Foxfire 9

by Foxfire Fund, Inc.

  But the Depression hit us hard. I could tell a difference. The demand for the stuff that I was selling just was not there. People just were not able to buy it. They couldn’t pay for it. I used to take in corn, potatoes and stuff like that for exchange. That was the way I kept my stock up. And me and Leon Bleckley used to walk home at night. Leon would say, “Earl, I had a good day’s business today. I did $3.75.” He was honest in it, too. And maybe I done $1.25. That’s a fact. That’s all I made some days. [What kept me from going out of business during the Depression] was, I had a lot of guts. That is the big thing. I took chickens and eggs [in trade]. I never did say no to people. [One time] George Darnell brought me seven two-hundred-to three-hundred-pound hogs. I gave George a little cash and the rest of it he took in flour. I took the hogs and cut them up and salted them down and sold them.

  Then when a train would wreck and maybe the cars were off the track or off down in a holler, I would go down there and look at what was in the cars. I would say “I’ll give you so much for this.” I bought the stuff at a big discount. They almost gave it away. Down in Elberton was a good place for that stuff. Seaboard railroad went through there. You will always hear about when a train wrecks. Somebody is going to tell you about it. Then you go down there and you don’t say anything to them when you first get down there. You wait maybe three or four hours for everybody to settle down. Then you ask them what would they take for that car out there. We salvaged groceries, flour, lard, coffee and all that stuff. It wasn’t even hurt. The people that owned the stuff on the train, the insurance would pay them off.

  But the big thing that kept us going was hauling that produce wholesale to markets like Atlanta. By that time I had a truck. The first truck I got was from Uncle John Howard. Of course, it wouldn’t haul but about thirty to forty bushels of apples. A pickup truck these days would haul more than it could. It was a T model. I got it in 1919. By the time I opened up in Clayton, I had a much bigger one.

  What we’d do is go around to the fields and pick up the produce. The farmers would pick it and I would come by and pick it up. Like we might go up to Jackson County, and all there was were these little narrow, muddy roads. It would take us all day or two days, sometimes, to get loaded and get back.

  Back then those farmers would cut all the cabbage and put them in tubs. Then they would weigh each individual tub. Then they would put the tub on a sled and slide it off the mountain behind a mule. Then we’d load it on the truck. Then, coming back off these muddy roads, we sometimes had to tie a log behind the truck. That was the only way we could slow ourselves down. One time me and A. L. was coming off the mountain with what we thought was a heavy load—it would be no more than a good pickup load now—and our brakes were just about out. The roads were just wide enough for just one car. So coming down the mountain we cut a log down and hitched it behind the truck with a chain. I mean it wouldn’t stop us, but it kept us from speeding. If another car came we would just have to work our way around it. Sometimes they had places along the road to where you could pull over and get out of the way.

  Then we’d bring the produce back to the store and grade it and pack it. Pack the beans in hampers. Grade the potatoes and pack them. When I graded potatoes I would just run them through the warehouse behind the store. The grader was a frame with a wire cable doing the rolling. It was sized to drop out the small potatoes. I had people standing at the sides to pick out the bad ones. Then I bagged them in burlap sacks, a hundred pounds to the sack. So I took beans, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and all that to Atlanta. I insisted that [the farmers] grow a lot of different things so when I took it to Atlanta, I would have a market for it. I would take the produce down to Atlanta, even during the Depression, and I still got a market for it. People had to have something to eat, you know. All I would take were just vegetables and apples and anything that would sell.

  Back before we had trucks, it was pretty hard to get stuff to market. From the time we picked the produce up and took it to wherever it was we were going, it took us about two weeks. We would sleep under the wagon, camp out alongside the road or in the woods. Lots of times while we were camped out, people would come into the camp and buy stuff. Then after we sold out, we would try to come right back with the wagon. Lots of times they had a little campground or somewhere for us to camp and get water and stuff like that. I came in a snap of getting shot one time. We camped on this guy’s land and I went to his house and I said, “I’m camped up here and I want to get some water.” He came out there with a gun. I had a little short gun that I always carried with me and I pulled it out. He came to the camp to see if I was telling the truth. He said, “Well, young man, you told me the truth, but you came close to getting hurt.” We had to haul all of our feed for the horses. We grew most of the horse feed. We just packed the fodder or whatever kind of feed it was on top of the produce.

