Foxfire 9

by Foxfire Fund, Inc.

  We had chores to do. [My parents] taught me and my sister to milk. Every one of the boys already knew. My daddy owned a mare and he’d raise colts. We had a gang of sheep. We sheared them for the wool [to make our clothes] and sold what wool we didn’t need. We also sold sheep. Mother would wash the wool, card, spin, and weave it. She had a loom over the kitchen and I always wanted to do a little [of the weaving], but she thought I’d tear it up. I would run the reel or the spinner to make the hank. I have even worn the little homemade skirts. [We wore homemade clothes] till about when we went to school and then we got to where we could buy clothes [at the store].

  PLATE 66 Martha Roane.

  Our family never was sick very much, but I had an earache a lot of the time and it still bothers me some. My mother would make a hot-water towel and put it on my ear and lay me in front of the fireplace on a pallet. [That treatment] would help a lot. We did have some kind of medicine drops for my ear but we didn’t use them much, because they were hard to get.

  If you had a bad cold, they’d give you a dose of castor oil. That was the meanest stuff I ever tasted. When we had the measles, and nearly every child had ’em, my father would move a big bed in the living room in front of the big fireplace and make us lay there. He made a tea and he wanted us to drink that tea. I’d put it in my mouth and when he got gone, I would raise up and spit it in the fireplace. I don’t know what kind it was, some kind of tea that would make us break out [with measles] faster. My sister got so sick. She finally broke out with them measles and it was bad. We had to blind the windows because they said it would hurt her eyes for the light to come in. I said, “Oh, no, I don’t want to be sick like her,” so I finally drank that tea.

  I first went to school over there [at Boiling Springs] on Persimmon. We weren’t allowed to talk in class. Of course, there was still a lot of talking that went on. We had a recess about ten o’clock and then we’d have our lunches around twelve. We had to carry our lunches in little buckets. Henry, my brother, wanted to carry his alone, but my sister and I put ours together. We always had a lot of meats because our parents raised it. We’d take meat and a biscuit, and sometimes when sweet potatoes were in, we’d take them. We’d take milk along, too, and we could go in the springhouse and set our little jars of milk in there. They had built a great big springhouse over the Boiling Springs right there near the Presbyterian Church.

  After school we had to walk home and we made it up not to eat much lunch and we’d have a picnic up where the roads tear (fork). One day our parents said we didn’t get in at the time we should and they complained to the teacher. He decided to follow us one day and said, “I know now why you don’t get home on time.”

  January the tenth, I never will forget. There was snow and ice on the ground. We moved in up Germany [community]. We left a good house and didn’t find one as good as we had been used to, but anyhow we made it. Six or seven neighbors with wagons and all [helped us move]. There was snow and ice on Devil’s Branch Road. [I know some of you have heard of it.] They’d get out with their mattocks and make little places for their horses to attach their feet and pull the load. I didn’t know whether we’d get there or not, but we did.

  I was in about the sixth or seventh grade when we moved up there and we went to Mount Grove Church for school. When I got ready for high school, we couldn’t go to Clayton because it was too far to walk. There was no way to go except ride a horse. There was a preacher from Habersham County that came up to our church and he told us we ought to get in up at Rabun Gap School. They didn’t have any room at that time but I was able to get in at Nacoochee Institute in White County [where students could board, and pay their expenses by working on the campus].

  [After graduation, Martha studied education at the A & M School in Habersham County and received her teaching license.]

  I started teaching in 1924. The first school [I taught at] was over by the Germany community out from Clayton. They called it Mountain Grove, and it was in a small church. We had desks for school, and on Friday we would just push them back out of the way and leave it for church on Sunday.

  PLATE 67 Martha Roane being interviewed in the Foxfire classroom. To her right is her grandson, Charles Dennis.

  I was the only teacher. It was one room and it was heated by a wood stove. I had to come in and start a fire every morning. The boys would come in and help me. In the afternoons they would get everything ready for me to make a fire the next morning. There was just six months of school each year. School would start the latter part of August and went on to completion in December. We would have about twenty minutes for each class.

