Early Memories in Rural Coffee Co (continued) - Part 2

This is the 2nd part of the Early Memories of Mrs. Averett from Enterprise, AL:


DINNERTIME
In Alabama back then, dinnertime was at noon. Mama went to the garden early in the morning and would have those vegetables in the iron pots, socked down next to the fire in the wood stove boiling away until about 11:30. Then, she would put on the hoe cake bread before going out and ringing the big dinner bell hoisted on top of a high pole to call Papa in from the field.


Now, Papa took out time at least until one o'clock, to eat dinner and to let the mules eat also.
As soon as he ate, he got his daily newspaper or his weekly papers, the Southern Star, or his
Progressive Farmer,  and read awhile before going back to the fields.


FAMILY CHORES
Everybody in the family had chores. Mama had eczema on her hands and didn't need to have
them in water too much so the daughters took over. Two daughters washed and dried the dishes, twodaughters milked the cows, two more cooked the bread for supper and set the table. In the morning, each of the girls made up beds, swept the floors with the broom-straw brooms, being sure to sweep under the beds. If there was a new baby, one girl rocked the baby in the cradle. That was one chore I really hated. When 1had to rock the baby, I would lie down on the floor and rock the cradle with my foot. Another chore I hated was churning. Papa always kept two or three good milk cows. In the summer, the milk was put into a large container and let down into the open water well to keep it cool. At other times, the milk would be placed into large pans and put into the kitchen safe with screen doors. By noon, the cream would have risen to the top and it was then skimmed off. Mama and Papa drank the
skimmed milk. The cream and the remaining milk were mixed with the warm night's milk and placed in the large churn and left overnight to clabber. If it was cold weather, the chum of milk was placed near the fireplace to make the milk sour quicker. The next day, the clabbered milk was churned by a dasher on a chum stick stuck through a hole in the chum lid. My arm would get so tired going up and down, up and down, but the reward was the good buttermilk which we children enjoyed every meal.  We mashed up the good yellow butter in syrup to eat with Mama's hot biscuits at breakfast.


One happy day, this churning chore came to and end. One of Papa's cousins from Enterprise
carne-and sold Papa on the idea of buying an electric plant. The plant was a gasoline-operated dynamo which produced electricity. The electricity was stored in large batteries which we kept in a specially built little house in the back yard. Then we had electric lights in every room in the house, one line hanging down from the ceiling with a light bulb turned on and offby hand. But the great news was the Papa bought an electric chum with metal dashers that went up and down.


HOME CONVENIENCES
We had an open well with a windlass and rope to let the bucket down into the well. The
windlass had a crank which unwound the rope as the bucket went down. We carried the water to the house in buckets. On the front porch, there was a shelf on which we kept the water bucket with a dipper in it. Everyone who wanted a drink used the same dipper. That shelf had a hole in it for the washbowl to sit so it would be steady when we washed. Nobody would even think of going in to eat without washing our face and hands. There was a flour sack towel hanging near the basin for drying. For the kitchen, we had a metal wash pan for the same king of washing, but at least once a week, usually on Saturday, we got our all-over bath in a wash tub. Every night, no one dared to go to bed without washing our feet.


As for an indoor toilet, the only one we had ever seen was once when we visited Grandpa and
Grandma Byrd in Ozark. They had one. We flushed that thing until I know Grandpa's water bill went sky high. Then rented that house from the Holmans, and in later years, one of the Holman sons told me a funny story about when they put the toilet in. When the plumbers came to the house to install the  commode, Grandma Byrd called Grandpa in town and said, "Curtis, come home. They are fixing to put the toilet in the house." It was a big event. Out at our house, we had what we called a "backy." I never knew why, but it must have been because it was so far back of the house we lived in. Inside the backy, we kept the Sears catalog and not for making an order or looking at the pictures. Sometimes, Mama put in a bag filled with small soft pieces of rags and a box of cobs from the com crib after Papa had shelled some com to take to the mill. Cobs that had been left in the trough when the mules had eaten the com were hard, but the shelled com cobs were soft.

ANIMAL FEED
Papa always had a good supply of corn in the com crib to be used for food for the family and
for the animals. He had a hand com sheller which was used to shell a large bag of com to be carried to Thrower's Mill for grinding into com meal. The mill was operated by water from a mill pond which turned the big rocks that crushed the com. The miller was never paid with cash but was given a toll of the meal for the grinding.


For cow feed, Papa carried com, hay, and velvet beans to a crusher and had it ground up
together. For the chickens, a bucketful of shelled com was thrown out and scattered over the chicken yard every evening. For the dogs, Papa made up two thick hoe cakes of com bread and cooked it on the back burners of the wood stove while Mama cooked breakfast. Then, he broke the bread into pieces and placed it into a large pan of buttermilk. His dogs, never, never got a store-bought meal. The cats ate the leftovers from the table.


