Foxfire 9

by Foxfire Fund, Inc.

  We had a road built up to the top of the kilns so when the wood got up past the doors and you couldn’t load any more from the bottom, we would drive up there and finish loading the wood down through those two-foot holes on top of the kiln. We would put our smaller pieces on the bottom and their size would increase as you went up. You could use wood two foot [in diameter] at the top because your heat was greater at the top than it was at the bottom and your big wood wouldn’t char if it was at the bottom.

  For starting the fire, in the third rick from the back we’d have a core of dry wood built in there two and a half feet wide by three feet high. That dry wood would start out pretty readily.

  In the front of the kiln, the wood was stacked straight up away from the door, not up against it. If a fire got up against the door, the door would get red hot and start buckling. Sometimes it would buck anyway because burning wood would fall up against the inside bottom of the door. We had a lot of trouble with that, so I invented a shelf-like stand that stood against the door and when wood fell down, it kept it away from the bottom.

  When we got it all loaded up, we would close the door. To seal it, we tightened the buttons on the sides and at the top. Then we mixed clay dirt and put it all around the door. That sealed that. We had to have it completely airtight. If it developed a crack in it, we had to watch it and seal it to keep the smoke and heat in. After we sealed it, I’d open that center thing in the door and take the center plate in the ceiling off to give it a draft while the fire got started.

  To light it, I had a twenty-one-foot reinforcement rod with a burlap sack saturated with kerosene wrapped around the end. Then I would set that afire and run it through that hole to where my dry wood was. I would hold it there until I felt like I got it lit, and then take it out. Maybe ten minutes after it got started, we would put the center plate back and put dirt on it.

  One little old boy one time said, “How do you light that thing?”

  I said, “Well, I get a boy to crawl back under there to light it.” I was just kidding.

  He said, “Ain’t you afraid he’ll get hung?”

  I said, “No. I tie a rope around him, and when he gets hung, I pull him out.”

  He said, “How much do you pay for a job like that?”

  I said, “I pay five dollars.”

  He said, “Do you pay him every time he comes?”

  I said, “Well, in his case I don’t. He owes me money and I just give him credit when he comes out.”

  He said, “Hell,” and turned around and walked off!

  After it got going good, it got red hot and you could look down in there and it was like looking into torment.

  When you lit that back in the kiln, after four, five, or six days that fire would burn to the front. When the fire came to the front, then you had to close the vent in the front door and seal everything. Then, instead of controlling the air intake from the front, since you didn’t have no more control down here, you had to do all the operation from the top. [You did that by controlling the air intake through the vent pipes that went around the sides and the back—the terra-cotta flues.] I had a little metal dish that went over the top of each one—they were just like two half-moons joined with a rivet—and you could look down in those holes and you could see the sparks coming up. When you saw the sparks down in there, you’d know that your wood over to that hole was charred. Then you would take your dish and put it over that flue pipe and put dirt over it. That would close that one off [and the kiln would start drawing air through a different flue].

  See, the kiln would have lots of different degrees of heat in there. One section over here would be cold and one over here would be hot. The smoke would come out the flue where the heat was the greatest, and air would intake where it was the less. So when we stopped the front up, it would start the intake from one of those cool spaces at the top. It would go to sucking air down through one or two of them. So I could open it up and give it air as I wanted to and control the burn from the top.

  After two weeks, you’d open it up and you’d start to load the charcoal out. It would be settled down three and a half feet, and it would still be in sticks ranging in size from your finger up to two foot. Sometimes you would find out that it wouldn’t be completely out. You would see smoke and you could feel the heat coming off the hot spot. The fire would always be in the center of a big stick you didn’t have completely out. It would start building up, and after a while, it would get afire. I learned how to put that fire out. I would have everything closed off, and I would come up to the top and take one of those plates off and take a water hose and flood that where it was hot. It would build up steam and in turn the steam would put the fire out. Steam was a greater fire extinguisher, I found, than anything. It would put a fire out when nothing else would.

