Foxfire 9

by Foxfire Fund, Inc.

  And we [routinely] carried kerosene, snuff, tobacco, flour, meal, coffee, sugar, rice and oatmeal and whatever. Just anything we could fit in that truck. We even had thread. Anything we could get our hands on, we traded. We sold fruit in the fall. We sold a lot of toys at Christmastime.

  All that stuff we would swap. People would bring chickens and eggs to swap. We swapped for a lot of potatoes. One time I guess we had five hundred bushels of potatoes at one time. When we’d come back in from a round, we’d have that trailer behind our truck loaded to the top with what we’d taken in trade. We’d get twenty-five or thirty cases of eggs in one day. We’d have chickens, geese, herbs. We’d be eight or nine o’clock getting home at night. I had a hole down through the floor of that first store with a big coop boxed up down there, and I’d just open the door in the floor and drop the chickens down in there. The coop was pretty high off the floor and I’d go down there and feed ’em and water ’em. Then we candled our eggs. Sometimes we would have several dozen out of a case that were bad. When we was out on the road, we’d just have to buy ’em because there wasn’t no way to candle ’em out there. But back at the store I had a box with a light in it and two holes cut in it and I’d stick the eggs up to those holes two at a time. If they were good and clear, I would stick them back in the carton. Some of them would be just as black as they could be and they’d be just plain rotten.

  Then we’d have to take all that to the city and sell it to get our money out of it. We never got more eggs than we could sell. We always sold them out. Sometimes we’d get too many potatoes and we’d have to take them in the springtime and peddle them out. We always took them to Greene County, Tennessee. I had some boys that would go with me. One would go down one side of the street and the other would go down the other side. Both would have a half bushel of potatoes. The other man would drive the truck, and we’d sell forty or fifty bushels a day.

  You’d be surprised at the hams we bought to sell. Sometimes twenty-five or thirty hams a week. We took them to Asheville and sold them to a wholesaler. When I bought a ham, I could tell right away whether it was bad or not. There’s a place in a ham that you can stick a pencil plumb through, and all you do is stick that pencil in there and smell of it. If it smells good, it was a good ham. If it smells sour, don’t buy it.

  I had train engineers that would stop at my place right quick and pick one up. One would call ahead and tell me to have a ham there. I’d have one and put it on his engine and he’d take it on. One of my brothers was loading up a load of hams in the store one time. We had a set of steps that come up from back of the store. This engineer come up there and got a ham and just turned around and took off. My brother said, “What’s he doing with that ham?”

  I said, “He’s taking it.”

  He said, “He ain’t been waited on!”

  I said, “When he gets to Knoxville, he’ll send me the money back.” My brother thought he was stealing it, but he had just stopped the train for a second to pick one up and he was just in a hurry!

  PLATE 86

  We also bought herbs to sell. I had started collecting herbs when I was a little boy. I bought ’em and sold ’em even then. I remember one time that we had these elders. They have a white blossom. I collected the blossoms off them and had a twenty-five-pound bagful, and I walked, I guess, five miles across a mountain to a store and sold that bag of flowers for a quarter. When I had my store, we’d go out and buy roots and herbs and botanical drugs that the customers had to sell. We’d buy those and then take them to a wholesale drug company in Asheville and sell them. Before we would pay the customers, we always had to check on the prices the wholesale company was going to give us because they would change every week. If they got a surplus of one kind, why they’d lower the price on it. We’d buy ginseng—I still buy and sell ginseng—witch-hazel leaves, cherry bark, wahoo bark, yellowroot, poke. We’d just buy hundreds of different things like that and sell them.

  Take all that stuff in solid truckloads to town, and when we got done, we’d bring the money back. My two brothers helped me operate that rolling truck store, you know, and we divided up the profits. That was a pretty big operation to load that stuff and check your stock in the evening and take inventory and unload the chickens and eggs and empty the coops and load them back on the truck late that night ready for the next morning. It was a big job.

