The Foxfire 45th Anniversary Book

by Inc. The Foxfire Fund

  I moved to Cullowhee in January, when I was eleven years old. I thought it was the most lonely, forlorn place I think I have ever been to. It was blowing snow, and it was just a very bleak place, I thought. Then later we moved around to the Vernon Painter place and lived there. Vernon was a teacher in Cullowhee. I basically grew up there. We lived there till I was about fifteen, I guess, and then we moved back to Tennessee. During that time I knew LV and his family ’cause he lived just around the road here. In fact, he was born right over here in a log cabin, which I have a picture of.

  PLATE 63 “We went to the carnival, and there was my mama, daddy, and brothers following us around.” LV and Mary Mathis at the Maryville, Tennessee, county fair in 1956. Mary was seventeen, and LV was twenty.

  I didn’t go out on dates because my dad and mama wouldn’t allow me to do that. I never really went on a date. The first time I ever saw LV was at a church in Cashiers, North Carolina. He was with Pete Jones, his cousin. After that I knew him, but I never actually dated him, never talked to him, for probably a year I guess, but he would go to Cedar Baptist Church, which is right around the road here, on Cedar Valley Road. I would go there some, and I talked to him a little bit during those times.

  His mother told him, “There’s a girl you can date.” She said, he said, “I wouldn’t date her if she was the last girl on earth.” Of course he was plottin’ then [laughs], even though we didn’t talk to each other at that time. I finally began to talk to him, and then I dated him about two years. One year of that was after I had moved back to Tennessee. I was fifteen and he would drive across the Smokies to see me. LV was really the only boy I ever dated. I talked a little to a boy they called Corny. He was LV’s cousin, but I never really dated him. His name was Cornelius, but they called him Corny. LV came to the house and picked me up, and that was the first time Daddy had let me go on a date by myself, but I really wasn’t by myself because my daddy and my whole family followed us. They really did. Anyway, we went to the carnival, and there was my mama, daddy, and brothers following us around. We rode the swings for a while, and LV got behind me on the swings, and he held my hand on the swings. I still have a bowl that was gotten at that carnival. Cornelius and LV are about the only dates I had. Cornelius is dead now.

  LV’s name is just LV. He has no name, just the letters. I asked LV’s mother what the initials stood for. I said, “It’s got to be somebody.” Well, no, she didn’t name him after anybody. So we got to calling him Lyin’ Varmint ’cause we couldn’t figure it out.

  PLATE 64 “I’ve taught him everything he knows [about singing].” Mary and LV Mathis on their wedding day

  I was seventeen and LV was twenty when we got married—just mere kids—but we’ve been married fifty-four years in October [2010]. He says, “It’s been real, and it’s been fun, but it ain’t been real fun!” He always tells everybody that. LV didn’t sing back then. I’ve taught him everything he knows [laughs]. After we were married, I took piano lessons for six months. I finally got this lady to agree to give me piano lessons, and I know that God had everything to do with that, too. I went to see her, and she was teaching a room full of little children. I went to the screen door and asked her if there was any way she could teach me, and she said that she just didn’t think she could take anyone else, but she just stood there. Then she said, “Yes, I will.” So I took about six months with her, but I couldn’t keep it all up, work eight hours a day, come home, and raise a family, keep house, and all that stuff, and I had to quit because I was working, too. But I told myself, “I will play the piano one day.” So that’s what I did. The woman teaching me didn’t believe in a lot of rhythm, so I never really learned rhythm, but I knew I was going to play one day, even if I had to teach myself. I played guitar when I met LV, and I was doing pretty good at it, and we got married and that’s when I stopped playing and didn’t play guitar anymore. Anyway, I’ve always loved music. It was just in me, and I loved it. I loved to sing and play, and whatever else I could do.

