Next we asked Mrs. Roane to tell us about the most popular products and how they were stocked. Here is a summary:
Candy: We usually got stick candy, and sometimes we got this little round, all-flavored candy. Chewing gum was one cent.
Cloth: They would sell bolts of cloth. There were so many yards of cloth on a big bolt. People bought that for sheets and pillowcases. They also sold something called “outin’” [outing flannel], which we call flannel now.
Clothes: They’d sell these loose shirts, work shirts, you know, for men and boys. Sometimes they’d be blue or striped or checked or diamonds. Usually, though, people bought the cloth and made their own shirts. [The stores] sold khaki pants.
Coffee: When you bought coffee out of the store, it was green—in little beans, I’d call it. They took it out of the barrel and weighed out so much. I think it was ten cents a pound. Then the customer who bought it took [the coffee beans] home and parched them.
My mother had a great big ol’ biscuit pan and she’d put the coffee [beans] in that pan and put the heat on it. She took a spoon and stirred all the time, so they wouldn’t burn. She baked them till they all turned brown. [Then we ground up the beans as we needed them for coffee.]
Flour: Flour came in barrels. I think a barrel had a hundred pounds in it and we bought a barrel at a time. We didn’t buy flour by the pound.
Grain: They sold corn for hog feed. People raised wheat and rye and would take it to a mill in Franklin [North Carolina] to be ground. If they had any extra, they could swap the grain at the store. Then, someone who didn’t raise their own could buy it there.
Kerosene and lamps: Back then everybody bought kerosene for their lights. They didn’t have any electricity. Kerosene came in barrels or drums.
Lamps didn’t cost but about thirty-five or forty cents, and that was for lamp, wick, globe and all.
Meat: They sold all kinds of meat, but it was local meat. People would cure the meat and take it into the store and sell it. Most everybody had their own meat, but there was a few that didn’t. If someone had some meat left over from where they had butchered, they cured it and put it in the store for those people that needed it. When it’s cured, it’ll keep a long time in a cool place.
Our family never had to buy meat, because Dad had hogs, cows, and sheep.
People would bring in livestock to Ed’s store [during the Depression] for trade. He had a lotful out there, couldn’t keep count. So he started a butcher business. Supplied the work camps for the Georgia Power people when they were building these power dams [Lake Rabun, Lake Burton, Tallulah, and Tugalo dams]. He peddled fresh meat from our store. He would butcher on Thursday and either [the customers] would come and get their meat or he would carry it to them on Friday. He had customers all around Tiger and Tallulah Falls.
Medicine: There was no such thing as aspirin, but they did sell pills. They also sold liniments for anybody that thought they had rheumatism, what they call now arthritis. There was a Rosebud Salve. You could order it, but you couldn’t buy it in the stores. We’d order a big order of that salve and went around and sold it.
Then there were peddlers who came through [the area] with all kinds of stuff. They would have just bagsful [of patent medicines] and they’d sell a lot of that.
Oil: I think [cooking] oil was ten cents a gallon, maybe fifteen cents. And oooh, now it’s two dollars a gallon.
Postcards: Postcards were a penny. You know, they had scenes on them, like mountains and rivers. I used to see those pictures and I’d want one [of those postcards]. So I’d save my pennies and go to the store and buy some.
Rope: It seems like rope was seven cents for so many feet of rope, but I don’t remember how many feet it was.
Salt: Salt came in big one hundred-pound sacks. Later, it came in fifty pounds. We didn’t have little box salt. It came loose and there were paper sacks to put it in after it was weighed out on the scale.
Seeds: There were people who had extra [vegetable] seed. A lot of times they would divide with their neighbors. When I was ten or eleven, people started ordering seed from Sears’ catalog. The seed [bought from the store] came in thick, striped cloth sacks and they sold them by the pound.
Soap: We could buy soap in the store [although many people made their own]. We bought Palmolive. It was a hand soap, we called it. It was green. That’s what we always got for a hand soap and to take baths with.
