History and Description of My Grandmother’s
Old Smith Home Place at Select, Ohio County, Kentucky
Over a 17-year period, I
interviewed my grandmother, Eva Caroline (Smith) Cox for her memories as a girl
when she was growing up, and in fact, for her entire life history. She lived to
be 99.9 years old and I was still interviewing her and capturing her stories on
audio tape six months before her death on December 4, 1988.
One day I decided to pick
out all the references and stories she told about what their house and home
place looked like. And I also chose some excerpts from the taped transcriptions
of interviews with my dad, Gilbert O. Cox, Sr., who was a retired rail road
engineer at the time in the 1970s. On
Saturday or Sunday afternoons, we sometimes gathered around my grandmother’s
dining table, and sat and visited with each other, usually telling what had
been going on in our lives during the week.
I always tried to steer at least some of the conversation to the “olden
days in Kentucky.”
These pages are just in
rough draft which I will be adding to as I find appropriate mentions and more
stories that my grandmother described about their home and farm place. My daughter is now taking my type-written
pages and retyping them into a computer, which will enable me to move
paragraphs around as I write my book on my grandmother’s life and that of her
parents and grandparents – the James Thomas Smith and Charles Sanders families
of Select, Ohio County, Kentucky.
~.~
On
one visit when I interviewed my grandmother, I asked her to pretend we were
sitting out on her screened-in back porch on her family’s old home place where
she grew up. I asked her to tell me what
she could see in her mind’s eye in the back yard, looking out back from left to
right.
She told me about the garden walk that stair-stepped down to
the grape arbor and the privy, and then the smokehouse, the well with the old
dinner bell beside it, (which I now have
beside my front door) and the new two-story barn that her daddy built of
logs, and the wood shed and other outbuildings farther back out from the house.
The sheds and barns were a good place for the children to play, or hide in the
hay loft. The lower part had storage
space for feed, saddles, bridles, and farm plows and equipment. The buggy was
also parked under a shed near the barn.
My grandmother also told this story about their dinner bell,
which was pretty large, made in Ohio in the 1880’s (according to my research). (I
have had it mounted on a wrought iron stand). She said they rang the dinner bell when they
wanted to signal to the men and boys plowing in the fields that dinner was
ready. She said that when the horses and
mules heard it ring, they stopped in their tracks because they knew they were
going to get to come to the house, get a drink of water, get their harnesses
off, and rest awhile, while the men ate their dinner. Then the men filled up their burlap-covered
jugs with cool well water, went back to plowing, and wouldn't be returning to
the house till the sun started going down.
~.~
She
said they had a screened-in back porch, with a long table and benches on both
sides out on the porch. Their large
family often ate out there, where there was a summer breeze most of the time
and it was much cooler than eating inside.
I think she said the porch had wood half way up the walls. It had the prettiest blue morning glories
planted that ran up wires beside the back door…that grew on both sides. Sometimes she said they would sit out there
with bowls or pans in their laps and shell peas and butter beans and talk. Sometimes they shucked corn for canning. The porch and its table and benches were well
used almost all year long.
In
the winter though, they moved their dining table and the long benches inside
and set it in front of the fire-place.
In one corner of the kitchen near the black iron cook stove,
they had a hand-cranked coffee grinder that was mounted on the wall to grind
the coffee beans, and that made grinding easier. It was the only way they had to grind the coffee
beans and produced good and flavorful cups of coffee for breakfast every
morning. The beans were ground slowly
with a manual burr grinder, and was somewhat time-consuming. Grinding coffee beans also took some energy
if you were grinding coffee for more than a couple of cups. The children were
enlisted to do this work and took turns…an early morning ritual.
She
said those were good times, a simple way of life even though they worked
hard. Eight children grew up in their
new house, and as they married, they brought their children to visit their
grandparents in that old fashioned log house.
It was their home place where later, all the family gathered together
when they could, for special occasions, holidays, and birthdays.
