PLATE 461 Carlton shapes the handle by hewing off the excess wood. There was a slight curve in the trunk, so Carlton hewed more off one side than the other so he’d have a straight handle.
PLATE 462 Chris helps, once Carlton gets the shape he wants.
PLATE 463
PLATE 464 “If you cut the timber on the new moon, you can set it up by the wall over there and it will bend, just like this is. I cut this one on the new moon so it would curve. If you cut it on the dark moon—that there’s the first quarter—it’ll stay straight. You saw the handles I already made? They’re just as straight as they can be.
“Now I’m gonna make the handle. When I chop [score] all the way down one side like I’m a-goin’ down here now, I turn it right around and it don’t eat in. Now I’ll take all of this side down, and then the other side, and I’ll take it down thin enough for the ax handle.”
PLATE 465 “What I’m using here is hickory. People would be after me for handles way back whenever my first kids were born, and my oldest girl’s sixty-three year old. I once sold two fellows six handles apiece, and they said I’d die one of these days and they wouldn’t be nobody else to make handles! Ain’t hardly nobody left now can make ’em right.”
PLATE 466 Once Frank has the piece of hickory chopped down into a rough rectangular slab, he rounds off the corners with his hatchet, and then he holds the axhead against one end to gauge his progress.
PLATE 467 He takes the sides down a little more as Wig, William Brown, and Tony Whitmire watch and record.
PLATE 468 As the handle approaches the right dimensions, Frank leaves the end that fits into the axhead larger, as well as the opposite end. He continues shaping, taking small, careful cuts. “I make that knot in the end so you can hold it there.”
PLATE 469 When the handle is rounded off and shaped to roughly the correct dimensions, Frank clamps it at either end to a block of wood. Then he slips a wedge under the curve, hammers it in tightly, and clamps it there, too, so the handle will air-dry with the curve intact.
PLATE 470 After the handle has dried for several weeks inside his house, Frank brings it out and, using his rasps, does some final shaping.
PLATE 471 He works the end that the axhead fits onto down so that it is just slightly larger than the hole in the axhead. This ensures that the two will fit very tightly together.
PLATE 472
PLATE 473 When he is confident the handle will fit into the head, he takes his chisel and splits the head end open to a depth of four inches.
PLATE 474 Then, with the blade of his pocketknife held at right angles to the surface of the wood, he smooths off any ridges left from the rasp. Before he started using his knife for this job, he used the edges of pieces of broken glass.
PLATE 475 Finally he sands the whole handle so that it is completely smooth. Then he greases it thoroughly with linseed oil to help waterproof it and preserve it and keep it from cracking.
PLATE 476 Now he puts the handle into the axhead. He does this by getting the handle started into the hole and then striking the opposite end sharply six or eight times with a go-devil.
PLATE 477 When the handle is completely in place in the axhead, he takes a sharpened wooden wedge and drives it into the split he made earlier in the end of the handle. When the wedge is driven in as far as it will go, binding the axhead tightly into place, Frank cuts off the excess wood with a hammer and chisel.
PLATE 478 Now the job is complete. Frank charges five dollars apiece for his handles, no matter whether they are the twenty-eight-inch-long broadax handles like this one or the longer, double-bitted straight ax handles. He also can make handles for shovels, hoes, hatchets, mowing blades, and hammers, and he swears they’ll last longer than the store-bought varieties.
PLATE 479 Frank Vinson with Cary Brown, Cecil Wilburn, and Tony Whitmire (left to right).
Cary Brown lives with his grandparents, Frank and Eva Vinson, and Cary and Cecil Wilburn are good friends and live close to each other on Scaley Mountain. Cecil found out about Frank’s handle-making business and told us about it in the Foxfire class. Frank agreed to talk with us and show us how to make one. He already had a piece of hickory that was slightly curved and would do for the handles we wanted, and so he used that. He told us, though, that if we wanted a piece of hickory to have a really good curve in it, all we had to do was to cut the tree on the new of the moon, and cut off the piece for the handle, and as it began to dry it would curve in just the right way. If cut while the moon was in its dark phase (or waning), the timber would cure out straight.
The first day we went, Frank roughed out the handle and then put it in a press in such a way that it would finish curing with the curve intact. It took him about two hours to finish this phase. Several weeks later we returned, and he took the handle out of the press and did the necessary finishing work and then put it in a broadax head we had.
Article by Tony Whitmire, Cecil Wilburn, William Brown, and Cary Brown. Photographs by William Brown.
CAROLYN STRADLEY
“The worst feeling was being alone,
never really feeling like I belonged.”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Sunday magazine section of February 26, 1984, included an article about Mrs. Carolyn Stradley and her paving company. The article was posted on our classroom bulletin board and called to our attention. When I read the story my interest in Mrs. Stradley was sparked. I found it hard to comprehend that a young, orphaned girl (her mother died when Carolyn was eleven and soon after, she was abandoned by her father) could live alone in the often cruel mountains of northeast Georgia and survive to become a civil engineer and the owner of a successful paving company in Atlanta.