  It took two or three days, or sometimes a week, to unload it. Under normal conditions, a seventy-cord kiln loaded with good wood should have from thirty to thirty-five tons of coal. I had a front-end loader with a big dipper that we used to load it into a truck. Then we would haul it to Asheville and dump it. We had two trucks that we used to haul it in. I thought it was a pretty good operation. The Forest people brought some people from Siam to see it. I thought, “Well, it must be pretty good for them to bring those people over here.”

  The briquetting people would take the charcoal and process it into briquets. They would run it through a hammer mill and turn it into dust. Then they would mix it with commercial starch and water and drop it down into a press and press that. From that it went on a conveyor to a furnace to dry it. Then they weighed it and bagged it.

  PLATE 90 “I had a little dish that I would lay on top of the flues. They were just like two half-moons put together with a rivet in the center. I could open it up and give it air if I wanted to.”

  PLATE 91 Inside one of the kilns, one realizes how large they are. Note the arched ceiling and a part of one of the three square openings in the top.

  When the briquetting people closed down, I had a kilnful of charcoal with no place to sell it. So I decided I was going to get rid of it somehow. I started to bag it and put it under my own name. I put it in ten-pound bags and sold it all out, but it took me three or four years to do it. At that time, we sold it for thirty-two dollars a ton delivered in Asheville. When I started bagging it, I sold it for $180 a ton bagged, so I come out on it.

  But overall I lost money on the operation. I didn’t make enough to pay for the construction of the kilns.

  I had my store from ’35 to ’69. At the time that I sold it, we were selling $70,000 worth of merchandise a year. The boy that bought it from me just went out of business recently. The place grew up. Somebody told me the other day the roof was falling in. It sure has changed since I had it.

  But I tell you right now, it was a busy place.

  EARL GILLESPIE’S PRODUCE MARKET

  My papa [grandfather], Earl Gillespie, has sold produce most of his life. He first peddled cabbage and apples from a horse-drawn wagon and later opened a produce store in Clayton. I got involved in this article because I was interested in what he used to do. I had heard some things about the way he used to run the store but I had never heard the whole story. So when Wig brought up the idea to do the article, I was more than willing to interview Papa.

  This article is based on Papa’s store, how it was run, what it looked like, how he shipped his produce, etc. I remember when I was younger, I used to stay around the store much of the time after school and during the summers. One thing that sticks out in my mind is the wooden floors covered with a light coat of dust. I also remember the old cash register and how I would just sit in front of it opening the drawers with the lever and then closing them again. There was also the potbellied stove in which coal was burned, and the shed filled with tables high enough for me to walk under that had sacks of fertilizer and seed on them.

  Today my father and uncle are partners in a large cabbage business. They have hundreds of acres of cabbage in Dillard and Mou
ltrie, Georgia, and Hastings, Florida. Papa got them interested in the business as boys. Every now and then, he would let them sell a load of cabbage. When they first started, he would loan them the money to buy the cabbage and they would keep any profit made off the sales. Then when they were about in the tenth grade, he took them to the bank to get their own loan.

  PLATE 92

  In the summers, I work for my Uncle Jim in Dillard; I have been working for him and my father since I was seven and have learned how to drive a tractor and how to raise and sell cabbage. This summer my uncle is planning on letting me and two of my friends who work with me have our own field. So who knows? Maybe he is starting the third generation of Gillespies in the business.

  RANCE GILLESPIE

  EARL GILLESPIE: Old man Frank Earl was one of the first builders we had. He was the best builder we had back in those days. I was named after him. He tried to get my father to go into business with him, but Dad said that he was going to spend most of his time with his boys. My father’s name was James Brabson. Dr. Brabson of Macon County was the one that delivered and named him. Back then Dr. Brabson had to ride a horse from right this side of Franklin.

