SAMANTHA SPEED
Yellow Jaundice
Drink apple cider often.
VON WATTS
Make a tea from yellowroot or soak the roots in whiskey. (Whiskey is good because it draws the strength from root and it won’t go bad if you set back for a while.) Then drink some.
ANONYMOUS
You make a little cross with a razor blade right between the shoulders. You put a little funnel or any little suction cup over that and draw out the blood. Then you get the blood up in a spoon and weaken it down with a bit of water. Some babies you can give a teaspoonful and some babies it’ll be a half. That’ll cure the jaundice. I’ve seen it done, but I never did do it. Mine never did have it.
FLORA YOUNGBLOOD
DOC BRABSON
So far in this section, we have shown you different types of herb remedies that were used, and are still being used, in the southern Appalachians. However, these people did not always depend solely on home remedies. By the mid 1800s there were also a few qualified physicians in their area.
On an earlier visit with two of our frequent contacts, Mr. and Mrs. John Bulgin, they mentioned to us that Mr. Bulgin’s grandfather, Alexander Crutch-field Brabson, had been a doctor. The Bulgins have a collection of operating tools that Dr. Brabson actually used and a ledger of accounts from his practice. One interesting point about the ledger is the manner in which many patients paid Dr. Brabson for his services. The payments to him were often made not in money, but in things such as animals and produce from his patients’ farms and gardens, homemade quilts, or services. To get a more detailed account of Dr. Brabson and his practice, during July of 1984 Cheryl Wall and I went to the Bulgins’ home in Franklin, North Carolina, about thirty minutes from Rabun Gap.
The Bulgins’ home is a large, modern two-story house built on top of a hill. It is surrounded by several barns, workshops, and a small greenhouse. Mrs. Bulgin has filled the house with antiques—especially clocks. On the hour, the house almost seems to quake with the chiming of the many clocks in the living room.
We sat in the Bulgins’ large, sunny kitchen during the interview. As we talked at the oak breakfast table, Mrs. Bulgin would occasionally wipe the counters of the clean, bright-colored cooking area. The windows from the kitchen look out upon the backyard where several birds pecked at the seed thrown out for them.
When we settled down to the interview, Mr. Bulgin surprised us with some new information: not only was his grandfather a doctor, but so was Dr. Brabson’s father-in-law, Dr. G. N. Rush. Dr. Brabson studied medicine under Dr. Rush and later attended Emory University, and they both served in the Civil War. Together, they perfected a cure for a usually fatal disease called milk sickness.
Mr. Bulgin said that Dr. Brabson was devoted to his work. No matter how bad the weather or what other obstacle stood in his way, it seemed that he was always able to get to his patients to treat them.
Mr. Bulgin is a tall, lean man in his early eighties. On the day we visited with him, he had been working in his metal shop, so he was wearing a baggy pair of army-green workpants and a matching workshirt. His large, knobby hands are strong and skillful-looking. His ruddy face is oblong and wrinkled from a combination of sun and age. Behind thick, black-rimmed glasses is a pair of eyes that are full of life and laughter and he grins impishly.
Mr. and Mrs. Bulgin, as always, were enthusiastic and eager to talk to us, and the following is the result of our most recent visit.
ALLISON ADAMS
John Bulgin: My great-granddad’s name was G. N. Rush. [He became a doctor when he graduated from] the University of Nashville in the Republic of Tennessee before it became a state. The date was 1854 the best I can make it out on his diploma. That diploma is actually on the skin of a sheep, and it’s all in Latin. He was an ordained elder in the Ebenezer Presbyterian Church and later at Morrison Presbyterian Church (which still exists) from which he retired.
PLATE 29 John Bulgin showed Cheryl Wall Dr. Rush’s medical kit:
“[These medical tools] were Dr. Rush’s graduation present. He graduated in 1854, so they’re at least that old. I’ve found one set [of medical tools] like this in a museum in Raleigh [North Carolina], but it’s not as complete as this one. There’s even a tourniquet and one of the needles in here. I don’t know how they kept [the tools] clean. Doctors have told me they used carbonic acid.