  I went to Betty’s Creek in 1925. There was a schoolhouse in the church there like in Mountain Grove. I think we had thirty-five or forty kids over there. When one of them got old enough and didn’t want to go to school anymore, they could just drop out and they didn’t have to go back. We would start about eight in the mornings and stay till about three-thirty in the afternoons. If it came a snow, we took off early because everybody had to walk home. The students wore heavy shirts in the winter. The boys would wear pants and those old wool stockings up to their knees and heavy shoes. The girls wore heavy wool skirts or dresses and they too would wear those old heavy stockings up to their knees. The girls wore laced-up boots. [All the children] pretty much had shoes to wear. If they didn’t have shoes in the winter, they wouldn’t come to school.

  We had spelling bees each month, and we had tests on spelling. They had to pass a test with spelling on it to go on to the next grade. We had our lunch outside if the weather was good. They each had to bring their own lunch. They would bring milk with their lunch and would go down and put it in Betty’s Creek to keep it cold. That year, 1925, was a very dry year. It got so dry the creek dried up and we didn’t have any water to put the milk in to keep it cold. We had different people each day to carry water from way over on the mountainside. They would go get two or three jugs, or whatever they could carry, and bring it back to us. We had a big tub we would put the waste water in, and we would use it to sprinkle on the floor so it could be swept. That’s how dusty it got. A lot of people were out of water. The timber on the tops of the mountains just turned brown and died. It was just terribly dry.

  PLATE 68

  Next I went to Tiger School in the middle of the year 1926. The school was located in the Cannon Hotel in Tiger. I was a third-grade teacher there. Mostly I taught third-grade reading. Sometimes, though, the teachers would want to change around—like, I might take the third and fourth grade math for a while. Ethel Williams and myself are the only two teachers left living [who taught at Tiger School]. She lives in California now.

  None of the schools I taught at had inside bathrooms. Tiger School got running water and bathrooms before I left in 1928. At the other schools, we always had to build little outhouses for the students.

  I remember when they were making the road through Tiger. They did it with horses and mules and big old scoops. Well, my third-graders would just be turning their heads out the window and saying, “They won’t get that dirt out.” I would have to try to keep them quiet.

  You know, way back you could have prayer in school, and we had a large prayer group that would pray in the mornings.

  I had a few students who were as old as I was, and some of them couldn’t even read or write, no matter how hard I tried to teach them. They just couldn’t learn it.

  Cheating in school was bad. If they got caught cheating, it was marked off their grades and I had a conference with them and their parents.

  When I taught up at Tiger, Ed had the store there and we’d go over there but I never thought anything about it. Then one day I went over there and he gave me a box of candy. A whole box. I thought, “Hmmm.” I had to go to Center, Georgia, in 1928 to teach for a while, and when I got away he started writing to me. So there I was. The first of June, 1931, was the wedding. It wasn’t a big wedding, just a little home wedding. Homely. I didn’t want a big wedding. All that was there was t
he family, his close friends, and the preacher and his wife.

  Our house was across from the store in Tiger.

  We had five children, four boys and one girl. After they got up big enough, they’d work when they got home from school. When it was mowing time in the yards, they’d clean the yards. [When the corn was ready,] they’d go to gather it. During haying time, there wasn’t hardly ever school. [They worked all day then.]

  [Our children fed the cows and milked them.] Our son Louis would get up in the mornings and get his lantern and his bucket, and go out to milk. Then he would come in and get ready for school. Said he never would forget it [because it was hard work] but he was glad he did it. It made him strong to get out there and get the exercise.

  We had a separator and we separated the milk and sold some of the cream and some of the milk to Nantahala [Dairies]. [They’re now called Biltmore Dairies.] We would save some of that cream and put it in the refrigerator and have whipped cream. That separator was a mess to wash if you didn’t get it before it dried. Whenever the boys got a little older [it was their job to wash it] and they dreaded that, but they did it anyway.