  Our house was up in the valley toward Rabun Gap. Like most people around here, we lived pretty hard. When I was growing up, they used to make our underclothes out of fertilizer sacks. They were rough. Our hand towels came from them also. Finally they got stuff made out of cotton. An old man down here one time said he didn’t know what to think about these new drawers!

  We raised all our own food, and we gathered some stuff from the woods. When Daddy would bring the chestnuts in the house, we would scald them in the shell. We had a big vat or a big tub and we would pour four or five bushels of chestnuts in that hot water and stir them up. Just keep stirring them that way and the chestnuts would get hot enough to kill the germs in them. That would keep the shell and the meat of the nut soft. It wouldn’t get hard then. Then we would put salt on them. I’ve seen upstairs at the old homeplace as much as five hundred bushels of chestnuts at one time. We could have made bread or something with them but we never did. All we did was just eat them.

  We had rail fences on each side of the road and we also used rail fences to keep the livestock up, and to keep people from coming in on your land. I remember our first rail fence down at the old homeplace. We had locust stakes, two of them in each place where the rails crossed, and we put them down in the ground and put a wood cap over them. You couldn’t tear it down; you could hardly shake it. The locust stakes went straight down in the ground where the fence crossed and you put them on either side. Then you put the cap on top made out of chestnut or locust, either one. It is made out of just one big slab of wood. You bore two holes in it and just slide it down over the top of those two stakes. There wasn’t any use to put a peg in it but we sometimes did if we wanted extra support.

  We had horses, mules, cows. I’ve known my daddy to have twenty-five head of horses there at one time, and you know you have to have a very substantial place to keep a herd of horses. They will fight and run into that fence.

  And everybody raised cabbage. My uncle Bob had about twenty acres, and that was a lot of cabbage back in those days. I’d say it would be equivalent to two hundred acres today.

  Even when I was little, my father was dealing in produce—picking it up from farmers and taking it to cities to sell it for them. My father and I would go up to Scaley Mountain and haul produce out in a mule-pulled wagon. I first started going with my daddy when I was six years old. Then I started buying it by myself when I was about fourteen. Daddy just turned me loose. He said, “You’re gonna have to get up there and buy your own. Take the wagon up there and get me a load of cabbage.” And after I would buy the cabbage, Daddy would sell it. We were kind of in the business together. We would go up on the mountain and bring the cabbage down on a wagon. If there wasn’t enough cabbage we’d finish out a load with any type thing we could, like chestnuts and apples.

  PLATE 93 Earl Gillespie.

  PLATE 94 The old National Cash Register. Sara said, “Earl got it from the richest merchant in Elbert County. It was made in 1898. I would say a lot of money has been passed through it.”

  PLATE 95 When Wig was in college, he spent a summer in Rabun County, got to know Earl and Sara and their family, and drew this pen and ink sketch of the market in Clayton as a gift to the Gillespies.

  PLATE 96 Earl Gillespie recalling humorous memories.

  PLATE 97 Earl in his living room with his son Jim, Wig, his wife Sara, and his grandson Rance.

  One time we went up to Cartoogachaye and bought apples from Ed Battle. They were the best apples you ever ate. Coming through Gapple Mountain, me and Lawrence were driving the team. Dad said, “We will just spend the night here.” [Dad] was up in the wagon, me and Lawrence built up a fire, and a panther came so near you could see him in the light of the fire. The mules got to braying and everything. They could smell him, you know. We just stood there, me and Lawrence did, and watched him go loafing off down the hollow.

  We hauled the produce to towns like Athens and Washington and Thomaston and Elberton to sell it. Elberton was a good market. One time Dad and my brother had shipped a load of apples down there, and I went to help them finish selling those apples, and I decided to open a little store down there. That was in about 1925. Some of my brothers and I ran that store, and my father and the other brothers would stay in Rabun County and do the buying and keep us supplied. I have had as much as eight thousand bushels of apples in there at one time; and oranges, grapefruit, and tangerines brought up from Florida. We carried all that stuff. I would say we had one of the prettiest stores in Elbert County.