PASTIMES
Papa always kept several fox hounds. He also kept Henry Steagall's dogs for him while the
representative was in Washington. When Congressman Steagall came home to Ozark, he and Papa went fox hunting with other friends. I went with Papa one night to fox hunt, but I could never become excited over hearing the dogs barking out there. One time was enough for me.
Mama enjoyed fishing in the creeks and branches close to our house. She had her own worm
bed and she had a catalpa tree which produced nice green fat worms that bream couldn't resist. She made a cushion to sit on at the fishing hole. It was a large croker sack filled with shucks and it served its purpose. It kept her seat dry. You talk about patience! She might sit there waiting for a bite for half a day and come home with three or four little perch or catfish. 


But, it was free and she thought it was good recreation. Every member of the family had some form of recreation. For the teenagers, we often planned parties either in our house or in homes of our friends. At these parties, we played parlor games like musical chairs. What we would do is line up two rows of chairs back to back and everyone marched around the chairs single file while music was played on the Victrola or the organ. When the music
stopped, everyone tried to sit down but there was one who couldn't find a chair, and that person was "out." Another chair was removed and this went on until there were only two left and one chair.


Then, we sometimes had a candy-drawing. Several boxes of stick candy of different colors were placed into a large box with a hole in the top. A boy and a girl would each put a hand through the hold and draw out a stick of candy. If the two sticks were alike, they could draw again until they drew two sticks of different colors. Then, another couple could draw.


During the winter months, we sometimes attended peanut shellings. The farmers had to have
their peanuts shelled by hand. Couples would shell peanuts from a large pan which they held together. After the work was finished, we would have a candy drawing, or cake and ice cream might be served. 


Sometimes, we played "hide and whoop," a game the city children called "hide and seek." One
child was the hunter. The child would close his eyes and wait until a "whoop" was heard. That meant that everyone was hidden. The first one found had to the hunter the next time.


To be continued....

Life in the 1930s in rural Alabama

The information I am using for the next few days is from the Memoirs of Enterprise (AL) native Tera Averett's early life.  It would have been the same for my mother and my early years.  I am putting it in my blog since I found it accurately describes life in rural Coffee Co (AL) for most families.

I will break it down over a period of several days so it won't take up so much space each day.
Here are the "chapters" of Tera Averett's memories: Not so Plain Food; Dinnertime; Family Chores; Animal Feed; Pastimes; Sunday Meeting; Teaching.
I am not including the part about teaching since neither my mother nor I were teachers. (I did teach middle school for one year in 1989-90 and then in the summer of 1990 we moved from SC to GA and I ended my teaching career.)

Memoir of Tera Averett's Early Life

edited by Georgia Fleming

 “NOT SO PLAIN FOOD.

During my childhood, all eight of us girls would gather around the dining table with Papa and

Mama three times a day for a big meal. At breakfast, there were always large, fluffy buttermilk biscuits baked in the. large wood-burning stove. There was bacon or juicy home-grown ham that had been smoked and dried by hanging in the smokehouse, plenty of brown-eye gravy, and sometimes sausage patties or stuffed sausage. Then, there was always one of the following: syrup made from sugar cane we grew and made ready for eating at a neighbor's cane mill, jelly made from blackberries we picked from the rail fence on the farm, honey from our bee hives which were robbed every May 20 and June 10 by papa, or fig 'preserves made by Mama with figs given to us by Grandmother Waters or neighbors .

Occasionally, there was a large bowl of softly scrambled eggs, fresh from the chicken yard. My

mother kept a-large flock of Rhode Island Red hens and one or two roosters. On special occasions and on Sunday mornings, we had fried chicken or fried steak from our own beef calves. When we sat down at the table, Papa sat on one side near the middle of the long table with my mother on his left. The oldest daughter sat on his right. One daughter sat at each end, and the other five daughters sat across the table on a long, handmade bench. My father served the plates and for refills, the children would pass theirplates to Papa and say, "thank you for some bread" Or whatever we wanted. Polite conversation was allowed, but never any loud boisterous misbehavior. If we got too tickled about something, we would excuse ourselves and leave the table.

At lunch, or dinner as we called it, my mother served vegetables grown in the garden the year

around. We had black-eyed peas, purple hull peas, snap beans, butterbeans which grew on the wire fence around the garden, collards, cabbage, onions, beets, tomatoes, squash, pepper, cucumbers, English peas, and turnips.