When
I asked my grandmother what was the earliest thing she could recall in her
childhood, my aunt Eula Mae, quickly asked before grandmother could answer: “When you built this new home. Did you say you remember that?”
GRANDMOTHER: Yes, uh-hum, I don’t think I was over three
years old. Mother told me I wasn’t over
four, if I remember. But I remember
carrying things up the hill from the old house to the new house. Little things, you know. Everybody had to help. It was about as far as from here to
Gilbert’s, not very much further. (My parents lived across the highway from my
grandparents which would be about a block from one door to the other, maybe a
little bit further, JB). Grandmother said she was four years old when
the new house was built on the hill, about a block from where their old house
was – in 1892.
GRANDMOTHER: The old house had logs in it, and our new
house did too. Oh, yes. It was built out of logs, but the logs were
wide, and you would think they was round, wouldn’t you? On each side, they was shaved down and they
fit them logs. Square. You just can’t imagine. They planed them. They had the lumber off our place. And then they weather-boarded it. They sealed it. It was weather-boarded on the outside. And they sealed it inside and papered it. Yes, it was a log house, there was no
cracks. And then it was weather-boarded
and painted. And ceiled inside and
papered. And you couldn’t hear anything
or see anything through cracks.
And
the chimney was right in the center between these two rooms. It wasn’t at the end of the house. And it heated both rooms. And you couldn’t hear people talk too much
when you were in the other part of the house.
Because the logs were so thick, you see.
And my daddy painted the house every year.
Well,
the stairs come down in the room where we mostly stayed. But I can remember having to come downstairs,
when I was cutting up and making a lot of noise, and they would tell me to come
down. They never did get after us,
except at night, you know, if we were scuffling. They would make us take our seat right down
on those steps, and Mother would say, “Now stay there until I tell you to go to
bed.” And that was the end of it. And sometimes they went off to sleep and left
us sitting. And I would hear that old
clock strike, but I wouldn’t get up and slip back in there to sleep. And I would sit there a little longer. (Chuckling.) It was me and Ella or one of the boys. Ella and me, mostly. I think when they woke up…I know they went to
sleep. They would call you and say, “Now
you can go back to bed if you think you can behave.” And I was ready to behave. I can remember that.
We
didn’t have a grandfather’s clock, but we had one just as good. And it chimed. Sat on the mantle. It was really good. And that clock…from the time I can remember
until I was married, they never had no trouble with it. It was a clock that chimed, with
weights. Yes. Had a heavy weight on each side. They called it an 8-day clock. They had to wind it every eight days. But the chimes were loud, and you could hear
it all over the house.
No,
it didn’t get cold. It was always warm
in there. There was always a big log
burning in the fireplace. I think there
was a closet under the stairway where they put wood in. Oh, it’s been so many years ago, I have
almost forgot. We always had lots of
wood stacked up for wintertime. The boys
cut the wood, but the girls brought it in, the same as the boys.”
(Describing the Upstairs). “The girl’s
bedroom had a pole or rod, and our clothes were hung. And we could just walk down through there and
there’s where Ma put all of our clothes.
Dresses and slips and everything.”
The new home was
originally constructed as a two-story structure, as shown in a picture of the
old house that Auntie gave me once, which shows my daddy squatting down holding
a little rabbit which he had trapped that day.
GRANDMOTHER: Oh those
maple trees, there at home? We went and
dug them up in the woods and brought them to the house and set them out across
the front of the yard. Four I believe it
was…or five. Each one of us claimed
these trees. And oh, they growed and was
so pretty. And each one took care of
their own tree, watering it, and then they grew to be big trees. I think they are all gone now…the house and
everything is gone. (Nov 1976 tape). Mother did all the sewing. On a sewing machine. She loved to sew. She bought the material. She had a spinning wheel too. And she would weave, and card. But she made our gloves and caps to wear…she
knitted those. That was the only way you
had. You had to be self-sufficient in
those days.