  When the war came, my brothers had to get a defense job or go to the army, one, and so they worked in the atomic energy plant down at Oak Ridge making those atomic bombs that bombed Japan; so we had to close down the rolling store. We had a good business with it until then, though. We traded anything the customer wanted to trade—anything we could use or sell.

  And, of course, with a business in the country like that, you had to give credit. I wish I could have sold everything for cash. Right now I figure I’ve got out on credit from forty to sixty thousand dollars coming to me. Two years ago, I had a woman call me from up in West Virginia. She said, “Roy, we owe you some money, don’t we?”

  I said, “Yes, you do.”

  She said, “It’s something over a hundred dollars, isn’t it? I’m going to send you a hundred dollars.” She did, and that was to pay on a bill they had run up in 1940. Every year I get money like that, and I haven’t run my stores for over fifteen years.

  But you’d trust a man until you’d find out [that you couldn’t]. A lot of times, these people that will beat you—they’ll beat you and you a-lookin’ at ’em. He’ll beat you and you’ll swear he’s a good man. A fellow owes me for five gallons of gas—a dollar and five cents—from the first day I was in operation. I haven’t forgotten.

  I had an experience with one fellow. He came in there and lightning had hit his house. His wife was at the sink washing dishes and lightning went through the sink and busted one of her legs up. He owed me for fertilizer, and he always paid me. So when he come to pay me that fall, I said, “If you’re hurtin’ now, you can pay me later.” He’s never been to see me yet. He still owes me that bill. And he was a preacherman’s boy. That hurts more than anything when you trust a man to that extent—try to help him out and then he beats you.

  A lot of fellas don’t intend to pay you. Did you ever notice? A man of that nature is always in hard luck. He’s never got money. He finally gets in a place where he can’t get no credit and people won’t trust him, and if he gets in a hard place then, he’s a-hurtin’. An honest man can go out there and get more credit than he’ll ever pay back any time he wants it. If you prove that you have credit, anybody that you ask will hand you money. That’s been my experience. I remember one boy—I sold him thirteen hundred-pound bags of flour and that kept his family over the whole year. He was a good boy. The same boy came to me and said, “What’s your fertilizer going to be next year?”

  I said, “I don’t know. I haven’t got the price on it yet.”

  “Well,” he says, “here’s three hundred dollars. You keep it until I get ready to get mine.” That’s the way I like to trade.

  But when you deal with the public, you’ll have trouble. Even if you do the very best you can. A few times we went to town and the trailer would be loaded up to where you couldn’t hardly see the trailer for the roots and herbs and things. We’d get to town and there would be a big rock in the middle of our roots and herbs. I had one man who sold us a case of fresh eggs every week. Then the wholesale man began to complain. He said two or three layers in the case were missing every time. So we had that kind of stuff. You just wait and expect it in the future. The customer is always right. You’re not right, the customer is right. I’ve made up stuff that I knew good and well was right, but it was wrong [according to the customer]. If you argue with a man, you’ll lose him. Naturally he can’t come back and face you. You just lost him as a customer.

  [But we did pretty well, all in all.] Just kept trying new things and figuring out ways to make one business support another. Like I was talking about those rotten eggs? Well, back in ’39 or ’40, the
y was a boy brought me a couple of young skunks. I guess he was drunk when he got them. He was pretty bad to drink. Well, I said I’d just keep ’em. I began to pet ’em, and later I decided just for the fun of it I’d raise me some. So I got hold of some more. A skunk makes a good pet, but you’ve got to get ’em when they’re young and work with ’em. A big skunk will eat you up. He’ll eat you up in a minute.

  So at one time I had about forty of them. I built me a lot up on my daddy’s place to keep them. I built it out of wire, and on top of the posts I put me a piece of tin, so if they climbed that post they couldn’t get out. I had little hollow logs that went back into the ground and they could be back in there in a box where it was dark. I had a place where I could take my lid off so I could get at them. It was a pretty good setup. I could call them skunks and here they’d come!

