Elba's flowing wells a thing of the past

This is the "new" fountain on the southeast corner of the Elba town square where the county courthouse is located. It's a far cry from the old flowing well that I remember as a child.

The old fountain was not in the center, but water bubbled out of cement posts and you just leaned over and got a drink of awful tasting water. I wonder what was in it that made it taste so bad. There was a small pond in the center with big gold fish swimming among the algae and water lilies. I think this is where I first saw gold fish. I remember thinking how beautiful they were. I think there was a wire fence and some shrubbery around the area. There were other flowing wells in Elba including one near the railroad track in New Town by Uncle Drayden Smith's store (Smith Brothers). I don't know what happened to all of the flowing wells.

A lot of school club initiations included something taking place at the flowing well downtown. I remember we had to do something in the Beta Club at night that involved going to the flowing well. It was spooky there at night. Maybe someday I can locate a photo of the old flowing well and add to this blog. I can probably find one in old school annuals at the library.

Blue Bell - best ice cream in the world

On our way home from Austin, TX recently we stopped by the original Blue Bell ice cream plant in Brenham, TX for a tour and sampling.


The first time we ever had Blue Bell ice cream was in the 80's when we were visiting Ron and family in Tyler, TX. I thought it was the best ice cream I had ever tasted. I had banana pudding and Jim ate homemade vanilla. You could only buy Blue Bell in an area in southeast Texas. People would purchase ice cream and take it home with them on the airplane, packed in dry ice (it was definitely worth it). Today you can have 2 half-gal. cartons shipped to us for $99. And people love it so much they will order it for special occasions. We have a plant in Ala. and can find it in most grocery stores in our area.


I'm standing by the original refrigerated truck used to deliver ice cream to the stores nearby. In 2007 Blue Bell celebrated 100 years and had a special ice cream for the century of service, "Century Cordial". It is like an ice cream sundae. I sampled some on our tour. At the end of the tour you can stop at the country store in the building and sample any of the flavors posted that day. I copied the list of flavors below from the website.
Homemade vanilla is our favorite.

List of Year Round Flavors: Banana Split, Buttered Pecan, Chocolate Chip, Cookies 'n Cream, Dutch Chocolate, French Vanilla, Homemade Vanilla, Milk Chocolate, Mint Chocolate Chip, Moo-llennium Crunch, Natural Vanilla Bean, Orange Swirl, Pecan Pralines 'n Cream, Rocky Road, Strawberry, Strawberries & Homemade Vanilla, The Great DivideList of Current Seasonal Flavors: Banana Pudding, Birthday Cake, Buttered Almond, Caramel Sundae Crunch, Caramel Turtle Fudge, Century Sundae, Cherry Vanilla, Chocolate Almond Marshmallow, Chocolate Brownie Overload, Chocolate Covered Cherries, Chocolate Covered Strawberries, Coffee, Fudge Brownie Nut, Hot Chocolate, Hot Fudge Sundae, Key Lime Pie, Lemon Ice Box Pie, Mango, Mocha Almond Fudge, Peaches & Homemade Vanilla, Peppermint, Pistachio Almond, Strawberry Cheesecake, Tin Roof, Triple Chocolate, Ultimate Neapolitan, White Chocolate Almond


This is a statue of the little girl and the cow that was created in the 1970's as a trademark for Blue Bell ice cream.

Fredericksburg, TX - a German settlement

On our way to the Texas hill country and the Frio River last week-end, we stopped over in the town of Fredericksburg which was founded in 1846 by German settlers. Over 150 years later their influence is still evident throughout Fredericksburg. The buildings with the two story balconies and the Victorian gingerbread, the German fachwerk, and the older log buildings scattered throughout Fredericksburg remind us of the German settlers. The beautiful Fredericksburg churches with their massive steeples are a sight to behold. Main street reminded me of a minature Gatlinburg atmosphere. Jim and our son Ron toured Admiral Nimitz museum . Nimitz was a native of Fredericksburg and served in the Pacific during WWII.

While they were at the museum, James and I had fun shopping at the stores on Main Street. We saw these tiny wooden snowmen in the window of an antique shop. I took this picture to bring home to our friend Ralph to see if he could make some. James enjoyed the Christmas shop and we got some old baseball cards at another place. We sat in a German biergarten and had an ice cold coke and listened to the "om pah" German band.

Before leaving Fredericksburg, we went to an herb farm at the edge of town. The farm covers several acres. A garden house and restaurant separates the buildings from the farm. My friend Elsie wanted me to go check out this herb business. She had heard of the place and wanted me to see it and tell her all about it. I was surprised at how clean the area was. Lots of paths among the herb beds.

Trade Days site (open every 3rd weekend of the month). Had some good food at one of the little cafes and enjoyed seeing the various things people take to sell. Didn't buy anything. Just looked. I can't believe the things people take to flea markets to sell!

Good to be back home again!

This beautiful photo is the Frio River flowing down a canyon at Concan, TX in the hill country.