Mrs. Stradley, born Carolyn Jones, has one brother, Eldon, who is four years older than she. He was at home in the mountains only occasionally, however, traveling back and forth from Atlanta to various jobs, so Carolyn was primarily on her own for her early teenage years. At the age of thirteen, she too packed up her few belongings and caught a ride to Atlanta. There she rented a small garage apartment with her brother, enrolled herself in a nearby high school, and got a job at the local Howard Johnson’s. Two years after her move to Atlanta, Carolyn met and married Arthur Stradley. When she became pregnant during her junior year of high school, she left school. After her daughter Tina was born, she returned to night school to complete her education. She got a job as a secretary with a paving company, and over a period of several years worked her way up to a management position. As she progressed, the company offered to pay her tuition toward a certificate in civil engineering from Georgia Tech.
When Carolyn had advanced in the paving company to a point where she felt that she could go no higher, she left it. She, Eldon, and Eldon’s wife, Shirley, collaborated and got a loan and started their own paving business. Thus began C&S (standing for Carolyn and Shirley) Paving, which she now runs.
We approached the small white one-story house with some hesitation one spring afternoon. Although we had followed very closely the directions that she had given us, Carolyn’s office was not quite what we were expecting. It was in an industrial area—small business offices on either side of the house proved this. Nevertheless, the friendly white cat that rubbed against our legs when we got out of the car, the well-trimmed lawn in front of the house, and the sound of barking dogs somewhere in the back were not, in our minds, characteristic of an average business office. However, as we knocked on the screen door at the top of the front steps, we could see a desk and file cabinets in the room. The secretary sitting at the desk confirmed for us that this was where we wanted to be.
PLATE 480 Carolyn Stradley (right) at her secretary-receptionist’s desk.
The office is more of a home than a place of business. It is equipped with a small kitchen, an eating area, bathrooms, and offices where there were once three bedrooms and a den. We set our equipment in the eating area which was sparsely furnished with a drink machine, file cabinet, picnic table, and benches. On one e
nd of the table a Crock Pot full of collard greens for someone’s dinner slow-cooked as we set up our tape recorder at the other end.
When Mrs. Stradley strode into the room with a big grin and greeted us with a hearty “Hi, y’all!” our apprehensions of breaking the ice with her diminished immediately. She shook hands with the three of us with a firm, strong grip. The warm smile introduced us to a sparkling personality, and her bright blue eyes edged with laugh lines mirrored a shrewd, ever-clicking mind. That mind, plus a keen lust for learning, was the reason this woman had been able to survive, on her own, in the southern Appalachian mountains during the 1950s.
Mrs. Stradley is about five feet, eight inches tall and thirty-eight years old. She was attractively attired that day in maroon slacks and a pale pink blouse that complemented her thick, wavy shoulder-length red hair and fair, freckled skin. We found it difficult to picture her as a child leading the toilsome life she told us about because everything about Carolyn Stradley is notably refined and articulate.
Although the atmosphere was homelike, the office still had its business aspects. There was a constant tap-tap of typewriters in the background accompanied by the occasional friendly greeting of the secretary answering the telephone. Our interview was interrupted several times by the jangling phone in another room and someone calling Mrs. Stradley to attend to business that just couldn’t wait. In spite of those interruptions, Mrs. Stradley made us feel relaxed as if she had all afternoon to spend with us. It was obvious that she handles her business efficiently and yet with a warm, caring feeling for people and does her best to benefit everyone.
Mrs. Stradley is not a typical Foxfire contact. She is young and she lives in an area that is south of the mountains. We were interested more in her way of life as a youth than anything eke, but as we were putting together the article we realized that many of the other aspects of her life were too important to leave out. What resulted is an article full of joy and suffering, life and death, and happiness and triumph.
ALLISON ADAMS
Article and photographs by Allison Adams, Al Edwards, Eddie Kelly, Patsy Singleton, and Kelly Shropshire.
I was born in 1946 in the small community of Youngcane, which is in Union County near Blairsville in the mountains of northeastern Georgia. [Except for times when we moved to Atlanta for short periods] that’s where I was raised until I was thirteen.
[My life before my mother’s death] was probably just typical of the area. There was a garden, and we canned what we grew. We dried leather britches beans. I loved ’em.
Mother never worked outside the home [like in a store or factory]. Daddy worked in a sawmill and did a little moonshining and he hauled produce into the city. [There were times] when I felt like I lived out of a cardboard box! We’d move back and forth from Atlanta a lot of times. Daddy would get a job down here [in Atlanta] and we’d come down and stay in a tenement house. [My dad, mother, brother, and I] would live in two rooms while he worked. There would be like eight or ten families in one big house. Then we’d be moving back to the mountains because he’d get laid off or something.
I started grammar school out at the old Blairsville School [about 1952]. Our school bus was a pickup truck with a wooden cover on the back and little wooden benches. And if it rained real bad, then we didn’t go to school because the roads were so bad that the little truck couldn’t get across the creeks. This was in the fifties, but very few people [in our area] had automobiles [and the roads were terrible]!
