History

My mom was raised on a farm that has been in her family since Civil War times.  She and her brother still own that farm.  By the time I came along, my grandparents lived on the farm in a house that was built in the 20s.  My grandfather was the youngest of eight children (I think).  My mom completed the family tree for the family in 1987.  After receiving her copy of the family tree, one of my grandfather’s nieces, by then an old woman, wrote this letter to my mom about her memories as a grandchild coming to her grandparents’ homeplace.  This house was on the same land where my mother grew up, although a newer house had been built in the 1920s.  The wood lot in the letter is the same one I played in when I was a child over 50 years later.  This kind of information is fascinating to me.  If I could write historical fiction, it would be bridging from family history like this.  But that will never happen.  Below are excerpts of that letter.

Dear _______.

The picture I have sent to you is the only one I have seen of the family.  You keep it and show it to the girls.  I have arthritis so bad in my feet and hands.  I do not care for such as this as I once did.

If we were together sometime I could tell you about the homeplace and the large wood lot.  The house was east of the house where your mother lives.  And a large wood lot between it and the road.  Maybe you have seen the old house.  There was a large pond in the south end of it and during the fall all the neighbors would take their hogs on the same day to the pen and kill them.  Make a scaffold and a fire and cut and dress them at the pond.  Had large vats to put them in hot water.

After the hogs were dressed and pieces cut off, the children had to turn the sausage mill as the women made sausage sacks and stuffed the sausage in the sacks.  Clean the heads and cook them in large black wash kettles.  Run them through the mill where the sausage was ground then pressed in large pans with large tops are pressed down.  That was how they made the souse.  The next day all the fat pieces of meat were cut, clean and put in a kettle and the children all had to stand by the large black kettles and keep the fire built up and the pieces of meat cooked.  Then the pieces were dipped out of the lard.  These were the cracklins used in making corn bread.  The lard was taken from the kettles and put in large lard stands.

The most fun the grandchildren had was the time of year when all of us had to go to the pasture north of the house where they had raised geese and chase them until every one of us had caught one each.,  We would take them to the buggy house (the garage today) where all the women would pick the feathers to make pillows and feathers beds.  That was used instead of mattresses.  

Uncle Onice [my grandfather] was the only child [an unmarried adult] at home and got all kinds of toys, tops, and other things for all of us to play with when we were there.  He enjoyed playing with them too.

When the wheat was ready to cut and thrashed in the wood lot by the pond, there would be a large pile of wheat straw left in the woods by the large pond.  All the women would work together and make new straw beds to use for the mattresses.  Under the feather beds, we got new mattresses each year when wheat was thrashed.

All the children in the neighborhood went to Tatumville to school.  The building was north of the church.  Elsie had a buggy and Ole Red.  She picked Vada, Parker and myself up and we rode to school with her.  The school was a 2 year high school.

Elsie and Babe got married and left school.  That left the three of us the last ones north of the school.

Pops started driving two mules to his wagon and taking us to school.  On the way down there was children standing out in front of their house waiting for the wagon.  When school was out in the afternoon, Pops was waiting in the wagon for all the crowd to crawl in.  When time came for him to go to work in the field, we all had to walk.  We took our lunch with us in a tin molasses bucket.

One day we had had a hard rain on top of frozen ground and the road was getting soft in places.  One morning Parker was leading the way and stepped in a soft place and went under to his knees.  It took all of us to pull him out.  Nada and I had to go back home with him after we had scrapped all the mud off that we could.

I was in 5th grade and Pops heard they were going to give exams in Newbern for a new rural mail carrier.  He said for fun he though he would go to town and take the exam.  It shocked him when he was notified he make the highest grade.

He sold his house and farm, traded his mules for two pretty horses, his wagon for a buggy and we moved to Newbern.

Fifty years later, I had my own “Uncle Onice” to play with at that same farm.  My Uncle John (who was Onice’s son) was not married when we were little and played tag, Old Maids, Authors, and Monopoly with us.  He chased us, and made us popcorn.  I got to ride on the tractor and the combine.  History does repeat itself, and probably much more than we realize.