There was another kind of soap, lye soap. It was a kind of reddish color, but I can’t remember the name.
Soft drinks: Uncle Johnny had a little store and he sold drinks. He had grape and orange and strawberry Nehi. But now, way back when I was little, I don’t recall seeing Coke. That came later.
Sugar: Sugar came in big white, one hundred-pound sacks. If you didn’t want to buy a hundred pounds of sugar, they would measure out what was needed. It was so much for a pound, but I’ve forgotten what it was. I think you could get a hundred pounds for a dollar and a half.
Syrup: Syrup cost a dollar a gallon then [if you went to the store and bought it]. I think it is about four or five dollars now.
We had a big [sorghum] cane patch to make syrup. We had about ten to twenty hands to work it and [when the cane was ready to harvest] they would get out there and strip it and cut off the heads. [This was when Ed had the store in Tiger.]
There was a [syrup] mill in Tiger where you could get your syrup made. People would come around from other counties, hauling their cane in to make syrup. [When syrup was being made from our cane patch] I have even got out there and helped to stir the skimmings. I never could [eat the juice when they were cooking it into syrup]. It would just make me sick. I liked it after it cooled off, but not that hot stuff. I just didn’t like that.
ROY ROBERTS
We discovered Roy Roberts purely by accident one summer day. Wig and I were taking another Foxfire contact up into North Carolina so he could visit some friends he had not seen for years, and we had all stopped for lunch at the Old Mill Wheel Café outside Marshall. One of the customers recognized Wig as the editor of Foxfire, and he said he knew someone we should meet. “Wait just a minute and I’ll go get him. He lives right behind here because he owns this café.” A few minutes later in walked Roy, and we started our first interview right there on the spot.
Roy is a man of average height and build. His snow-white hair is cut close to his balding head. The glasses he wears cannot hide the twinkle in his eyes which goes perfectly with his constant grin.
I used to consider eighty-two as being old, but there is nothing old about Roy Roberts. He does not stoop over like most eighty-two-year-olds, but stands erect. He does not shuffle along as one would think an eighty-two-year-old would, but takes long strides and moves quickly. He is not frail. His big hands are powerful and strong, as are his arms and legs. Roy radiates energy; he is in constant motion.
When asked how he has stayed so healthy, Roy replied, “The Lord’s been good to me. I quit drinking and smoking and chewing and all that back in 1929. I think not doing that kind of stuff and living a reasonably clean life has helped me to stay so healthy.”
Raised on a farm in the North Carolina mountains, Roy went to Detroit during the Great Depression. There he worked checking the inventory of railroad cars for a factory that produced ice cream and refrigerator cabinets, and later he served as a security guard for the families of some of the automobile plant executives. After the Depression, Roy returned to the mountains and has since done just about everything from running a general store and making charcoal commercially in kilns he designed and built himself, to serving as sheriff of Madison County and raising skunks.
On our first visit with Roy, we were interested in the charcoal he had made because we had never interviewed anyone on that subject before. Roy could remember things so accurately and relate them in such detail that he made an excellent contact. As we talked with him, we found that he had done more than we had imagined and we went back to interview him two more times during
the summer.
On one visit with Roy we stayed overnight in his cabins. We arrived in the afternoon and stayed until late afternoon the next day. We took eight rolls of film and made four hours of tape recordings. When we first got there, we made a couple of hours of tape and then took a break for supper. Roy’s wife made some hush puppies and fried some trout which Roy had raised in the pond beside the café. We ate outside under an open-sided picnic shelter which he had built.
After the meal, he showed us around his place. Behind the café stretches a long, narrow flat sandwiched between the banks of the Laurel River and the side of a mountain. Down the middle of this flat runs a gravel driveway. As one looks down the driveway, on the right side there is a row of small log cabins which he rents out to summer tourists. Beyond these cabins is an unpainted, two-story cement-block garage. Next to that is a rock springhouse that he built. On the left side of the driveway sits Roy’s house—a silver two-story cement-block structure with the river running directly behind it. Beyond the house is the picnic shelter, and there is a small lawn with a swing between the two.