PLATE 481
In the sixth and seventh grades, I was going to school over there at Youngcane. I can remember we did not even have electricity at that particular time. We were still using a kerosene lamp. When I first got into geometry in the seventh grade, it was very difficult at nights sitting by a kerosene lamp trying to get my geometry homework.
All [through] my life, I can’t remember [ever] not being responsible for someone or something. As a small child, it was my responsibility to make sure there was water in the house. I went up to the spring and brought in water, carried in wood [for cooking and heat], and made sure that the chickens had been fed. These were all things that were necessary. Mama was often extremely sick. [When I was] a child, I can remember her being in the hospital a lot. She had had rheumatic fever [as a child] and she developed heart disease. [When my brother and I were small] she would get out and work like a man. She would do sawmilling with my father and pull a crosscut saw. Then she’d get really sick! [She died when] I was eleven. I believe I was in the sixth grade. There was so much anger inside because I couldn’t understand what I had done wrong to make my mother die and leave me. You know, I really had this feeling: “What horrible thing have I done?” I really couldn’t understand why this had happened to me.
She had been a very strong, independent person. She had grown to be that way with Daddy’s habits of coming in one week and gone the next. There was never anything she could depend on.
First of all, please understand that I loved my father more than anything else in the world, but Daddy was an alcoholic. My mother died on a Sunday, she was buried on Tuesday, and the following weekend my father was remarried. He chose to live in the Atlanta area with his new wife. [He left my brother and me in our little house in Youngcane to look after ourselves.] He just did not get to the mountains to visit us that much [after Mother died].
My brother, Eldon, is four years older than I. [When we were children] his responsibilities were similar to mine. A lot of times he would do what they called “off-bearing” in a sawmill. Off-bearing is where someone catches the slabs that come off the side of the tree trunk whenever a tree is run through the saw. They’d catch those slabs and lay them somewhere else [away from the mill]. Even though he was a young boy, he was very strong and he would do that a lot of times for his money. [After Mother died] Eldon worked at the sawmill or cleaned out chicken houses—things like that. Whatever he could pick up! He would come in and live with me part of the time, between jobs.
Mother had managed to get the house paid off before she died. There wasn’t much to it, but it was shelter. The winters get sort of severe over there and I can remember waking up sometimes and I’d have ice frozen across my face from the condensation of my breath. I think being cold was one of the things I remember most. It would be dark by the time the school bus got me home [and when Eldon worked away from home, I was there alone]. Some mornings I didn’t properly cover the coals in the fireplace before I left for school and I would come in by myself in the evening and [the fire would be completely out and I’d] not have kerosene to start a new fire. I’d have to get a new fire going in the dark.
Bobby socks were the popular thing at that time and I only had one pair. I’d wash them [every night] and if they weren’t dry by the next morning, I’d put them on wet. I think being laughed at and made fun of in school and never feeling like I was as good as anyone else were probably the worst things [I experienced]. When I was in the seventh grade, one of the things that I really remember most of all was this girl giving me a bar of soap for Christmas. Of course she was trying to be obnoxious, because she knew I had never had anything like that. [We made lye soap instead.] She didn’t realize that was the best Christmas present I had. It was probably the only Christmas present I had that year. She thought she was being super mean to me, but I thought it was super good!
[Surviving] was a day-in, day-out process. I had learned to can vegetables and dry beans and dry apples and fix kraut so most of the time I had enough canned [food to last me].
I wore a lot of my brother’s clothes, hand-me-downs. I worked hard through the summertime and usually would get enough money to buy enough clothes to just about last through the winter. [Farmers in that area grew vegetables for the big food companies like Campbell’s Soup and Stokeley’s. They sent big open trucks along the country roads to pick up people who wanted to work by picking the beans, peppers, or whatever in the summertime.] In the mornings, sometimes just at daybreak, big trucks came along near where I
lived and picked us up and carried us to the fields and we would be in the fields all day. It might be where they’d be cutting cabbage and loading them into a sled or something, or they might be picking peppers. But mainly the thing that I did was pick beans because I was not fast enough to make any money the other ways. But beans—I learned to pick those quite well. I could make a quarter a bushel picking beans! One time, though, when I had worked picking beans all day, I got sun [burned] bad on my face and back because when I was bending over, my shirt had pulled up from my waistline. I had to take [all the money] I had made and go to the doctor. It cost me everything I made all that time for medication to repair the burns.
Also, I would keep people’s children for them. I’d also take in laundry. Of course, up there [at that time], you had to either go to the creek or the spring to get water or draw up water if you were fortunate enough to have a well. And you either had a rub board, or again, if you were fortunate, you had the old-fashioned wringer washing machine. [I only had a spring and a rub board.]
Whenever school was in, I really had it made because I got one good hot meal a day. At school there was a long noontime recess and I would sweep the floors in the school at that time, and then wash dishes. That way I could have all I wanted to eat. That was how I got through the week.
I never begged. I never begged and I never had the first welfare check. And I never stole anything to eat. I’d wash the dishes or I’d watch the kids, or I’d mop floors or wash windows or whatever was necessary. I’ve never been ashamed of doing anything to make money that was honest and that I felt good about. And I’ve tried to do [every job] to the best of my ability.
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