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| Excerpts from an original manuscript of my Grandmother Claudia. Granny was born in April of 1909. She was the fourth child of fifteen. |
| My father was a sharecropper and most of my young life was spent on farms. We moved almost every year and he raised cotton and corn and always had a large vegetable garden. What vegetables we didn't use during the summer, were canned, preserved or dried for the winter. We would can as many as two hundred cans or more. When mama filled all the available jars, she would use half-gallon molasses buckets. She would press the lids as tight as they would go and then melt paraffin and pour it around the lid to seal it. We raised hogs and chickens and always had meat and eggs for the table. We kept at least two cows and always had milk and butter. My mother could knit, crochet, and sew. She made all our clothes except the men's overalls and pants. She made bonnets for all the girls to wear in the field. In the winter, she knitted gloves for us to wear in the field to keep us from blistering our hands. She knitted socks for my father and brothers. |
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| Our only heat was a fireplace in one room and a wood stove in the kitchen which was used for heating and cooking. We burned wood that my father went to the woods, cut, and hauled to the house. Mama would take the ashes from the fireplace and stove and put them in a hopper made by driving four posts in the ground and tying a sack to them. She would pour water in the ashes and catch the drippings to make lye soap. She made lye soap by putting lye, grease, and water in a washpot and boil it until it was thick. We used this soap to wash our clothes in big wooden tubs that were made by sawing barrels in half. We rubbed our clothes on a rub board and boiled them in a black washpot. She, also, had a battling stump and she would put the men's overalls on it and battle (pound) them with a battling stick, which was a long, flat, wooden paddle. We moved our battling stump every time we moved. Water had to be left in the tubs from one week to another to keep the tubs from drying and shrinking which would cause leaks. We had to draw water from a well and sometimes dipped the water from a spring. |
| Our only transportation was on foot or a two horse wagon. I never saw a car until I was nine years old. We walked to and from school and sometimes we walked as far as five miles. We had to leave before daylight and it would be almost dark before we got home in the afternoon. On Sunday, Pa would put hay in the wagon, spread a quilt over it, put two chairs in the front for he and mama to sit on and we would go to church with the children sitting on the quilt. We did all our work on the farm. Sometimes, we would still be picking cotton after it got to be cold weather. We would pick until almost night and then we would pick off the balls and put them in our cotton laps. We would sit by the fire at night, pick the cotton out and burn the burrs in the fireplace. We, also, shucked and shelled corn at night to take to the corn mill to grind for meal. We raised peanuts and we would shell and husk them. Mama ground them in the food chopper and made peanut butter. Mama had a sage bush that she dug up every time we moved. She picked off the green leaves. put them in the oven to dry, then crumble them in her dressing, sausage or any other food that needed to be seasoned. On long winter nights, we would sit by the fire and roast sweet and Irish potatoes in the hot coals in the fireplace and pop corn over the fire. **A personal note from this webmistress: My mother still grows her own sage bush from a piece of the above sage bush.** In the spring, the men would clean a new ground and cut small trees and bushes and pile them in piles. At night, we would go bird thrashing. We would get a lightwood torch and sticks and when the birds flew out, we killed them with the sticks. Then we would go home and clean the birds. Pa would fix forked sticks and we would roast them over the fire and eat them. In the summer, we picked blackberries which were canned and used to make jelly and jam. In the fall, we rambled through the woods and gathered muscadines, hickory nuts, black haws, wild grapes, huckle- berries, chinquapins, chestnuts, walnuts and many other nuts and berries. We ate everything that was edible. |
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