  I quit teaching in 1934, although I substituted for teachers some in the 1940s and ’50s. I guess the last time was in 1954. [I spent my time raising my family.]

  But I’ve been around these stores all my life. My Grandpa Justus started running his store during the Civil War. He never even had a cash register. Just a strongbox. We didn’t have banks until about 1903 and everybody had a hiding place for their money. He hid his money in a sealed closet in the chimney. He’d put it in there and you would never know it was there. Half the family knew about the closet, but I didn’t. One day somebody wanted to change some money. Of course, Grandpa didn’t let that man come in. He told him to come back later. I happened to go into the kitchen and I saw him getting the money out. Then I knew where it was, but I never dared touch any of it.

  When I was a girl, the Tallulah Falls Railroad ran as far north in Rabun County as Tallulah Falls. That’s how the store was supplied. People could trade eggs and live chickens. They’d take [only live chickens] and put them in coops since they had no way to keep the chickens refrigerated. If there were too many chickens to sell locally, the store owners would send them to the train at Tallulah Falls in crates and ship them somewhere else. My grandfather, and later my father, hauled crates to Tallulah Falls in a wagon pulled by horses or mules. Then they’d haul barrels of goods back for the store. The railroad brought everything. Later, it came on up to Tiger [Georgia] and that made hauling easier.

  ED ROANE: When they brought the railroad farther north, to Tiger, that’s when I opened my store. That was 1927.

  When I first opened the store in Tiger, the [Tallulah Falls] railroad turned around right up in that valley [in Tiger]. The railroad had a switch right there and that’s where they turned the engine around. [That was the end of the line at that time.] The depot was [right in the center of Tiger near the little church there], and I built my store right up from there, and opened it the first day of June, 1927.

  There were three or four more [stores] here in Tiger when we built and then a barbershop and a little ol’ restaurant where you could get a barbecue. Our store was one of the biggest stores there was in the county. The others were smaller, didn’t carry near the amount of stuff that we did. Now up in Clayton, the Cannons had a big store. Ours was a general run store. We sold hardware—wire, fencing—and anything I could buy in the way of cheese, sugar, salt, coffee. It all usually came in sacks and wooden boxes and barrels. Everyone from Towns County and all around would come here and get their food. Since this was the end of the railroad line, we got all kinds of fertilizer, food and such shipped in on the train.

  PLATE 69 Ed Roane in the living room of his home.

  MRS. ROANE: Ed would order cookstoves and sell them to people who wanted them. They could put an order in and the store would get it for them. Things like that all came in on the train, too.

  ED ROANE: To pay for them, people brought in corn, peas, cane, twisted-up tobacco, hogs, cows, sheep, goats, tanbark, ties for the railroad—anything they had we could take in trade. I’d buy everything they had. I don’t know how many hogs or cattle I had—a lotful. And I could sell them! Why, law, I reckon I did! I put in a meat market and went to killing hogs and cows. I would wake up at three o’clock [in the morning] and light a lantern in the smokehouse and cut meat till daylight.

  MRS. ROANE: Hotel owners bought some of that meat. They also bought great numbers of chickens. Most stores didn’t have phones back then, but the hotels could send word that they’d buy so many when available.

  ED ROANE: And hogs and chickens went out of here by the [railroad] carloads. There’d be eight or ten cars full of cattle. Folks brought them in from Towns County [Georgia] and all back through North Carolina—Clay County, Macon County, and Highlands—to be shipped out on the train.

  MRS. ROANE: Then the Depression came along. During the Depression, Ed and I fared okay. He always had work—in the store and on the farm. He did a little bit of everything, because a dollar was a dollar then and you had to work for what you got. But the Depression was very bad because lots of people who owned homes couldn’t even pay their taxes and some of them lost their homes. Some people would have to sell their cows and other animals to pay their taxes. [If they couldn’t pay the taxes,] the government would just take the houses and sell them.