We spent last weekend there at Neil's lodges. The cabin we stayed in was located on a cliff overlooking the river. Our son Ron and his family spend a week every summer here and wanted us to go see the Frio.

On our way to the Frio, we traveled thru the Texas Hill Country and stopped at the LBJ ranch and Fredericksburg, an old German settlement.

The area is very rocky and lots of pretty cypress trees along the river bank. The water was clear and cold.

Jim is outside the cabin we stayed in which was on top of a cliff. The cement picnic tables are used for the bird watching groups that come there in the spring.

My sister Carolyn and her husband Dave from Black Mountain, NC were here at this same spot last April on a bird watching trip.

Inside our cabin in the kitchen. James is watching Liz as she talks to her dog Luna.

The cabin was very rustic with nice Mexican tiles on the floor. It was cold at night and we built a fire outdoors and sat around it and enjoyed the star studded sky.

Lizzie, Ron and Ally standing outside our cabin with the river deep down in the gorge. It was a long way down there. Liz is a student at Univ. of Texas in Austin and Ally attends North Texas University at Denton, TX. We were happy to spend the week-end with all of them.

Heading out West to Texas

I will be taking a break from posting daily entries on my blog. We are heading out to Austin, TX to visit our son Ronnie and family for a few days. Ronnie is our oldest son and he and his wife Cindy have two daughters, Liz at Univ. of Texas and Allison at North Texas State University . They will both be home for the weekend and we are spending 2 nights at the Frio River at a lodge near Concan, TX. They go there every summer for a week of tubing on the river and want to take us there to see the area. That should be fun. We have seen the sights in Austin since we've been there several times so this trip will be just to spend time with our family.

Texas Gilmers are the last 4 on the back row. Nov 2006 at our son James (red shirt in front) 50th birthday. Our youngest son Bill is behind James and the other 3 girls belong to him. And then there's Jim and me. This is our entire family. We don't get together at the same time very often.

Bird watching

I love to hear birds singing, especially the mocking bird. We have lots of these birds in your yard and I find nests in the low shrubs, the pomgrante bush, the rose bushes, and in the grape vines. The mocking bird is easy to identify with its white markings on its wings and the skinny black legs. I do not get credit for this photo which shows the markings that helps one identify this songster.


Mocking birds sing any time of the day or night, and at times you aren't too happy to hear them singing like at 4 a.m. outside your bedroom window! I'll never forget the mocking bird that sang all afternoon outside my daddy's bedroom window the afternoon he was dying from cancer. He kept hearing the bird and thought it was beautiful. That bird stayed in the grape vine all afternoon and sang until my dad died late that night. It was eerie!


My mother loved birds too. When I was 5, Christine was 3 and Sue was a baby, we would accompany mother to the cowpen each evening and sit on the grass while she milked the cow. We walked down a sandy lane with trees and bushes on each side to get to the cowpen in the woods. Mother would see birds building nests and as soon as there were eggs in the nest, she would lift us up to see the speckled eggs, and told us to never touch them or the mother bird would not return to hatch them. Then we watched every day to see if the birds had hatched. Then one day they would start breaking out of the shells and were fuzzy little things and their eyes would be closed and they had no feathers yet. Then one day we stopped and mother told us to be very quiet and she would show us how the mother bird fed her babies. The mother bird eats and the regurgitates the food into the mouths of her babies. Mother ate some berries, and put some on her finger and dropped in into the open beaks of the baby birds and they enjoyed eating the blackberries. As she neared the nest they could hear the movement and would start making noises and opened their mouths. I found a photo to show exactly what we saw.


We have a birdbath in a flower bed in the back yard and this summer when we had a drought and it was so hot, we enjoyed watching the birds taking baths in our birdbath. Before we moved to town in 2003, we enjoyed redwing blackbirds (they used to chase the crows), kingfishers, herons, swallows, wrens, quail (we called them Bob Whites), and a variety of owls, as well as the noisy jay birds with the tall combs on their heads.


It was fun watching the mother bird teaching the littles one to fly, often pushing them out of the nest. They would land on the soft ground and were so helpless. After a lot of struggling they would eventually lift their wings and take off, with the mother bird in the background protecting them.

We saw a lot of quail on our farm and they look like little brown chickens. Daddy would bring home quail eggs if the bird had a nest on the ground where he was plowing and would have to destroy the nest. Mother would boil the tiny eggs and we would eat them.

Where we live now once was a wide open field and we have a large variety of birds. My favorite are the pretty bluebirds with bright red breasts. Our bluebird houses were filled this spring and summer. We have a variety of birds migrating through in the spring and summer. But the robins and mockingbirds are with us most all year long. We enjoyed a lot of brown thrashers this year and had to get out the bird book to identify them. I had not seen them here before this year.


Bird watching is a great sport and you can find such a variety at any time of the year, anywhere in the world.