On our farm, we had most everything. Cattle, horses, sheep, hogs. Geese. We always had to help pick them. We had to hold them when they picked them…laughing…I can remember that! And we made feather pillows and feather beds
out of them. They were white geese, if I
am not mistaken. Maybe blue geese. But I never did have to help.
Mother canned everything in jars. Dried apples and peaches, and
everything. She put the apples and
peaches upon the house…on the smokehouse, so nothing could get to them while
they were drying.
It had a very pretty old-fashioned garden walk that led down
to large grape arbor at the end of the garden walk (that I thought must have added a lot of charm to the back yard when
the young people had their friends over.
I could just see it as she described it.
The blossoming grape arbor must have been a delightful place with
benches along the inside where the children used to play and elders could sit
in the shadow of the grape leaves on hot afternoons, listen to the birds
singing, watch the butterflies in residence, and visit a while).
GRANDMOTHER…telling about gardening: All of us worked in the garden. I’ve worked a many…I worked anywhere and
everywhere. Us girls knew how to
work. We could hitch up a team to the
wagon or to the buggy. Yes, we could do
anything we wanted to do. And worked in
the garden too.
A cherry tree grew by the back door. And my mother, Sarah (Sanders) Smith, made
delicious cherry cobblers.
My Dad told about the cherry tree: They had a big cherry tree. “Had black
cherries on it, growing right by the kitchen door. And my grandmother made her own soap and it
was lye soap, and she would throw that dishwater out on that old cherry
tree. Every time she finished washing
the dishes, she would throw the dish water up on the body of that tree, and it
would run down to the bottom of it. And
that was the biggest, healthiest cherry tree I have ever seen in my life. It got up so high, that the limbs would grow
out over the roof of the house, and the shingles. And boy, those were the best cherries you
have ever eat. She would make those
cherry cobblers out of them. And I would
get up there and fill my stomach up with ripe cherries right off that tree and
then pick enough cherries to make a cobbler, and fight the jay birds. Because they were all in there after them.”
My grandmother described how there was a long dirt walk,
rock hard from so many people using it every day. It was swept clean daily by one of the
children, using a broom made of twigs.
The landscaped walk, with red and white peonies planted on both sides,
stair-stepped down with one path leading to the fragrant grape arbor, and another
path that forked off to the privy, hidden from the house by the limbertwig
tree, grandmother said. Her daddy kept
the grape vines pruned and trained to grow up wire trellises to avoid a tangled
mass of twining vines.
A quiet lane about a block or so long ran from the main road
up to the house, and her dad always had a tobacco field off to one side of the
house. And they worked in it until harvest time. It was their cash crop, and her daddy took it
to Owensboro to
sell.
GRANDMOTHER: We had a
happy home when we were kids…at home. I
don’t know…it was just a happy home. In
that time, we sat around the fireplace and popped corn, and made candy, and eat
apples. Just had a good time. Yes, and we were all close too. Because we stayed at home, and all the
family was together.”
~.~
“Auntie,” (Mary Elizabeth (Smith) Sandefur) told me a number
of stories about growing up that I wish I had recorded but did not. However I did make notes later about some of
the things she told me:
Auntie said their house was a big two-story house, painted
white, with pretty wall paper. The
bedrooms were all upstairs and they had one bedroom downstairs. They had a lot of flowers and the prettiest
garden walk with peonies that looked like wax - red and white. At the end of the garden walk, the landscape
stair-stepped, and they had a grape arbor with a slatted roof-top.
Auntie said that Grandma Sanders' house had a summer kitchen
where they cooked and canned.
She also said they had a dog, named Old Sport that slept by
the chimney and he bit Grandmother once.
He was a good guard dog.
They had a smoke house out behind the house. She could remember that her father killed 16
hogs one cold winter day, and there were lots of people there. They let her walk to Grandma Sanders' house
to get a knife to use in the hog-killing.