One part of the garden was set apart for strawberries grown in wide beds. The chore I hated

worse than any other was pulling weeds from the strawberry patch in the summer. But when my mother cooked one of her delicious two-tiered strawberry shortcakes smothered with those crushed berries, I soon forgot the hot summer job I had getting up all that grass.

In another comer of the garden there were hills of sweet potatoes which were covered with

teepees made of corns talks or boards covered with mounds of garden soil. Inside of the teepees, the potatoes were covered with pine straw. We grew two kinds of pears: Keifer pears were used for pear preserves, and Bartlett pears were good to eat off the tree. We also had peach trees and my mother made peach pickles and also canned some. At one time, Papa built a large canner and canned fruits and vegetables in tin cans for us and for neighbors.

We had several pecan trees and visited hickory trees, chestnut trees, and chinquapin trees for

additional treats. We had a large scuppernong vine also, but nobody was allowed to put a finger on the scuppernongs until they had turned brown.

My father and all his girls had a "sweet tooth" and we always had desserts for both dinner and

supper. Dinner was the noon meal. We would have stack cakes filled with caramel or chocolate or

coconut or lemon cheese. We had peppermint candy and jelly cakes and pound cakes made from

homemade butter. We had fruit cake or sponge cake at Christmas time and Thanksgiving. My mother served peach cobbler, syrup custard, egg custard, potato custard, and potato pudding. Even when we went to school, we carried two lunch buckets. One contained the meat, biscuits, and sweet potatoes, and the other bucket contained the desserts. We had never heard of a sandwich. For supper, we ate some of the vegetables and meats left from dinner, but we always had hot cornbread. We called the cornbread hoe cake and it was made from cornmeal, salt, and water, baked in a flat bread baker on top of the wood stove.

In the 1920s, we bought a Model T Ford and many times on a Saturday night, we had homemade ice cream. Papa would buy a 10-pound block of ice and bring it home on the running board of the car. When he got home, he would place the ice in the shade on the ground and put a #2 washtub over the top until we were ready to crank the hand freezer. Sometimes, the whole community would have an ice cream supper. The ladies would bring home-baked cakes and the men turned the freezers to make the Ice cream.

One special food Mama cooked for our family was hominy. She picked the best, firm ears of com from the com crib, shelled off the small grains, and put the big grains in the big iron wash pot. In the first boiling, she put lye in the water and coiled the com until the eye of the grains came off. Then came the many washings of the grains to remove the lye. When she prepared the hominy for serving, she fried it in a little lard with salt and water.

To be continued...

Plant a Tree and Watch it Grow

Tuskeegee crepe myrtle in front
Overcup Oak in back

Today we spent the morning pruning limbs from trees we planted in 2004 - just 7 years ago.  You can see the crepe myrtle in front.  Behind the crepe myrtle is the big overcup oak.

There are about a dozen other trees this size on the west side of our house, all planted in 2004 and most were small seedlings. They are all big trees now.

The bottom photo of limbs was taken after we removed bottom limbs from some of the trees so Jim could ride underneath on the riding lawn mower.  When we planted these trees, most were shorter than 5' and now I can stand under them and I am over 5' tall.  They have grown so fast in our poor, hard clay dirt soil.  We'll probably have to start raking leaves this fall since they all have so many leaves this year and are getting  big.

Times Remembered: Attend a Class Reunion

Today I read in our local newspaper, The Elba Clipper, of at least 6 high school classes planning class reunions for the weekend of Sept. 30th, Homecoming at Elba High School.

I graduated 59 years ago.  The average age of the graduates being 18, means most of our classmates are 77 years old this year.  That's really getting old!!!  I can remember when I thought 60 was very, very old....

I can't even do many  things I could do at age 69.  I can still walk 30 minutes early every morning and stay up past 10 pm at night, altho I do wake up around 5:30 a.m. every morning - ready to get up and get going.
I still have good vision and I can hear well.   I really count myself lucky when I see the condition some of my classmates are in.  And I still have my husband, who is also in good health.

Today we talked about our classmates, and I asked Jim if would mind if I invited my classmates to our home on the afternoon of Homecoming, after the parade, for dinner and then all go to the football game as a group.
He agreed that this would be a  nice thing to do.  I got out my list of classmates, marked off a few more who are deceased (now 23), and made notes of those unable to travel, etc. and my list kept getting shorter and shorter.  It makes me sad that so many will be not be physically able to come to our gathering.

We MUST have a reunion this year.  Probably not everybody feels the same as I do about keeping in touch and could  care less about getting together.  I'm going to have to come up with some novel ideas to create an interest in getting them together.  We don't need a country club dinner with a bar, or a dance band, or a cruise, or big barbecue, etc.  -   just a simple hamburger cookout and some good, sweet iced tea.  And maybe a good pound cake for dessert.  It all sounds so simple and I intend to make this work.   Check my Blog in October and see if we had a reunion on Sept. 30!!!