“Dr. Rush gave this [medical equipment] to my uncle in Cornelia. Then my mother said, seeing that I was the oldest grandson, she wanted me to have [the kit]. So some of ’em gave it to me.”
Dr. Rush was in the Civil War. He had his degree then. I still have his watch. It has a hunting case and a key, and it still runs and is in good shape. He would carry it in his vest pocket with the key on it.
My grandfather’s name was Alexander Crutchfield Brabson—Dr. A. C. Brabson. I wish I had been old enough to remember him, but I was about four years old when he died in 1916. He was in the Civil War, too. Of course he was quite a bit younger than Dr. Rush. They were both medical aides for the South. After the war, when they came to this area from Washtown, Tennessee, they settled about eight miles from Franklin in what they used to call Riverside.
PLATE 30
Grandpa Brabson read medicine and studied it under Dr. Rush. He then went to Emory University [before it was named Emory]. He lived where Bryant McClure’s restaurant is in Otto, North Carolina. He lived right across the ridge from [where the restaurant is now] within hollering distance, nearly. That old house is still standing.
Mrs. Bulgin: John’s grandfather and grandmother were considered to be the affluent society. They had a nice home, they had plenty of food, and they had house servants, but how they got the money to pay for them, I don’t know. He didn’t get any fee, hardly, for what he did. He didn’t question whether [patients] had money or didn’t. I’m sure he knew that if they had money, they would pay him, and if they didn’t have money [it didn’t matter]. They still needed something done for them.
John’s grandmother used to have one woman that came and moved in during the wintertime. She’d come right after Christmas or around the first of January and stay with them through the winter months. I’m not sure whether she was an old maid or whether she was a widow, but she didn’t have a family. She’d sew, quilt, card wool, spin, and weave. John’s grandparents had seven children—a big family—so his grandmother didn’t have time to do all the mending and all the darning of socks and all of that. John’s mother, Blanche Brabson, was second to the oldest of the children.
I’ve heard her talk about some of the remedies [Dr. Brabson used], but I never used them except one for yellowjacket stings. When my kids would get stung in the yard, I’d make a poultice with three or four plantain leaves—wet them and tie them on the sting with a cloth. It’d take the sting and the swelling out.
We cannot conceive of the hardships [they faced back then]. Diphtheria was a big killer in those days. If that hit, there wasn’t a thing anybody could do about it. They usually didn’t live long after they contracted diphtheria. [Dr. Brabson had a lot of cases of] that as well as scarlet fever and typhoid fever. They also used to have a disease called milk sickness. People got it from using the milk of [infected cows]. Cures were rare, but Dr. Rush and Dr. Brabson perfected a treatment for it, and Dr. Brabson taught the cure to Dr. Neville from Dillard, Georgia, and he taught it to two or three other doctors around here. But the actual remedy they used has been lost now. [It died with those doctors.]*
John Bulgin: Grandpa Brabson worked mostly out of his house. He had a horse and buggy that he went to Hayesville in. He probably had to stay the night somewhere before he got to Hayesville because it’s about forty miles from here. During a childbirth, he’d have to maybe spend the night or a couple of days at the home according to how the patient got along.
His favorite words were, “Ye old son of a bitch.” He would tell them, “Ye old son of a bitch, you ain’t gonna die! They ain’t no use of you coming to see me.”
PLATE 31 An old photo of Dr. and Mrs. Brabson which was hanging in Mr. and Mrs. Bulgin’s home.
But I don’t reckon he ever turned anybody down. He didn’t think of it. I remember a story about a guy somebody shot. He was stealing stuff out of a man’s garden. I don’t know the particulars, but it was dark and he ran and got caught in a cockleburr patch. The [owner] shot him with a shotgun. It was pouring down rain and a guy come in the middle of the night after Grandpa. He told the guy he wasn’t gonna go see that old son of a bitch [because] he wasn’t worth saving. But Mama said that all the time [he was saying that], he was getting up and putting on his clothes. He told the man to go over to the barn and “catch Alec and put the saddle on,” and he rode over there and scooped out the cockleburrs and sewed that man up, and he lived.