Lilacs arrived in the early spring and those hardy shrubs
filled spring with its delicate scent and profusion of blooms - white and
purple.”
~.~
More than two decades have passed since my grandmother’s
health began to fail, and eventually her death at the age of 99 years and 9
months. I will always have wonderful
memories of sitting around her mahogany dining room table where everyone
gathered and enjoyed afternoon refreshments – usually coffee and cake – and
conversation that I tried to steer around to my grandmother’s home life and
growing up at Select. I always took my
tape recorder when I visited her.
I have carried those memories around with me ever since and
transcribed them from tape to type, and now it’s time to write my book about her
life so that future generations will appreciate seeing a very special ancestor
and the way times were when she was growing up.
I think of her often – sometimes she and granddaddy sat in
the swing on the front porch that faced the west, but most of the time they sat
out on her screened-in back porch built back off the kitchen and dining room,
where there were several chairs and rockers. It faced the east and there always
seemed to be a breeze blowing through it.
Both the front and back porch could accommodate a number of visitors,
mostly family members. Often on Sunday –
sometimes Saturday – Joye and Frank and Auntie would drive over from Palestine to spend the day
and visit. Auntie was my grandmother’s
older sister – Mary Elizabeth, called “Betty” by her family, but called
“Auntie” by all of us (because she was the aunt of my dad, Retha, and Darrell –
and my great-aunt). Auntie’s husband,
Everett Sanderfur, whom we called “Uncle” died in June 1954; Auntie died in
July 1975.
I forgot to mention that Grandmother usually had a hanging
basket or two on both the front and back porches of her home, and a bed of old
fashioned petunias that didn’t require too much fuss planted in front of both
porches. They always remember how pretty
they were and how good they smelled.
~.~
G.O. (My dad was called G.O. by his grandchildren because my
children had all of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers living when they
were born – six all together).
G. O.: - telling about Grandpa Smith and then about his barn:
“When we were back in Kentucky, we always went to my
grandfather Smith’s house. Jim
Smith. His name was James, but everybody
called him Jim.
And he kept everything up.
If it was raining, he still kept you busy. You would go to the barn and shell corn, or
you would work on the harness or you would clean the stalls. There was something to do all the time. If nothing else, they had a big old keg of
rusty nails. I never have forgot, a lot
of them were square nails. And you would
take a hammer and straighten them out.
There was never a minute that you was there that you didn’t have to get
up of a morning and…except Sunday, that was a day of rest…you were going to
work all day. By the time you got
through with one thing, he would have something else figured out. He had that going all the time. And there wasn’t much you could do about
it…because he kept his eye on you and you didn’t hide out on him. If you did, he would soon find you. He would know right where you was. He knew!
Oh yes, I will tell you something else we had to do. Those horses had to be curried and brushed,
and their collars cleaned off…because the sweat would build up on the leather
collars, and when you brought a horse in of a night, and put him up and feed
him, when you got through, you brushed his shoulders and curried him, and
rubbed him down with a big old stiff brush.
And fed him, and then you went and got that collar and cleaned all that
caked dirt and sweat off of it. And he
had a collar pad that went on the horse, and you had to clean that too.
My Grandfather Smith…like I told Conrad (my husband)…there was something to do
from the time you got up in the morning until the time you went to bed at
night. And when night come, you was
ready to go to bed. You were give out because
you had done worked. You can’t believe
how primitive they lived, compared to the way we live now. If we want some beans, we run to the store
and buy a little sack of beans. But you
raised your own beans then. Planted them
in the corn when you were planting the corn rows. And then you had to take meal sacks, and
flour sacks, and go down there and pick them beans off of those corn stalks
when they got dry. And you took a stick
and beat that sack and knocked all the beans out of the hulls. And then you held them up and let the wind
blow the trash out of them, and let the beans fall on a sheet. Sometimes I stood on the barn roof, and the
wind blew the trash away. And they had
something to put in them to keep the weevils from getting in them, but I forget
what it was.