  But even after we got trucks it wasn’t much easier because the roads weren’t paved. It was dirt road all the way to Atlanta. Now there was one little strip of pavement in Habersham County. That was about sixty years ago. It was just a one-way drive. You couldn’t get but just one car on it at a time, and if you ran off the side of the road, you were in the mud. That stretch of pavement started over here at Dick’s Hill Road. Burnell Wilbanks, who has worked for us fifty years, used to carry water over there when the people were working on that road. It started just as the road starts down the hill and it went down there for less than two miles. That was a state project. I think it was a CCC deal. Burnell said they would go around in a truck and anybody that wanted to work they would put them on that road project. Burnell was about twelve years old then. He started hauling water. That was his first job. He just got a big five-gallon bucket and lugged that thing around with a dipper and started giving everybody water. He got ten cents a day.

  The reason they built it there was because ever’body was complaining about the road. According to Burnell, that used to be a big throughway where they used to bring all the apples and stuff through. They had to pave it because coming up that hill, ever’body was spinning or bogging down. It was paved out of brick, like Atlanta was first paved out of when I first started hauling produce down there.

  When you finally got to Atlanta, the market was located on Piedmont Avenue. The first market I carried a load down there to was a curb market. I would have to drive the truck in there. All they had was a simple market space in toward the sidewalk. The sidewalks were made out of plank. And you never knew what you were going to get for what you’d brought down. Sometimes we got caught in a bind. The market would clean out and we might get maybe two dollars a hundred for the cabbage. Then we would go buy another load based on the price that we got last, and we would come back and the market might drop down to say fifty cents a hundred. So you might lose like fifteen to twenty dollars plus your gas, and that was a big lick back then. The gas alone back then was twelve to thirteen cents a gallon. Then it started jumping up and every time the price of gas would go up I would raise the price of my cabbage. I had to, to make it work out for me.

  But there was no communication over the telephone or anything. Didn’t have phones. There was no communication at all. You had to take a chance. Whatever the market was the day you went down is what you got. It was a big gamble. You might lose thirty to forty dollars a load. That is like losing four hundred today.

  But they were taking a chance, too. You just had to work together or you were all in trouble. One of the buyers in Atlanta was W. W. Lowe, and he came to me one time asking for two bushels of beans. I said, “W. W. you don’t even take enough to advertise.”

  He said, “No, to tell you the truth, I don’t have the money.”

  I said, “Do you want me to change that?”

  He said, “I would appreciate it.” I unloaded all my beans. There were a hundred to a hundred and twenty-five bushels there. I just took his word that he would pay me back for them later. I’d let him take the responsibility for them and just pay me when he sol
d them. I said, “Just pay me for part of them and keep your capital to buy some other people’s beans if they come in here.”

  We were both taking a chance, but it worked out. Everybody was in together. Farmers took a chance on me, I took a chance on the market. Everybody risked.

  Jim, one of Earl’s three sons, got into the produce business through his father and is still in it today. He added a fitting conclusion to this article:

  Daddy’s big customers later on were Kroger, which used to be the Rogers Company, and Winn Dixie which was Dixie then. I still sell to them.

  The shelf life of the cabbage that Daddy used to work with was maybe two or three weeks without refrigeration. Now the cabbage will hold up two days without refrigeration. The cabbage now is grown for speed. Back then it would take at least a hundred and twenty days for it to mature. It grew nice and slow. Now we have seventy-five-day cabbage. Back then every head was placed in the truck by hand and done very slowly and carefully with every head pointed one way and the stalks pushed down. It made them look better. Now we have harvest crews just dumping it into a cart, then dumping it into a box, then loading it on a truck. Now, that’s handled three times. Then it goes to a chain store. Then the chain stores deliver it to the outlet store like Winn Dixie. Then it goes on the shelf. So you go in the store and say this produce stinks, but it has been handled four to six times. Back then everything was slow and easy and they took pride in their produce. You still try to take pride in it, but it’s just such a fast-moving thing now. That is the change in the produce Daddy was working with. He had time to work with it and market it. Now you have a matter of days to market it.