  But they weren’t descented. When a skunk is going to discharge, he’ll look at you, and to scare you off he’ll turn his tail towards you. He’ll turn around here and throw his tail up and keep going sideways. What I learned to do is just to back up and you didn’t get sprayed. He will turn around and start going the other way. If they do decide to throw that scent, they will turn around. They’ll bow up and pull that tail wrongside out and those tubes will be exposed and he’ll press that muscle back there like a little syringe and out comes the fluid. You had to get used to being sprayed. You have to learn to sleep by yourself and things like that! When I was around them, I always wore some old clothes. Baking soda is the best thing to get the smell out. Whenever I would get someone to help me with them, I’d have to change men the next time because they would only do it one time and that was all!

  I decided that I needed to deodorize ’em. I kept studying and studying and finally I got onto some stuff that showed me how to descent them, and I learned to do that myself. The word got around and people in California heard about it and they contacted me and said they would like to come and make a newsreel. They came and made a newsreel of my skunks. That was back in, I guess, 1940 or ’41. Well, I got letters from Panama, England, Michigan, and everywhere. I got letters from people wanting to know about them. At that time, I sold them for five dollars apiece.

  We saved all the eggs that we candled and discarded to feed the skunks. That’s what they liked the best—them old eggs. It was funny how they would break an egg. They would catch it in their front feet and they’d throw it behind them between their back legs. If it didn’t hit something behind them and break, they’d turn around and throw it in a different direction. They’d keep on until they heard a crack. If they missed several times, they’d get impatient, and boy they’d get in a hurry then.

  I had two of them that would follow me around. They liked insects of all different kinds—particularly little black bugs that would be under boards. I’d turn boards over, and boy those skunks, here they’d come, and hunt for those insects. I’d go and hunt another board and they’d follow me over to get those insects out.

  I would experiment with ’em. I’d catch a mouse and tie a piece of thread to its legs and turn him loose, and boy you talking about a time now. The skunks would have a time trying to get ahold of it, you know. They were quick. They loved those mice, but they wouldn’t eat a rat. Nothing will eat a rat!

  Then, since I had a wood business anyway, I decided to try charcoal. We had a man who came down from out West somewhere. He wanted to get a bunch of people to make charcoal, so he contacted me and I decided I would make some. I had seen one or two [kilns in use]. There was one in Buncombe County around the Asheville area and I went over and looked at it. I talked with them and saw some of the troubles they had, so I designed mine differently and improved on theirs. I never saw any [kilns] constructed exactly like [mine].

  I think it cost me $10,000 to build those kilns. I done my own construction. I guess it took four or five months—maybe more—[to build them]. Incidentally, the sides and back was underground. It was a steep hillside, so we hauled a lot of dirt out to make those kilns. We had a couple of dump trucks, and I rented an air compressor, hammers, and drills. The back part was fifteen foot of solid rock, and I had to drill and shoot all that rock out.

  When I was moving this dirt, I came across some dark-looking dirt in the clay. I kept watching, and after a while I came across some bones. Well, one of the Forest Service men was acquainted with bones and he said it was human bones. I had run into a grave. I kept all the bones and I buried them again in a different place. I asked an old man about it. I said, “Did you ever hear of anybody being buried there?”

  He said, “No, but I can tell you my opinion. I think my opinion is correct.” He said, “When they built this railroad here, it was built by slave labor, and wherever a slave died, that’s where they buried him.” He said, “I’d say that was a slave buried there.” I’d say the man was right.

  We made three kilns. [Each kiln]was twenty-four feet wide by thirty and a half feet long. They each had an arched ceiling [that was] fifteen feet high from the floor to the complete top of the arch. It was twelve feet high to where the ceiling began to arch. The kilns were made out of steel and concrete. I believe it took two [railroad] carloads of cement, and I don’t know how much gravel. We ordered the gravel from South Carolina. We tied steel reinforcement rods on one-foot centers. Then we got plyboard forms and a vibrator to vibrate the cement down as we poured it in and made the walls. We got timbers and supports underneath a plyboard form to shape the ceiling. We welded steel and then poured a foot of concrete on top.