But there was something to do all the time. Just like when the peaches and apples was
getting ripe. You were either canning
them or you was cutting them up to dry.
And Grandma had a lot of oil cloth, and you would get up on that
smokehouse, and that was my job because I was a little boy and could get up
there real easy, spread that oil cloth out, and they would hand me up those
peaches and apples and I would spread them out on top of that oil cloth and
have the whole top of that smokehouse covered with apples and peaches,
drying. Drying in the sun for food that
winter.”
And I said: “ I guess
all the girls kept busy the same way.
What did grandmother do when you were there visiting?”
G.O.: “Cooking,
sewing, washing dishes. Washing clothes
by hand. Yes. You had better believe it. Hanging them on bushes to dry…there would be
so many clothes washed and didn’t have enough lines and fences to hang them
on. Feed the chickens, gather up the
eggs. Build hen nests. I could just sit here and tell you…there was
something all the time. For
everybody.
Or work in the garden.
Hoeing weeds. Everybody had a
hoe. Suckering tobacco…that was the
money crop. Boy, you really worked in
that tobacco. When he sold that tobacco
in the fall, he carried it down to Cromwell, and put it on the boat and carried
it to Owensboro and sold it, and when he come back, we met the boat that he
come back on, and he brought everything with him that he was going to use the
next year…two barrels of brown sugar. I
never will forget that. The stuff we
were going to have for Christmas.
Coffee, pepper, salt, stuff like that.
Flour. Bought flour by the
barrel, because they didn’t grow much wheat there. Bought it by the barrel. Knocked the lid out of it, and it set over in
the corner of the kitchen. Had a cloth
over the top of it, and a sifter in it, and you went over there and got what
flour you wanted, and sifted it right there on the side of that…and about that
much of the flour would still be left in there.
Had a coffee mill mounted on the wall, and you roasted the
coffee beans in the oven on the stove.
Then take it out and grind it.
And you roasted the coffee beans, and stirred them all the time they
were roasting. And a wood stove to do it
on. And you can imagine how hot it
got. And the stove had a warmer on top
that went up, and you kept that full of food up there. Stuff that was left from dinner, and you
warmed it for supper. You couldn’t
believe what it was like. You had to
live it to really know.
But we had good times too.
Sometimes we would go squirrel hunting and sometimes we would go rabbit
hunting. And I did love to squirrel
hunt. And we would get on a horse and
ride down through the woods and there were so many squirrels that you could
hunt off your horse. Grandpa even had
one horse that he could shoot a squirrel off of…and the horse wouldn’t jump.
But that tobacco was something. You had to worm it. Pick the worms off. With your hands. Little old speckled worms, and you stepped on
them. And they had a big old horn. When I was a little bitty baby, my mother
gimme a tobacco worm to play with…put it in a pasteboard box and I would sit
and look at it in that box, crawling around, and the box would keep it from
getting away, too.
And you had to go pick them peaches. And boy, I ate enough of them. They had one tree that I just loved. It was a little bitty one, and when they were
ripe, you could just break them open with one hand and eat a half would just
make a good bite. It was an Indian Cling
peach and it didn’t get very ripe until way up in the fall. And they had pear trees.
All the hay had to be put up in the loft of the barn. It was a two-story barn. And it had a hole cut at each manger in the
stalls where you put the hay down through that hole into the hayrack down in
the stall. And it was my job to go up
there every night and feed them horses hay.
I had to fill up that manger down through that hole. The ladder went up beside the runways that
went through the barn, with stables on both sides. It had two big doors that stayed open nearly
all the time…swinging doors that you could throw back and put the hay up there,
and then in the wintertime, you closed it up…to keep the rain out.”
G.O.: “And then that smokehouse I’m telling you
about. He had great big 5 and 10 gallon
crocks filled with kraut, with big old wooden lids. And it would be foaming and you could smell
it when you went down in that smoke house.