Peanut Picking Time

Peanut stacks in the field

It's hot, dry and very dusty and a lot of the dust is from farmers picking peanuts in this area. It brings back memories when I see the tractors in the field loading peanuts into the big trucks and dust so thick you can hardly see the equipment.

Peanut picking takes place in the fall when the peanuts are mature and ready to be plowed up and today they are mechanically picked and taken to the peanut warehouse to be dried. The peanut picking machine came along after I grew up and left home in the 1950's. I will explain how we harvested peanuts on our farm before modern times.

But I have to tell you that before the peanuts were harvested, we could pull up a few vines, pick the raw peanuts off the vines and boil them in a big black wash pot outdoors. A fire would be built under the pot to boil the peanuts. We would add a lot of table salt to the water to make the boiled peanuts salty to taste. Young people would be invited to a home for a peanut boiling and play party games while they waited for the peanuts to boil (cook). Peanut boilings were very popular in the 1940's and 1950's. Now people go to the grocery store and buy raw peanuts which are ready to be boiled. I think that's cheatin' a bit!  Or better yet, they stop at a roadside stand and buy "boiled peanuts".

Let me begin at the beginning. Daddy would always save a basket of raw peanuts when he gathered them and in the winter, we would have peanut shellings. Families would get together and shell the peanuts and they would be packed away to be planted in March. This is where they got their seed. The peanuts were put into a planter and either planted with mules or later by using a tractor. Some fertilizer was included in the planter with the peanuts. It was the children's job to load the seed peanuts and fertilizer in the planters when they became empty. And to furnish the person doing the planting with water to drink. I always liked planting time because it was warm enough to go barefoot and walk in the soft plowed dirt. During our spare time we would build "frog houses" in the dirt and decorate them. More about games we played in the field in another blog. Maybe I'll build a frog house and take a photo of it so you can see what I am talking about. When the dirt was "broken" or plowed prior to being planted, and after a good rain, we would remove our shoes and go "bogging" to see who could make the largest holes in the ground. I can still feel the dirt squeezing between my toes. What fun!!

Once the peanuts started coming up and filling the rows with little green bushes, the weeds would also start coming up among them. We had to go to the field and "hoe" the peanuts, which meant digging up the grass and weeds and try not to dig up the young peanuts. I really didn't care for this part of the peanut farming. This usually took place in hot weather, June and July.

We would go to the field early in the morning after having had a big country breakfast. But by 10 AM, it would be so hot and humid. We would stop to have lunch at noon and rest a bit under the big pecan trees before heading back to the field around 1 PM. And we would work until the sun went down. We didn't have to work on Saturday or Sunday. Our friends liked to work on our farm with us because my dad would bring us cold drinks from the store and maybe a moon pie or candy bar. And at the end of the hoeing season, he would take us to Pond Creek to go swimming. He knew how to get us to work. We didn't receive any money for working as kids do today. And if he grew cotton, we had to chop the excess cotton plants and hoe the weeds just as we did for the peanuts. I'm glad he wasn't much of a cotton farmer. He preferred peanuts.

Ah, peanut picking time. A large plow was used to lift the peanuts out of the ground, with all the peanuts hanging underneath the vine. The peanuts were covered with soft dirt. The family got involved again and this time we walked behind the plow, lifted the peanut vines (little bushes) and shook the dirt off the peanuts, leaving the peanuts exposed to the sun. You can only imagine what a dirty job that was. Once the peanuts were shook, the men came to the field with a wagon load of poles and slats, and dug holes in the ground, put a tall pole in the hole and filled it with dirt, and then nailed two boards near the botton of the pole with the boards crossing near the pole, like an "x". Then the peanut vines were picked up with pitch forks and placed high on the poles like in the photo at the top of this page. The children would drag the peanuts to the poles for the workers to stack them. We were not allowed to use the dangerous pitch forks.

Once the peanuts were stacked and dried for about 4 weeks, they were ready to be picked. My daddy had the only peanut picker in the area and he kept busy for many weeks, picking his and most of his neighbor's peanuts. The peanuts were separated from the vines as they passed through the picker. The dried sweet vines were baled into square bales with a baling machine that was behind the picker. This hay was taken to the barn to fed to livestock during the winter.

Peanut picking took place in late September and there was always the danger of tropical storms and gales (that's what they called hurricanes back then). Neighbors helped each other and worked day and night if they thought there was going to be bad weather. We didn't have weather radios, TV or any way except the newspaper to know about weather.

After the peanuts were separated from the vines (picked), they were gathered in big tubs and then poured in the back of my daddy's big red truck, and taken to the warehouse to sell. He put the money in the bank and this was what we lived on until the next fall. He found lots of odd jobs to do throughout the year, including lots of bartering.

I have a great respect for peanut farmers and really appreciate peanut butter much more than those who have no idea all that goes into getting it in the grocery store. Of course we made our own peanut butter and peanut brittle.

If you want to learn more about picking peanuts, go to this link, to page 4. I found the photo used above of stacked peanuts on page 2 of this website: www.rootsweb.com/~ncbertie/peanut.htm