  ED ROANE: We helped a lot of people so they wouldn’t lose their homes. Now we never lost anything by it. [During the Depression, we just made sure their houses weren’t taken by the county because they couldn’t pay their property taxes.]

  MRS. ROANE: People couldn’t get the money even to buy food and clothes with. There just weren’t any jobs to find, and back then they didn’t have welfare to help out. Most everyone had a garden if they had the land to put it on. We had several people to work on our farm and they were paid a dollar a day. That was a good bit then. Some people would come in the store and get flour and other necessary stuff and put in fifty cents a day on it. It was just real bad all over. We gave [credit] a lot then. Some were forced to go somewhere else [to live] because they couldn’t find work. They would leave without paying their bills, not even their rent. Years later, a few came back and said, “Do you remember how much I owe you?” Well, Ed couldn’t remember, but they did and they would pay their bill. We had no hard feelings by it. They needed it.

  ED ROANE: Our property was the best bond of anything we had, because we could borrow money from the bank. We had nothing against our property. We were able to keep our store stocked up so people [who couldn’t pay us during the Depression] could charge at the store. Many families didn’t have flour or anything to go on. My mother would ask me just a lot of times how much longer I was going to give a man a boxful of food, and I said, “I don’t know. I can still borrow money from the bank if I need it.” So I borrowed money to stock the store and fed the people, as many come, and they came from as far as North Carolina. But we were blessed in it, because we had a lot of people that trusted us. I say we were lucky because we had a lot of friends. If a fellow needed a loan—twenty, fifty, or five hundred dollars—instead of his going to the bank, he might come and borrow that money from me. If I knew his father was a good man, a businessman from the county, I never took a note on it, but I never lost a dollar. I wouldn’t charge nothing [for interest]—just told them to take the money and use it. Martha knows—for the last twenty years I was in business, I never hardly lost a dollar on loans.

  MRS. ROANE: To help pay their bills with us, some people cleaned up creek banks and things like that. Most [store owners] owned big gardens and they needed tending, and lots of cattle. They had to keep the cows fed and the garden looked after [and people would help with these chores to pay off a bill].

  ED ROANE: And we had a sawmill, a syrup mill, and a gristmill, and some people would work there in return for credit at the store. Up until World War II [when he was
drafted], my brother done most of the farming and seeing about [the sawmill and gristmill]. He’d be gone for a week at the time during the Depression, taking the thrashing [threshing] machine around from farm to farm, thrashing wheat for farmers in the area. We thrashed up through here in the [Rabun Gap] valley. Why, them folks farmed up there. I’ve thrashed many a day way ’long into the night—after dark. When our four boys got up big enough, they went along. When we were far away, we’d camp overnight, didn’t come back home. Like if we were way back over on Persimmon, the farmers’ wives would cook for all the thrashers. We’d have people to help us and get credit at the store.

  MRS. ROANE: When World War II came along, things started picking up. Someone started a sawmill up in Mountain City. People went to work there, and they would go to cutting those big old pine poles. People got to working and started buying cars and homes. It got to where there were more jobs coming into Rabun County and the county started growing.

  Jim Ramey had two big hotels in Mountain City and Ed Holden had a little hotel right where Dillard Hotel is now. Later on, Jim Bleckley opened a big hotel. There were some little stores up in Clayton. They weren’t big stores. Clayton had board sidewalks and so did Tiger. The roads used to be rocked. I believe they started paving them in the late thirties. There were hitching posts to hitch your horses to. Finally, in the early fifties, the shirt factory came in and then Rabun Mills came.

  ED ROANE: By then I also had a store in the town of Washington, Georgia, and we’d move stuff we had here—apples, cabbage, potatoes—down there and then I’d put a load on and go on to Florida sometimes, or have a truck coming from Florida bringing oranges and sweet potatoes back up here. We kept two or three trucks running all the time, trading back and forth. I had to be down there [in Washington] for a week or so ever’ so often, but I had good men down there working for me.