But there would be 6 or 8 or 10 of them big old crocks all across the
backside of it there…setting on boards, filled with kraut.”
G.O.: “We
ground the corn into meal. I rode Old
Barney, an old horse that was gentle, and my grandfather would pick me up and
put a sack in front of me and one behind me, and I rode it about six miles down
to my Uncle Letcher’s grist mill and saw mill, and he ground it up into meal
and I brought it back.”
GRANDMOTHER:
(telling about cutting the boy’s hair):
The neighbors cut each other’s hair most of the time. But I don’t know…I don’t think they had any
barber shop close. Course they did at
Cromwell and Beaver Dam. Daddy cut a lot
of their hair. They would come to the
house and go out in the yard under a shade tree.
G. O.: And Grandpa Smith was a fox hunter. My grandmother would make a great big pan of
bread…that big a square (measuring) for them dogs. Every evening. And if he told her not to feed the dogs, I
knew we were going to go hunting that night.
So they would run real good. And
he would put me up in front of him in the saddle and away we would go. And we would meet four or five other fellows
and they would all have their dogs, and boy, I’m telling you, the fox chase
took place. And we would stop and listen
to them dogs, and they could tell which dog was in the lead…and where the fox
was going to cross. And we would get on
those horses, and race to get there in the moonlight and watch the dogs cross
with that fox. It was thrilling…to a
little boy!
Yes, it was a pastime to them. He had the best dog there was in that
country…my grandfather. His name was Pullman . I don’t know where he got that name for him,
but I never will forget it. Pullman…like
the Pullman car on the back of a passenger train. And he had the best nose, and
one of the fastest dogs. I know one
night, we had started across a bridge over there at the Chancellor Creek over a
foot log when he was just a puppy, when my grandfather was training him, and it
was a coon he was after instead of a fox, and when we got up there, that coon
had a hold of that puppy on that log and pulled him off in that water. And it was icy, mind you. And Grandpa went right in that icy water and
grabbed that pup by the leg and that coon was still holding on to him, setting
right on top of his head. And he would
have drowned him, too, if Grandpa hadn’t of got him out. They will do that, a coon will.
GRANDMOTHER - telling about her dad, the fox hunter: “My
daddy was a great fox hunter. He had fox
dogs, and he went with all of them. All
of them hunted. But daddy liked to go
with Roy Stewart’s daddy. John Henry
Stewart. Those two really loved to hunt
together. Yes…they went fox hunting all
the time! And then got up early of a
morning and go to the field and work hard all day, and then his health give
away. And Roy Stewart would come by to
go fox hunting, and he would help him finish his work so he could go fox
hunting with them. Roy Stewart’s daddy
was a farmer too. And him and my daddy
was as close as brothers. They sure
was. (laughing)…he was a fine man.” (Roy
Thompson Stewart married Aunt Ella Smith, grandmother’s younger sister next to
her in age. Roy Stewart’s father was
John Henry Stewart who married Susannah Miranda Cox (daughter of James William
Cox and Mary Elizabeth Mitchell – Granddaddy’s parents). Grandmother also told this: “Some
of the fox hunter’s families would come and spend the night and they rode in
the wagon, and they would spend the night because it was too far to go back
home at night. I don’t know...(she was trying to remember…) -- some
of them that fox-hunted and the family would come and spend the night.”
GRANDMOTHER: No, we
never did give any parties at home hardly.
But we went to parties. No
dancing. Just played games and made
candy, and that was about all you had to do.
Go to church, go to Sunday school.
And school. (and she told about
going to the county fair with her father).
(Nov 7, 1976 tape)
GRANDMOTHER: Mother
had a big old trunk and she always kept a little bottle of whiskey in there in
case of sickness, and locked it. Cause
if it was needed, doctors weren’t close by and it taken a while for someone to
get there. And Mother would make a
little toddy and give it until the doctor could get there,
(GRANDMOTHER -- describing her mother): My mother had light brown hair and blue
eyes. And I guess Grandma Sanders did
too.