  One of the most interesting things is that the produce business is one of the last big businesses where still today there are no signed contracts. You phone the people from, say, Kroger and a price is agreed on. It makes no difference if the price goes up between the time that you make the deal and the time you sell them. I mean you readjust for your next load, but you get the agreed-on price for the last one, no matter what the market does. It is still just one of the old businesses where nothing is in writing. It is all your word over the telephone.

  * Directions for making these toys and scores of others appear in The Foxfire Book of Toys and Games: E. P. Dutton, 1985.

  “QUILTING—THE JOY OF MY LIFE”

  Aunt Arie Carpenter

  On many visits to our contacts, the subject of quilts often eases its way into our conversations. Though we have not published much on quilts in a long time (see The Foxfire Book, “A Quilt Is Something Human”), we have continued to gather information on quilting and some of the traditional quilt patterns of this area. What follows is only a sampling. We have an ongoing collection which includes examples and patterns for at least fifty quilts. Here we include a few that are unusual or visibly striking even in black-and-white photographs, but truly vivid when actually seen in color.

  For several years I have been aware of the many picturesque quilt patterns seen in homes around here. However, I had never realized the effort put into the actual sewing of those quilts. I have now begun to observe the quality of the tiny, hand-stitched rows of quilting. We have been told that traditionally the care and skill with which the stitches were made and the variety of embroidery stitches used by a young woman indicated that she was a good seamstress and considered very eligible for marriage.

  Several women we have talked to specifically for this quilt collection who are knowledgeable on the subject are Lassie Bradshaw and Mary Franklin, who operate the Georgia Mountain Arts Crafts Co-op in Tallulah Falls; Mrs. Harriet Echols, who has made quilts most of her life; Mrs. Clyde English, a retired high school teacher, who is actively involved in the Tiger [Georgia] Homemakers’ Club, which makes several quilts a year to raise money for community projects; Stella Burrell, who earns her living making quilts; and her daughter, Andrea Burrell Potts, who is a former Foxfire student and proprietor of the Tryphosa Craft Shop in Otto, North Carolina, specializing in the sale of handmade quilts made locally, Mrs. Esco Pitts, Mrs. Robert (Edith) Cannon and her sister Mrs. Rose O’Neal, Mrs. Isaac (Vernice) Lovell, and Mrs. Ruth Holcomb all shared their time, expertise, and love of quilting with us on cold, snowy days when we would spend three and four hours at each of their homes photographing, measuring, drawing diagrams, and asking questions. They allowed us to photograph old family quilts, giving us the histories of them and of new quilts that are copies of quilt patterns known to have been owned by people around here fifty and a hundred years ago.

  PLATE 98 The monkey wrench quilt on the frame the day we visited the Tiger Home-makers’ quilting was an old top, bought by Mrs. Clyde English from someone in Hiawassee, Georgia, that was being quilted for her to give to a member of her family. The eight to twelve ladies would finish this quilt in two to three days. They meet whenever it is convenient for them. Whenever they are quilting, they bring their lunches and quilt for however many hours they can work into their own schedules—sometimes only an hour or two, but usually four to six hours a day. When this quilt is finished, another member may bring one of hers to be quilted, or the ladies may donate a quilt top and quilt it to be sold and the money used for a community project.

  From left to right: Mildred Stroud, Rose O’Neal, Marian Gregory, Vernice Lovell, Mrs. Clyde English, Dot Parkman, Edith Cannon, and Myrtie York.

