the dead lies here--quite an old man,75, and his name was Miles To Boston."
While I was batching on the farm word got out that electricity was coming to our neighborhood! Most everyone was all excited about this. Congress had passed the Rural Electrificaton Act. This was when most of the people out in the country got their electricity. There were a few people who were opposed to it. They did not want a line coming across their property.
Then along about July 1949, I had my house wired. Mr. Gilmer Morris and two assistants wired it. They furnished the wiring and everything. If I remember correctly, the bill was $84.00. That was for three men working all day and furnishing everything. Quite a change from today! In a few days they had everything ready to go and you can rest assured that it was a very exciting time for me when the lights were turned on for the first time.
I don't remember just when running water was installed. Water was brought to the house in two buckets. We had what was called the "water room." This was a little room off from the kitchen with a table where the buckets could be put.
I got a refrigerator a while before your mother and I were married. After we got running water in the house we put the refrigerator in the "water room" and I made some shelves for it.