“Charlie always had a fast horse. It was a traveling horse. We always liked to get on that old horse and
go to Select and get the mail. And get
the paper. About two miles. (Charlie was my grandmother’s oldest
brother).
I saved these pictures
Lynne Miller sent me because I heard my grandmother mention her church and the
family cemetery where all the Smiths and Sanders are buried (her parents and
grandparents – and some of her brothers and sisters. I visited it back in 1973.
Bald Knob
Church is where Grandmother went to church.
Next to it is the Brick House Burying Grounds, where Smith and Sanders
families are buried. It is about four
miles east of Beaver Dam, according to an obituary.
~.~
My grandmother mentioned their limbertwig tree with branches
that drooped down, willow-like” that hid their privy, located out a ways from
their grape arbor and garden. It produced medium to large apples, greenish or
light yellow with light red stripes, and was usually harvested in late fall. It
was an excellent keeper. Her mother made
delicious cider from those apples, as well as apple butter, jelly, and
wonderful apple cobblers and fried pies.
It was also good for just eating out of hand. Grandmother described how they buried their
apples in a bed of straw under a cone-shaped mound of dirt, for eating in the
wintertime. To keep them from freezing.
They could just open up a hole, reach their hand in there, and pull out
an apple to eat – or to take a bucketful to the house for cooking something.
In Kentucky the limbertwig tree is noted for its “weeping
growth” due to its thick and “limber” twigs, but are probably most prized for
their distinct and unique flavor. Some
old varieties came from the Cumberland mountains. It is a very special apple.
~.~
Tape recording dated March
7, 1977:
GRANDMOTHER - describing their smoke house:
“It was pretty wide, you know, that you could walk around;
that’s where my daddy smoked the meat, dig a hole right down in that dirt, and
smoke the hams and shoulders and meat.
Then we had syrup, molasses, they called it – it was ribbon cane syrup,
and then we would put that molasses, I’ll say, some called it syrup, in
barrels. And Charlie went out there…it
was so cold…he went out there to get some in a bucket, and it was so cold, it
wouldn’t run…you know was just running slow into the bucket, and he forgot
about it, and when he thought of it, the ground was just covered. He opened the spigot and forgot all about it,
and boy, he had molasses everywhere.
Well, I think they carried dirt and covered it up, and cleaned it up. I don’t remember exactly.”
“We
had about a one acre orchard. The first
barn was great big, and was pretty old.
When it fell in, they built a new barn with a driveway through it for
the wagons, and it had stalls on both sides and troughs fixed for each stall,
and a gate to go in and out and around the barn, and you open it and throw in
the corn in and it was fixed that way so the horses couldn’t kick you with
their heels when you went around to feed them.
The
barn had a loft without a banister, and Ellis walked off it one time. He and our cousin, George Taylor, had gone to
church and had come back by the barn.
The loft just had a ladder, and Ellis thought he was stepping down where
the ladder was, but in place of that, he just stepped off the loft into air.
It
knocked him unconscious, but George didn’t bring him to the house until he
revived. And it left a gray spot on his
head where his hair just turned grey.
They were young men at the time, old enough to be going with the girls.”
~.~
I read about the Ohio County fairs in the Ohio County News,
which reminded me of another story, and will mention it here because my
grandmother told a story about going to the fair with her daddy.
Fairs bring out the best in everybody. The annual county fair was a respite from
hard, hot work of summer, when everyone gathered for a few days of fun and to
show their prized projects and animals...even coon dogs. Those who took part in the friendly competitions
proudly brought handpicked, polished produce…their tastiest jams and
jellies…their creative crafts…and well-groomed animals.