And I remember Mama telling about him coming home from Hayesville late at night or in the early morning hours when it was real cold and raining. His feet would be frozen to the stirrups and he couldn’t get off. He’d ride up right in front of the house and she would take a kettle of water out and pour on his shoes to loosen them so he could get them out of the stirrups. If he was lucky, he got two dollars for that call, wherever it was.
I imagine there were lots of [debts] in that ledger that was never collected. Most of the patients would pay something, though. Maybe they’d just have fifty cents to pay him, and he’d mark it down and give them credit. When he delivered a child, it was two dollars and a half or three dollars. He always carried medicine with him, and the medicine charge would be fifty cents.
The ones that couldn’t pay cash bartered. One old guy made a bunch of those split rails—I believe it was a hundred—for [credit of] seven dollars and a half. In [the ledger] you’ll see where people cradled wheat for fifty cents a day. They’d give him dried apples, a bushel of peaches, syrup, maybe a quarter of beef. Sometimes just a day’s work [would pay the bill], maybe hoeing his corn or working in his garden. He was quite a watermelon raiser. Mama said he would always plant his watermelon seed down on the creek bottoms on the seventh of May whether it was Sunday or not.
Actually, I still barter some myself, but the Internal Revenue frowns on it. But I do some work for the dentist and I do some work for the eye man and we swap out a lot.
Following is a list recorded in Dr. Brabson’s ledger of items that he accepted from patients as payment for his services:
Payment to Dr. Brabson for services amount
2 pigs [$]5.50
1 day rock hauling 2.00
gallon kerosene .25
36 lbs. beef 2.22
mowing 7.50
10 bushel turnips 2.25
1 stack fodder 2.00
buffalo horns 3.00
½ bushel dried grapes .75
pasturing 8.00
plowing 5 acres 4.00
pulling corn .50
work in meadow 4.50
patching roof .50
churning 1.00
photographs 2.50
dehorning cattle .50
ranging cattle 4.50
1 lb. tobacco .20
beef skin 2.00
PLATE 32 A sheet from Dr. Brabson’s ledger.
Payment to Dr. Brabson for services amount
chimney work [$]2.50
1 blanket 2.50
fly brush .75
saw 1.85
3 pecks onions .37½
3 days foddering 1.50
160 feet lumber 1.60
1 gallon syrup .40
cutting wood .50
cotton .25
fruit jars .90
4 days harvesting 6.00
sack of salt 1.00
hauling 274 lb. wire 1.37
25 lb. flour .75
2 days planting 2.00
quilting 2.00
1 sheep 1.65
½ lb. yarn .30
soup recipe 1.50
12 socks .30
soap .25
1 bushel dried apples .50
¾ days cradling .75
1½ bushel peaches .75
350 rails 7.00
2 days hauling 3.00
haying 2.25
2 bushel potatoes 1.25
2 days sawing wood 1.50
eggs .60
coffee 1.00
splitting wood .30
25 lb. sugar 1.25
7½ bushels wheat 7.50
blackberries .50
chair .50
12½ lbs. pork 1.00
lumber 1.75
180 ft. culls 1.25
shotgun 7.00
spinning .50
12 lbs. honey 1.50
1 day wagon and team 1.25
8 gal. ware .75
knives and forks 1.25
pair of cards .37
1300 shingles 2.60
1 bushel oats .40
7 brooms .70
shoeing 2 horses .80
24 lbs. bacon 2.40
1 barrel .50
lard 1.20
1 pair shoes 1.25
drill 1 days work .50
making gate 1.00
32 stakes 2.06
1 peck chestnuts .25
* Milk sickness was a common and greatly feared disease not only in the Appalachians, but also in the Midwest. Doctors that were able to treat it were widely respected and greatly valued members of any community. Dr. Neville, for example, in our community, was often described to us on interviews as “the only doctor around here that could cure the milk sick.”