  Then the Depression hit and we lost it. I don’t like to think about that! And when some government jobs opened up in Rabun County, some of us left there and came back home. Not long after that is when I started my store in Clayton.

  I first remember coming to Clayton with my daddy. Daddy was on the jury. I saw the walkway and it was built out of plank then. The jury men were laying all over the sidewalk drunk. I asked my daddy what was wrong with them. I said, “Dad what are they doing?” He said, “Oh, they’re just asleep.” I went with my daddy on over to the courthouse and the judge was about as drunk as the rest of them. He about had to call court off, he got so drunk!

  When I came back, it still looked about the same. It was just a big mud hole. There still weren’t any paved streets or sidewalks. The sidewalks were board. I have seen mules mire up to their bellies there where the drugstores are now and up that hill there. The first time they tried to make an improvement on the streets they laid slabs, such as they have at these sawmills, on the street and that is what the wagon had to roll over. They laid them crossways slightly on top of each other.

  Just before the Depression, there wasn’t but about four or five stores in the whole town. Louie Young had one up on the corner, Leon Bleckley who was the mayor had one up there below the bank, Marcus Keener had one above Louie Young’s, and Bryant Hill had one. When the Depression came, some of those stores had to go out of business. Leon’s was a grocery store. It wasn’t the first grocery store in Clayton. Marcus Keener had the first grocery store. When I say grocery store, I mean they sold coffee, flour, dry goods and all that too. They kept their produce under the counter. Then the rest of the stuff was the coffee, flour, hardware, and cloth. Almost all those general Stores had a little produce back under the counter. They kept tomatoes and cucumbers and squash, and so forth. They didn’t have it out on the main floor because there wasn’t enough room. They had to keep it under the counter. On the main floor they had stuff like shoes, dry goods. The old stores kept canned goods, salmon and stuff, back under the counter.

  But I was the first real produce store in Clayton, and I was the only store in town that also sold wholesale. I started with produce about 1932—rented the building for seventy-five dollars a month. Then I moved into wholesale about 1934, and borrowed the money to buy the building. It co
st three thousand dollars. I got five hundred dollars from Tom Hamby and the rest from T. A. Duckett at the bank. And I paid it back in four or five years. They didn’t want me to pay them off that fast. They wanted to keep getting the interest from the loan. But they didn’t pull that stuff on me. I was about as slick as they were! I went ahead and paid it because I wanted to be in full ownership.

  When I first got that store, it was just an old empty framed-in building. It used to be a blacksmith shop. It didn’t have a ceiling in it, no weatherboard or anything like that. The studs showed and everything. The outside was covered with clapboard. The inside had nothing in it. It was just gutted out. I’ve had hay and cottonseed meal packed to the ceiling. The first thing I did was put in a ceiling. And I had a shed put on. My brother and I built that shed, and then on the inside Harmon Deal and I put the ceiling in.

  It was pretty rough, but it worked out. Customers would come and tie their horses and mules up right in front of the store when the streets were still mud. And I sold a few things besides produce—not many: some hardware, clothing, Pittsburgh Paint. I was the first to sell that in Clayton. The paint and flour and stuff like that would carry me through the winter months when there wasn’t much produce. But we made it a policy that when a man called for an item that we didn’t have, we wouldn’t order it until three customers requested it. It just wasn’t worth buying something that wouldn’t sell, and I couldn’t afford it.

  I had a coffee mill that I would parch coffee in. I would parch it, then I would put it in a grinder and grind it up. I had me a grinder that I would pour the parched coffee in and grind it up. I parched it in a skillet on a potbelly stove that I had there at the store. Some customer wanted it blended, and I’d take Luzianne and Teaberry coffee and mix it for them.