  When I was growing up, my mother took me to church when she could because she didn’t drive, and if Dad took us once a month, then he thought that was enough. So we didn’t go very often. When I was about six or seven years old, I went outside and I told my mama to come outside because I wanted to show her something. She came out and I said, “See up there; there is where God lives, and I’m going up there someday.” I remember really clear about a church we went to with my aunt. It was a Church of God. She would come get us sometimes and take us with her. I remember as a child seeing the power of God. I’ve never forgot it, and I knew it was real. There were things that happened, that I remember, that made me know that God was real, but I was never saved until I was going to Oak Ridge Baptist Church. That was a long time ago. When I was twenty-seven, I had gone to the altar a couple of times, but I never really was saved, nor did I ever say I was. Sometimes when you’d go to some of the churches, they’d drag you to the altar, and they’d tell you when to get up—that you was all right. I even got that said to me when I was saved. The preacher told me to get up and I said, “There’s more to it than that.” I just knew there was, and I stayed on my knees until I was sure. And there is more to it than just getting up.

  The way we started singing was, I was saved about five years before LV, and I guess that after I took the piano lessons, and I got to where I could play around pretty good on it, then we started singing together. Our two sons sung with us. I guess we sung together about ten years, if that long. When Allan, one of our sons, got married, that ended. Vernon, my other son, continued to sing with us until he decided he was grown up and knew everything there was to know.

  LV: My name is LV Mathis. I was born May 24, 1936, and I’m almost too old [laughs]. I was born right down in the holler here in Tuckasegee, North Carolina, in an ol’ log cabin that used to be down in there. They’s seven of us, two brothers and four sisters. I’m second to oldest of us all. I had one older brother, and he passed away when he was nine years old.

  Life was rough when I was growing up! We was poor. Everybody was poor, but we didn’t know it. It didn’t make no difference because everybody was just about the same, and if I had to go back, I wouldn’t change a thing because I learned a lot.

  Mary: We grew up in the town and not back here in the mountains like he did, so we did know people who had a lot more than we did and that were a lot better off than we were.

  LV: We had the farm. It was just an ol’ mountain hillside farm. We had to raise what we ate and all that. I remember when we didn’t have power. I remember my grandmother would grow a big patch of punkins [pumpkins], and when they first bloomed, she’d pick the blooms off, roll ’em in cornmeal, and fry ’em. They was just as good as squash, if you didn’t have squash. We’d keep everything that we needed to keep cold in a spring box. That’s a box about eight foot long—the one that we had was ’bout eighteen inches wide or somewhere along in there—and water would run in one end of it and then stay in there because there was a lid on it. We’d put our milk, buttermilk, butter, cucumbers, watermelons, and different things in there.

  We always had two cows. We’d always churn our own buttermilk. They wudn’t no Wal-Mart around! My grandmother had a porch on her house, and she had these great big ol’ barrels made out of a log, and she’d keep her kraut, corn, and pickled cabbage in ’em and get out whatever she wanted, whenever she’d need it. It’d be fine out there because anything pickled would stay good. We made leather britches, dried apples, peaches, and all that, all the time. In order to live, that’s what we had to do if we wanted to eat. By the time I was big enough to hold a turning plow, I was out there turning the land with our two horses.

  PLATE 65 LV’s birthplace. LV’s mother, Lettie Mae Hopper Mathis, at right with LV in her arms, brother Frank sitting in doorway

  PLATE 66 “Life was rough when I was growing up.” LV Mathis school picture from Rocky Hollow School, Tuckasegee, North Carolina, age ten or eleven

  PLATE 67 Rocky Hol
low Baptist Church and School, where LV attended first through fourth grades

  Mary: See, he can tell you about all that old stuff, whereas I can’t!

  LV: On a typical day we got up at four o’clock in the morning, whether you needed to or not. We worked all day until it was about dark. We’d take about half an hour to a’ hour off for dinner, if you could hold off that long, because most of the time they’s a-needing you to get back out there to work. We’d put in ten or twelve hours a day in the summertime. Then, in the wintertime, we’d put in time getting the wood. It never ceased; we’s always working. We never knew when Saturday come because we’d work right on through it. They wasn’t none of this “Let’s go to town” business, but we always knew when Sunday come because we didn’t work on Sunday.

  For fun, we mostly just climbed sapplin’s, had grapevine swings, fishin’, huntin’, swimmin’, and just anything because we had to make our fun. In the summertime we’d fish the river here all the time because they wudn’t no lake there then. It was a great big ol’ river running through there. We fished that river and all the creeks around that had any speckled trout in ’em. Then, in the wintertime, we hunted. I never bear hunted or deer hunted, but did lots of coon and squirrel huntin’. We’d catch ’em possums and feed ’em buttermilk and bread, and then we’d cook ’em. They’s just good white meat, and it was as good as chicken if you didn’t have chicken. We had chickens, too, and got our own eggs and stuff from ’em. Barnyard chicken makes the best chicken and dumplin’s. There was none of this going down to Wal-Mart and picking the chicken out. Mama’d grab up that chicken, and its neck would be wrung before you’d know it.