  PLATE 99 Mrs. Harriet Echols still makes quilts to sell and to give to her own children, nieces and nephews, grandchildren and, now, great-grandchildren. Here she is showing Shane Holcomb a quilt she has in her quilting frame and patterns of other quilts.

  MELINDA HUNTER

  Students who worked on quilt articles: Melinda Hunter, Shane Holcomb, Karen Lovell, Kim English, and Teresa Cook. Additional diagrams by Oh Soon Shropshire and Joseph Fowler.

  CRAZY QUILTS

  My project for the quilts article was to find out all I could about quilts called “crazy quilts” in our county, or friendship quilts if they are signed or personalized in some way and presented to someone as a gift.

  I started by following up a phone call from Mrs. Isaac (Vernice) Lovell, a member of the Tiger Homemakers’ Club who was present at the quilting we attended with Mrs. Clyde English. Mrs. Lovell allowed us to study and photograph a quilt that has been in her family for more than sixty years.

  Two outstanding examples of fine stitchery on crazy quilts were hanging right on the walls in our Foxfire classroom. They had been donated to us by Aunt Arie Carpenter more than ten years ago. When some Foxfire students were visiting her one time and admiring some of her quilts, she said:

  “I enjoy quilting the best of anything in this world. Get your cloth and get whatever design [you want to make]. How I wish I could quilt and do like I used to. This is Uncle Fred Childer’s wife’s scraps. All these is. Now I’d piece her one and me one, and she’d get her half and I’d get my half. That’s how come me to have so many quilts. Of course, I never had no such dresses as this. We wasn’t able to have it.

  “But quilting was the joy of my life. Working with that. Ever’ little piece.”

  Mrs. Sue Pennington, a charter member of the Rabun County Historical Society and an avid quilt collector, helped us identify the various stitches in the crazy quilts we had photographed, and gave us information that helped us ask the right kinds of questions of our contacts about crazy quilts.

  KIM ENGLISH

  REFERENCES

  Handbook of Stitches, Grete Petersen and Elsie Svennas. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1970.

  (Quilting Manual—Now! Designer’s Boutique, Delores A. Hinson. New York: Hearthside Press, Inc., 1970.

  PLATE 100 Shane Holcomb, left, and Kim English hold a quilt given to Foxfire by Aunt Arie Carpenter, which now hangs on display in our classroom. Aunt Arie told the students at the lime she gave it to them that it was made about the time of World War I and she called the pattern “fishtail.”

  There are only five primary pattern pieces for this quilt. Scam allowances should
be added to the dimensions shown. (Note the use of dark and light choices of fabrics to create a striking pattern.)

  The overall dimensions for this quilt are eighty-two by sixty-one inches. There are twenty blocks in the quilt. The piecing diagram (Plate 102) is for center block, sashes, and corner blocks. The strips between the finished squares arc called sashes, sashings, or slipings. Mary Franklin told us she had heard a woman years ago use the expression “sliping the quilt blocks.” Sliping is an old British expression used in quilling.

  PLATE 101

  PLATE 102

  PLATE 103 Even more interesting than the design on the front are the varied, intricate quilting patterns on the reverse side. The quilting patterns used for the outer blocks are elbow, straight, and diagonal. The six inside blocks have a common pattern in the center (note Plate 104) but have different corner designs (squares on left in Plate 105) and a variety of triangular designs along the four sides.

  PLATE 104

  PLATE 105

  PLATE 106 Many of the older quilts we have photographed are quilted using a fan or shell design. Mrs. Mary Franklin told us, “The fan is the first method of quilting that I remember seeing used. The way the people used to lay the fans or the shells off was, they used string tied to a piece of chalk or something else to mark with. If they wanted a shell six inches wide, they’d tie a six-inch piece of cord to the chalk. Then they held the end of the string and drew off a fan shape. They moved it up as much as they wanted [for the space between each row of quilting]. But the lines of stitching had to be real close together to hold the cotton padding in place. That was just the way they liked to quilt. They liked a lot of quilting. That was a sign of good workmanship, you know. If they made big, far-apart lines, they were considered sloppy quilters.”