Gerald W. Sanders, the lead technician at the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial in Lincoln City, Indiana, was kind enough to send us several materials regarding the disease. One was a booklet entitled “Milk Sickness Caused by White Snakeroot” written by Edwin Lincoln Moseley (professor emeritus of biology for the State University at Bowling Green, Ohio) and published in 1941 jointly by the Ohio Academy of Science in Bowling Green and the author. Another was a handout for visitors to the Memorial entitled, “The Plant That Killed Abraham Lincoln’s Mother: White Snakeroot.” (No author given.) The latter reads, in part, “By definition, milk sickness is poisoning by milk from cows that have eaten white snakeroot. Many early settlers in the Midwest came into contact with the sickness.
“In the Fall of 1818, Nancy Lincoln died as milk sickness struck the Little Pigeon Creek settlement. The sickness has been called pucking [sic] fever, sick stomach, the slows and the trembles. The illness was most common in dry years when cows wandered from poor pasture to the woods in search of food. In man, the symptoms are loss of appetite, listlessness, weakness, vague pains, muscle stiffness, vomiting, abdominal discomfort, severe constipation, bad breath, and finally coma. Recovery is slow and may never be complete. But more often an attack is fatal. And so it was for Nancy Hanks Lincoln. She died on October 5, 1818.”
THE GENERAL STORE
Most communities in the mountains, as elsewhere, failed as viable communities without several essential institutional and social anchors: a post office, several churches (which usually doubled as schoolhouses on weekdays), a grist mill, a blacksmith shop—and a general store. Up until now, we have not looked at the last in any concentrated way in this series of books, but in the past few years we have been lucky enough to learn about several ledgers from general stores that existed in our area, and this information simply whetted the appetites of the students, who began to search for them. Some searches have not been successful, like our attempts to find the one Christine Wigington told us about:
“One of my daddy’s first cousins, old Mr. Bob McCall, used to live at Cashiers [North Carolina]. He was quite a character. He had a big store there, one of the biggest—which wasn’t real big, but it was big for Cashiers back then; and he sold everything, too. He couldn’t read or write, but he had his ledgers that he kept his records in. When a person bought something on credit, he’d draw pictures of what they bought and they’d write their names down. Nobody beat him out of anything. Used to own practically all of Cashiers.
“I remember one
time they laughed at him. He had a round picture with a hole in the center of it, and the man that signed come in to pay and he charged him for a hoop of cheese. Well, that man hadn’t bought any cheese, and they couldn’t figure it out, and they thought and thought. Finally he remembered he’d bought a grindstone. But he’d put that down and he thought it was cheese!” [laughter]
Other searches were more fruitful, however, and these discoveries captured the interest of the students who combed through them to the point that a series of articles became inevitable.
In hundreds of previous interviews concerning how mountain peopie survived during the period of extreme self-sufficiency (which lasted, around here at least, from the 1820s, with the arrival of the first permanent white settlers, for at least a hundred years), the people interviewed explained to the students again and again how little they and their families had bought in the few stores that existed: a bit of coffee, some salt, some sugar. Otherwise, they said, they were virtually on their own, and they even had acceptable substitutes for coffee (parched wheat, for example), and sugar (sorghum molasses) when times were truly tough. That information—which we are not contradicting, by the way—led all of us to assume that the bare staples like coffee and salt were the only items these stores stocked at all.
That assumption came completely unraveled with the discovery of the ledger from the Fort Hembree store (located in what is now Hayesville, North Carolina) dated 1845-1847—a ledger owned and fiercely protected by student John Singleton’s grandfather, Frank Moore, while he was living. The assumption was shattered, in fact, by the array of available goods that appeared on the master list of products John and his classmate, Vaughn Rogers, amassed from reading the accounts from this modest pre-Civil War business—a business that, rather than serving a city, served instead the tiniest of rural communities in a mountain valley that was almost inaccessible to the outside world except by horseback. Think of a K-Mart with groceries, its contents jammed into a tiny frame building, and you begin to get the idea.
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