  We also had to put these [six-inch-in-diameter] terra-cotta pipes along the sides and back of the kilns at the base. There are seventeen of those [in each kiln] and they are placed four foot apart all the way down both sides and across the back. They are placed about one inch above the floor and they go through the walls. Then they turn up in an “L” shape and go all the way to the top and extend three foot above the top of the kilns. Those pipes were my flues.

  Then at the top of each kiln’s arch are three two-foot-square openings—one in the front and one in the center and one in the back—and each one has a little bit of a recession to hold a quarter-inch steel plate. When the kiln was burning, those plates sat down over the three openings. The idea was that if you had spontaneous combustion in there, it would blow these plates away and save the kiln from blowing up. They were like safety valves [on a boiler]. I’ve had them blow up with me and blow the double metal doors on the front of the kiln completely off. When that happened, I would have to get a tractor to lift those three-thousand-pound doors back. If you didn’t do it in a hurry, that fire would get out of control, so I learned how to control my spontaneous combustion by putting those relief holes up there on top to let the pressure off.

  PLATE 87 Roy’s charcoal kilns. Roy is explaining to us how the doors of the kilns worked.

  PLATE 88

  Those doors were made of quarter-inch-thick steel, reinforced with heavy angle iron to keep them from buckling. That was part of my invention. Each door was ten foot high and ten foot wide—big enough when they was opened so that we could back our trucks right into the kilns and unload the wood right in there. The doors were on rails so they would slide open or shut, and when they were pushed together, we’d fasten them down with quarter-inch-steel iron buttons that were spaced eighteen inches apart. Then we had a smaller sliding door made in the bottom of each of the big doors so we could get through the door to start the fire. It also acted as a little vent, and you could give the fire a small amount of air or give it a lot.

  PLATE 89: On top of the kiln, Roy lifted the lid off one of the square openings. “If you were experienced, you knew what was going on down there.”

  Then the floor of each kiln was slightly tilted toward the front because when I was making charcoal, there was a liquid that came out of that wood—it was moisture that would come out of the ends of the wood and sizzle. With the floor tilted, that liquid would run to the front. It took almost a two-inch pipe to carry that stuff out. When it firs
t started coming out, it would be kindly brown; then the next day it would be browner; then after a while it would turn black, then tar would come out.

  We also had the kilns spaced apart from each other and we put rock in between our kilns and filled that space with dirt so that the kilns would be insulated and would stay hot from one operation to the next. You wouldn’t lose much heat that way. And I had about a foot of dirt piled on top of them. I never saw it done before, but I figured if we didn’t put some dirt on the top and it come a sudden rain with those kilns red hot up there, it would ruin them. That dirt turned into solid clay, you know? In front, you could feel the heat way out away from them, but on top it didn’t get too hot because of that dirt. Sometimes we even cooked up there. I would just take a place and beat that clay up into dust and I would put green corn and potatoes under that dust and cook dinner that way.

  We used hardwood to make charcoal. If you didn’t have a hard wood, you didn’t have a heavy coal. The more dense your wood, the heavier your coal and the more tonnage you had. There would be more profit and less work. I also found out the smaller the wood you had, the less tonnage you had because you had more bark. The very best wood for making charcoal was hickory, ash, oak, apple or sugar maple. I liked to use green wood over dry wood because the burning process was easier to control.

  It took one week to load one of those kilns up. Each would hold seventy cords, or 8,960 cubic feet of wood. What you would do when you started packing your wood in there was to go back to the back and lay an eight-inch stick of wood down facing the front so that it wouldn’t obstruct one of the flues in the back. Then you would do the same with another one. You would lay them about four foot apart all the way across. Then you would come back and lay three sticks across each four-foot section—one stick in the front and one in the middle and one in the back. Then you would come back and do the same thing again, making a rick about twelve inches high. [This would provide an air space for the flues.] Then you would do the same thing along the sides. From then on, you would stack your wood solid all the way to the ceiling.