The last "fruits" of summer

Today I gathered most of the remaining hot pepper in our garden to make pepper jelly.  It's so good spread over cream cheese and eaten with crackers.  Sometimes I use green food coloring if all the peppers are green. Using red peppers will make the jelly turn red.  You make it just as you make jelly from fruit.  You use Sure-Jell to make sure the jelly gets solid like other jellies.

Back to School - Then and Now

I always think about how we prepared for back to school when I was growing up in the 1940s and early 1950s.  It's much different from today of course.

To begin with - buying school clothes.
I remember having one new outfit to start back to school.  Usually mother made it, taking apart dresses given to her by her younger sister in Washington, DC and her friend (she in turn sent them bags of farm produce ie, peanuts, pecans, and in cold weather other non-perishable items).  In this photo I am wearing a dark green wool silk with white satin blouse (made from my Aunt Nellie Faye's old suit).  I remember that mother curled my long red hair which I usually wore in pig tails.  We were told to "dress up" for the group photo and I did.
Click to enlarge photo

Look at the clothes in this photo of my classmates at Curtis, our country school.  Most of the boys wore blue denim overalls.  They mostly had one jacket or sweater and wore it every day.  I look at these photos and can recall many of the jackets.  Most popular were wool plaid ones.  I doubt that any of them had fashion labels sewn in them.  And shoes...  mostly they wore high top "brogans" because they lived on a farm and were outdoors helping with chores before and after school.  The basketball players usually had a new pair of black high top tennis shoes.

Penny Loafer

I remember a new pair of shoes I had in the 8th grade - brown and white saddle oxfords and the next year I saved my money from picking cotton and bought a pair of brown penny loafers.  You inserted a penny in the band across the top of the shoe.  I would remove the penny and shine it when I polished my shoes with either wax or liquid shoe polish.  I'm not sure you can even buy shoe polish these days.

Girls could not wear pants to school until I was in the 9th grade.  We had one pair of blue jeans and the girls would get together and decide what day we would wear our jeans to school.  Boys mostly wore blue jeans after the got to Jr High and white t-shirts (no graphics).

This is all about shopping for school clothes.  Now for supplies.  My dad went to Grimes General Store and picked up notebook paper and tablets, pencils, etc. for us.    We had to buy our books back then and usually you could buy used books from someone the year before.  No internet or even a school library so we pretty much learned all we knew from reading the textbooks.  We had Weekly Readers that we got current news from (nobody had a tv back then).  I remember reading that there were over 52 million people in the US back then from reading in the Weekly Reader.  I wondered where all those people lived??

Over the years we have helped our granddaughters with their school supply list, and shopping for clothes.  This could  be a pretty big bill if you have more than one child.

there is Nothing Like a Dame!

Recently I received my membership certificate to be a member of the National Society of the Dames of the Magna Charta.     (Click to enlarge)


My sister Christine Knudson did all of the research and shared it with me so I could complete my application. She and her daughter Joann Handler also became "Dames".


OK, what does this mean?  It means one of our Cole ancestors who living in 1215 actually signed the Magna Charta document.


Go to this website and read an interesting article by Jeanette Saddler Taylor that was broadcast in June 2008.
It is very informative as well as amusing.   http://www.mchron.net/ee/radio/celebrating_magna_charta_day/

My hand-painted, large certificate arrived in the mail yesterday, inside a big cardboard tube.  Had to place heavy books on it overnight to flatten it some.  I will frame it this week, and hang it along side my DAR certificate on the den wall.

I am going to order a book from Amazon: 1215: The Year of Magna Carta    Here is a description of the book .  Can't wait to read it. 

"Surveying a broad landscape through a narrow lens, 1215 sweeps readers back eight centuries in an absorbing portrait of life during a time of global upheaval, the ripples of which can still be felt today. At the center of this fascinating period is the document that has become the root of modern freedom: the Magna Carta. It was a time of political revolution and domestic change that saw the Crusades, Richard the Lionheart, King John, and -- in legend -- Robin Hood all make their marks on history.

The events leading up to King John's setting his seal to the famous document at Runnymede in June 1215 form this rich and riveting narrative that vividly describes everyday life from castle to countryside, from school to church, and from hunting in the forest to trial by ordeal. For instance, women wore no underwear (though men did), the average temperatures were actually higher than they are now, and the austere kitchen at Westminster Abbey allowed each monk two pounds of meat and a gallon of ale per day. Broad in scope and rich in detail, 1215 ingeniously illuminates what may have been the most important year of our history."