  I went to church until I was about twelve or fourteen years old, then I stopped going. When I was a kid, I would sing in church and Sunday school. Mary got to going to church. It was about five years after she got saved when I started going to church with her and got saved. I was going, and I’d hear her and the boys singing, so I just joined right in with ’em.

  Mary: He did sing at the Church of God that I went to when I was a little girl.

  LV: We’ve been going to Oak Ridge Baptist Church about forty-five years now, but I’ve only been saved about thirty-five years.

  Talking about how me and Mary got married, well, I just tried to outrun her, but I couldn’t [laughs]. We met there at the carnival. I had seen her before that, though. My cousin she was with wouldn’t ride the Ferris wheel with her, so I rode the Ferris wheel with her. It was sometime after that I asked her out. I walked her home from church a few times, and then we started datin’. In about a year Mary’s family moved back to Tennessee. She thought she had saw the last of me. That didn’t break my heart, but I did hate to see her go [laughs].

  Mary: He rode to the top of the Smokies with me in an ol’ International pickup truck that looked like it was about to fall apart.

  LV: It was ’bout three months before I went there and saw her. We dated about a year. We couldn’t call each other, so we’d write to each other.

  PLATE 68 Mary and LV in the Smoky Mountains on Easter Sunday 1956. They married that October.

  Mary: I still have most of the letters, too. We wrote a lot because that’s the only way we had to communicate with each other back then.

  LV: We were married awhile before we had a telephone. We barely had power up here. We lived in an ol’ store building with a bedroom, kitchen, and a living room. We lived in that for a couple of years.

  Mary: You know what we had as a roof over that store building? It was a Pepsi-Cola sign. That’s what was out hanging over the door.

  LV: That house was right up here on this same road around the curve.

  Mary: We put up wallpaper, and we thought it was purty. When we built a fire in the heater, that wallpaper paste got hot, and I can still hear the wallpaper going pop, slit, crack, splat because it was getting so hot! But that was our home until we could get by. Then we bought a little single-wide trailer. That’s when we bought Allan a little carpenter toolbox because I reckon that’s what he was destined to be. So we bought him a little toolbox, and we had a new red Naugahyde couch, and it was beautiful. First thing Allan did was, he got out the little saw, and he just sawed away at the arm of that couch. He was about three or four, and when he got to that brand-new couch, he knew what a saw was for. So today he still knows what a saw is for because he’s still a carpenter. Vernon, our youngest son, is a good carpenter, too. They took over the business when we retired.

  PLATE 69 Mary, age twenty, at her and LV’s first home. It had been an old store. Note the Pepsi sign for roof over the door.

  LV: When we first married, I was in construction work, and I did that for probably ten years. Then I quit and went to work in the pulpwood business. Pulpwood work is when you cut the tree down and cut the wood into pulp so it can be made into paper. So basically, I was working for a paper mill. We had a truck and a skidder to help us cut the tree and drag it out. I did that for about seven years, and then they went out of business. I didn’t want to fool with going to Canton, North Carolina, to work—that was where the plant was then—so I quit. I come home to rest for a day or two, and a boy up the hill here come down to see me one night. He said, “You want go to work?” I said, “Well, not really, but I guess it’s a pretty good opportunity to go.” He said, “Well, I need a carpenter.” I said I would. I worked with him for about five years. In the meantime, while working for him, Arnold Rigdon was my boss man. He was the best carpenter I ever met. After working with him about a year, I told him I was going to hang with him and learn everything he knew, and I did. I stayed with him five years, and then he quit and went to driving a truck. So I just kept on. I went to Maggie Valley, North Carolina, and worked for a guy, and I worked with him for nine and a half years. I drove to Maggie Valley every day. It was a long ways—little over an hour or more. I done that for nine and a half years, and then there wasn’t much building going on in Maggie Valley, so the boss sent me to Asheville, North Carolina, to work on building some condominiums. I went over there and built one. They had another one that was about ready to be built, and the feller said, “Why don’t you build this one yourself?” I thought about it, and prayed about it, and I told Mary, I said, “I believe I will.” So I give him a bid on it, and he took it. He said, “You’re the one that’s doing the work, so there’s no point in working for the other feller, since you’re doing it anyway.” So I built two there before I come back to Cashiers to work, and I stayed up there till I retared [retired]. I worked there about thirty years. I enjoyed it. I’ve gotta few tools left, but my boy has got most of ’em. I give ’em to him when I retared.