I wish I had asked my grandmother whether or not they ever
entered animals or food in the fair competitions, but I didn’t. Those folks who came just to look around at
the local fair were rewarded with sights, sounds and scents that couldn’t be
found anywhere else…while enjoying some great outdoor eating, and meeting and
seeing relatives and friends from all over.
Everyone loved the horse races there.
Men had fox hounds and all kinds of homemade inventions for sale.
Rural folks gathered from all nearby counties to celebrate
the end of summer at the Ohio County fair.
Grandmother told me a neat story which I have on tape about riding to
the county fair with her father in the buggy.
She really wanted to go with her boyfriend, but she said her daddy
begged her to go with him, and she just hated to turn him down. She thought they would be eating his dust on
the way to the fair. As it turned out,
her daddy got ahead and her boyfriend rode his horse behind them. He had to eat all the dust their buggy
stirred up behind them.
~.~
Class in front of Bunker
Hill School in Ohio County, November 5, 1909. Photo by Schroeter,
contributed
to An Ohio River Portrait Collection by Carmen Kittinger. KHS Collections.
Bunker Hill School where I think my grandmother said the
Smith children went to school. One of my
Grandmother’s teachers was Birch Shields, who later married my granddaddy Cox’s
sister, Martha Evelyn Cox. She told
several stories about attending school and walking home from it with all their
friends until they came to a fork in the road and it was there they had “the
battle of Bunker Hill” as they called it, with all the boys trying to get the
girl’s bonnets or fascinators and throwing them up in the trees.
~.~
Tape Recording: Oct
10 1977 – Grandmother: “I
remember my grandmother’s good cooking better than anything. One time I spent the night. I stayed…and then I got to crying and I
wanted to go home. And I could hear them
all hollering over there at home and having a good time, and it was dark. I stayed one night and all day, and I was so
lonesome…and homesick. And there was a
big snow that night…up to your knees.
And I said I wanted to go home, and grandma said, “No, you can’t go
tonight…cause we have no phone, and you might fall.” Well, I just set into squalling. (Laughs.)
And it was after night, and she couldn’t do nothing with me. But I remember enough that she got a pair of
grandpa’s wool socks and pulled up over my shoes and fixed them where they
wouldn’t fall down, and she let me go.
And I come in, and Mother was so surprised. All of them.
They had the lights on… lamps… and they hadn’t eaten their supper…they
always ate late. And grandpa eat
early…about 4:30 in the wintertime. So I
had already had my supper. And I really
wanted to go home, and I was so happy when I got there. There wasn’t any wind blowing.”
~.~
GRANDMOTHER:
“I was just saying how close we were
when we’s children, you know…at home.
When the day’s work was done and supper was over, they had a table and
it usually, sat, you know, right in front of the fireplace. And one sat on one side and one sat on the
other. And us children all around in
chairs. And we would pop corn and we’d
make candy, and tell stories, and eat apples and have a good time.
We
didn’t do too much reading, I guess, because we were always talking. And if we were making candy and all… Of course, we talked.”
GRANDMOTHER: “And each one knew where their plate
was. My daddy and mother always sat at
the ends, like me and Retha are sitting now.
And Charlie would sit down at that end, I’ll say. And then Ellis sat down next to Ma. The boys sat on one side and the girls on the
other. I always got in there, right
close to Mother. I don’t care if they
had company, and I was little, they say I would always scrooch in there
somehow. Right by my mother. I’d always do that. I wanted to eat and I always got my plate and
got right by her.”
~.~
My grandmother, born in March 1889, was still telling her
life stories to me, even six months before her death. She had a wonderful recall and memory, and a
dry wit, coupled with a soft-spoken voice that had just a hint of a Kentucky brogue. She almost made it to her 100th birthday; she
was ill for about four months and died at the age of 99 years, eight months and
six days. She is buried in the family
plot of the Rose Hill Cemetery at Tyler, Smith County, Texas, only a few blocks
from my home.
~.~
~
Janice Cox Brown, Tyler, Texas