While he was showing us around, we found out about his sense of humor. Roy is almost never without a smile and is always looking for a laugh. As we were walking around, he was demonstrating a sling he had made. We marveled at how far he could sling a rock, and I ventured to question his accuracy. Without the slightest hesitation, Roy directed me to stand on a stump. I unknowingly did so, thinking I was going to have a good view. Then Roy placed a rock on the top of my head and stepped back confidently, saying, “How much you want to bet I can get that rock off your head?”
PLATE 70 Roy Roberts on a pair of Tom Walkers he makes for the children who stay at his cabins.
PLATE 71 The Old Mill Wheel Café at the intersection of the Laurel River and Hurricane Creek highways (25-70 and 208).
PLATE 72 Looking from the picnic shelter toward the café and highway, the row of cabins is visible on the left.
PLATE 73 From the highway across the Laurel River, spread along the opposite bank, are Roy’s picnic shelter, garage, the cabins, and his home.
PLATE 74
PLATE 75 A closeup of the front of one of the cabins. On the porch is a chair Roy carved out of a solid log with a chain saw.
PLATE 76 Roy shooting the water gun he made for us.
PLATE 77 Roy demonstrating the fly gun he made while we stayed with him.
PLATE 78 The rock springhouse Roy built. Three poles run from the roof to a nearby hemlock tree so squirrels can feed on the roof.
PLATE 79 Detail of the rock sculpture on top of the springhouse.
In an instant I had snatched it off and was down, saying, “You’re crazy!”
By then he was almost in tears from laughing so hard. “See? It works every time!” he said. Throughout the rest of our visit I watched him closely, and he had fits of laughter as he recalled the incident.
Then we went back to the shelter and sat around the cement picnic tables, and he began to show us how to make some of the toys he used to play with when he was a child. That’s when the fun began. As he would remember things, he would get excited and his eyes would light up. Once he had found the right wood, he sat and whittled while he reminisced until late in the night. After showing us how to make two different kinds of whistles and a popgun, he decided he needed a different stick of wood. So off he went, romping through the woods at ten o’clock at night with no flashlight in the pitch-black darkness. He left us sitting there, dead tired and sleepy-eyed, wondering what was going on. We could hear him thrashing around and breaking branches. By the time we had figured out what he was doing and had started out after him, he was already back with a satisfied grin on his face, holding a perfect stick for his next toy.*
We were ready to call it a day, but he was just getting started. We finally got to bed after he showed us how to make a fly gun.
Roy was waiting for us when we woke up the next morning. He had been up for hours and had already fed the squirrels that come every day to the roof of his springhouse on wooden poles he has running from a nearby tree. He had even made another toy that shot little wooden pegs.
We made some more tape recordings and a water gun. Then we drove ten miles over the mountains to see Roy’s abandoned charcoal kilns and his old stores. He had us struggling to keep up with him as he pointed out different features. After that, Roy took us to some land he used to own and showed us a lake and a dam he had built himself. We straggled behind him as he marched up and down hills and through the woods.
Finally all of our film was used and our tapes were full, so we packed up and headed for home. We were all worn out and slept on the way. They say time flies. Well, I don’t think even time can keep up with Roy Roberts.
—KYLE CONWAY
Interviews and photographs by Kyle Conway, Al Edwards and Chet Welch. Edited by Kyle Conway and Chet Welch with help from Al Edwards, Allison Adams, Greg Darnell, and Cheryl Wall.
I know that everybody that comes through here [looks at these mountains and wonders] the same thing. A few years ago we had a vanful of people come by and stop. They was from Michigan and they was going over here to camp for the summer. One of the girls, she seemed to be the spokesman, and she kept looking around. She said, “Mister, I’d like to ask you a question.”