  I built this house we live in. I always had ten or twelve men working for me at that time, and they helped me build this house. I had the gradin’ done, and Mary and I had prayed about this house, so I had the church people come over one Sunday after morning service. They all come down, and we got down here where the basement’s at now and had prayer. Then we built the house. We had almost enough money to build it. I had to bary [borrow] twenty thousand. The bank didn’t want us to bary twenty thousand; they wanted to let us have thirty thousand. I told ’em that I didn’t want that much, and they told me to just take it ’cause I’d need furniture and other things, too. I give in and took the thirty, but we finished the house, and I took ’em ten thousand dollars back.

  Mary: When we took it back, they said, “Don’t y’all need some furniture?” I said, “Yes, we do, but I’m not going to finance furniture, so y’all can have this ten thousand dollars back.”

  LV: We started building in ’88 and finished in January 1990. We had an old couch in the living room, and we just slept on the floor on a mattress and springs.

  Mary: We’d bought two bar stools for the kitchen, too.

  LV: Later I got to thinking about a gazebo we had built up there in Cashiers and decided I needed me one out there, off the deck. I set in and got it all laid out. I got Sam Crawford, he was working for me at that time, to come one Sat
urday and help me. I’d already dug the footers, and the Saturday he come, we set the posts and got it all framed. Then the next Saturday we put the floor on. I got the men who worked for me to come help me put the roof on it. Allan did the work on the inside of it. Then I started loaferin’ [traveling], gettin’ ol’ antiques to hang in it. When I got it filled up, I just kept buying. So now I’ve got the basement full.

  Mary: Well, at first he’d come in, and he’d just set it up on the mantel. At that time this mantel wasn’t there, and the one that was, was an ol’ rough piece of wood. It wudn’t smoothed, planed, or nothing. It still had the splinters all in it. You couldn’t even dust it, it was so bad. He’d come in and set them things he’d bought up there, and I’d say, “We don’t have any more room for this stuff!” We just had no place to put it all, so I told him to hang it in the gazebo, and he started hanging it in the gazebo. What’s out there now wasn’t all of it. He sold a lot of it.

  LV: I’ve collected stuff from California, Maine, Washington, Florida, from everywhere. We’ve done a lot of traveling. We had a motor home. The man I was working for one week in Maggie Valley couldn’t pay me, and he had a motor home. He told me, said, “We’re going to try to sell that motor home, so I can pay y’uns for this week.” I said, “Well, how much do you want for it?” He told me, and I said, “Well, I believe I’ll just buy it.” So I bought it. It was a Class C, and I just couldn’t hardly stand to ride in it [laughs]. Nevertheless, I bought it anyway. We kept it for about ten years, I guess. We didn’t use it a lot because we just didn’t have the time. If I was working and she was working, then we just didn’t have the time to travel. Sometimes, in my business, I had to stay pretty close by, so we couldn’t travel much. So we sold it. We bought a pop-up [camper] and traveled in that a little while, but that wudn’t no good. It was more work than it was anything. If you was just going somewhere for a one-night stay, then you had to get it all ready, hook it up, and so on, and it just wudn’t worth all that. So I sold it and I bought another motor home. I bought it over in Asheville, North Carolina. It was a nice motor home. We did travel in it a lot, but I didn’t like it because of the bed in it. The only way to get in the thing was to crawl up in it. You couldn’t just walk around and get in. We had it for a long time, and Mary’s brother finally bought it off me. When he bought it, then I found the one that I’ve got now. We took this one to Alaska. We’ve been to Hawaii a couple of times. We went one time and stayed three weeks. I went over there and built a man a room on his house.