I said, “Okay.”
She said, “I want to know how you people live around here.”
“Well,” I said, “I’m going to tell you. Most of us make liquor!”
She didn’t say a thing. She got kind of distant. She didn’t smile or nothing.
“Was you born around here somewhere?”
I said, “Yes. I was born right over the hill there twenty years ago!” She smiled then.
But anyway, I’ve wondered myself how we made a living. That time was different than it is now. Everybody tended these hills and made their own corn. There were corn mills that they could take their corn to and grind it. They made their own vegetables. They canned those vegetables. Maybe they had a tobacco crop. And we used horsepower to plow our gardens. They had their own cows to milk. They had their own hogs, and maybe they sold a calf from that cow. We didn’t have gasoline. We didn’t have no telephones. We didn’t have no televisions. A gallon of kerosene would last you a month and cost you ten cents. What did you have to buy in the first place? All you had to buy was your clothes—maybe thread—and your coffee. If you had any cereal, oatmeal or rice, you bought that, or sugar. A few things like that you had to buy. Besides that, all you had to do was pay your taxes. You can see what I’m talking about. Everybody got by. We were poor, but we never did go without something to eat. Always had plenty to live on.
One time my dad bought a farm on credit. I believe it was eighty acres. It had a house on it, and we had to finish up the house and clear [the land up]. We just fixed it up so we could live in it. We had to go out and we had to peel chestnut oak bark, and we paid for that place cutting chestnut oak bark for a tannery. We’d peel around the tree and we’d cut the tree down and we’d stack the bark with the sap down—lean [the strips of bark] up against the tree. In the fall we’d come back and carry that bark out. If we couldn’t get our sled up to where the bark was, we would pile it on top of brush and pull it down the mountain with horses to our wagon. Then we’d haul it to Barnard, which was ten miles, and pile it up there until we got a [railroad] carload. Then we would load that car up and ship it on. We paid for that place like that.
[But even with as little as we were making, some people would try to cheat us.] My dad sold [that tanbark] to a middleman. I remember one time my dad sold it to this man. Dad was pretty good estimating weights and whatnot. So [after we were paid], he said, “Boys, we didn’t get [credit for] our full weight on that.” So we went to the agent at the depot and Dad got the name of the company [the agent had] sent it to, and the [actual] weight on that certain car. [Turned out] the man had took us for I don’t know how many ton of that bark. Well, Dad confronted the [buyer] and he wo
uldn’t pay [the balance]. So what he did, he got judgment against the buyer. This man was buying and selling telephone poles also. My dad found out about it and ran an attachment on [a shipment of poles] till he paid off. It’s hard to make an honest living, but the results down the road is sure.
[Though we didn’t make much], we didn’t miss things because we didn’t have [them] and didn’t know about [them]. I’m going to say that it brought your family closer together because of the fact that you stayed together and talked your problems over. You loved each other better and so when you got to thinking about that, I think it’s a better living than it is right now. Our parents, now, they loved us and we loved our parents. We obeyed our parents and we did what they wanted.
[Of course, there were some disadvantages then, too. In those days] if you needed a doctor, the doctor would call on you at home. You wouldn’t go to a hospital. Never heard of a hospital. [If] you needed a doctor, you’d have to send someone to get him. It’d be eight or ten miles away. Take you half a day to go and get him. So you better not get sick. It ain’t like it is now.
[Since it was so hard to get a doctor in there], my grandfather and my father and all of [the other men of the community] went ahead and made a horse path across the mountain and called it the Doc Woody trail because the doctor was Burnett Woody.
You should have seen that doctor when he come across there. He was a big cutup. This fellow was the first fellow I ever saw wore a pompadour haircut. But I was on that road one time and he come by. I had heard that he would catch boys and he would get him a limb and wear the boys out just for fun. All the boys were scared to death of him. I was up one of those serviceberry trees and there he come along. [He] looked up there and saw me and tried to get me to come down. I wouldn’t!
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