Tag: appalachia

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A Lifetime of Gardens

I sometimes find myself wondering why I even bother with making a garden. It would be hard enough with an acre of bottom land next to a creek, but it is hell making an Appalachian “side hill” garden. That’s all we’ve had since we came into our Prime Hill property the year before I was born. So that’s over 50 years fighting rocky soil, Georgia red clay, and the steep terrain in general.  Always an avid reader and a historian of the rural South, I’ve spent my whole life reading stories of the poor subsistence farmers of the Appalachians scratching out enough food to feed a family from a mountain side. Tall tales of cattle with two legs shorter from walking across steep slopes all the time. It isn’t all untrue. A man has to be creative to grow a garden on the side of a mountain year after year. We have almost four acres of land. The only “flat” land is the front yard and a half-acre on the ridge top. So we made terraces. I use a BCS “walking tractor” with a rotary plow to contour and create natural berms to hold moisture and stop run off. Whatever it takes.

As I get older I try my best to prioritize my time. Late each winter I ask myself if I want to go to the trouble and physical labor to make a garden. As cheap as they are at the store, potatoes are more trouble than they’re worth. It’s the same with several other vegetables. I do know that my garden is organic, Roundup free, and no chemical fertilizers have been used in decades, but damn, it’s a lot of work. It would be a whole lot easier to just go to the store. But I really do it to help remember my people.

Paw Paw Jess (my grandfather on Daddy’s side of the family) used to work his fields pretty hard. The old Hopkins home place had some good bottom land. Paw Paw was a good farmer when he wasn’t knee-walking drunk. Daddy always told stories that when he was a boy, Paw Paw led the mule to the field, placed a quart jar of his moonshine at one end of the field and a quart of buttermilk under a tree at the other end. By the end of the day, Paw Paw was dog drunk and he’d done worked the mule half to death. Ironically, his biggest crop was always corn, which he turned into more liquor, which he also drank.

For some reason I don’t know as much about Mama’s side of the family. My Great-Grandfather Emmett Roberts built the first housing development in Jefferson, Georgia over a hundred years ago, but I don’t know anything else about him other than he was a respected member of the community. My maternal grandfather, Ernest Roberts, went to work “up north” right after World War Two. Henry and Alene Phillips of Rabun County had moved to the Pontiac, Michigan area sometime around the end of the war. They had several related businesses in the area, including some type of boarding house. They recruited drivers for RoadWay trucking. My “Grandpa Ern”, as I always called him, procured a job through the efforts of the Phillips family and began driving a big rig.  

Sometime in the late 1960’s, Grandpa Ern and his second wife, Grandma Lucy, moved back to Georgia, buying a few rural acres on the county line of Stephens and Habersham County. Behind their house was a big flat area of a few acres. The first thing Ern did was clear it and buy an old Ford 8N tractor. Him and Lucy always made one hell of a garden. They probably grew and put up most of their food every year. Ern was always fastidious with everything he did. He taught me how to shine shoes the right way. He kept his Florsheim shoes and side-zip boots polished and buffed to a mirror finish. He was always perfectly dressed (unless he was in the garden). When mowing grass or working the garden Ern broke out the very stylish one-piece, zip up coveralls. I have some of those myself, but Amy says she’ll file papers if she ever catches me wearing them. Maybe I’ll wear them on our next date night…

Ern always favored Pendelton shirts in wintertime. He was fanatical about maintaining his trucks. His garden was no different. I never, ever, saw a weed in it. Everything was always hilled, hoed, and looked like a photo from a seed catalog. Mama always said I got my anal-retentive and obsessive traits from him. Memories of his gardens are always a benchmark for me.

Well, Daddy was a drinker during my childhood, but not on a level that could match Paw Paw. Our side-hill garden tilling and plowing wouldn’t have ended well with a bunch of white liquor anyway. Somebody would’ve rolled the tiller or homemade tractor off the side of the mountain and ended up at Ridgecrest Hospital. Daddy made the most of what we had. There were four or five manmade terraces up behind the house where we planted our regular vegetables. Squash, okra, radishes, beans, cucumbers, and that type of stuff. Up on the ridge was where the potatoes and corn got planted.

The first crop I ever planted was in kindergarten. Our class took a field trip up to town to tour the farmer’s co-op. Monique Lunsford was a classmate of mine until we graduated from high school. Her parents, Rollin and Roanne ran the store. I loved the old feed and seed stores. Still do, but they’re few and far between these days. I still remember the way the co-op smelled, even after all these years. The Lunsfords let each of us kids pick out a pack of seeds to take home and plant. I chose a pack of watermelon seeds. I don’t remember the variety. I was excited to get them into the ground. We had a junky old front-tine tiller that Daddy used to till me my own “plot” at the edge of the garden. I threw the seeds in the ground and covered them with a rake. I was five, so the seeds were forgotten and they were never watered. I was too busy playing. Lo and behold, they came up. All of them. I bet we got at least 30 watermelons from that packet of seeds. They almost overran the entire garden. We ate them till we never wanted to see another one. We gave them away and still they kept coming. I’m surprised Daddy didn’t somehow use them to make liquor.

By the time I reached second or third grade we had moved our corn operation over to Nannie’s garden spot. My maternal grandmother, Arleisa Norton, known to everyone in the family as “Nannie”, lived a couple of miles away from us and had a prime creekside piece of flat bottom ground. Nannie, Daddy, and Mama planted it each year. She often kept me during those summers so I spent many mornings in the corn patch with her hoeing corn while I listened to her tell stories. Sometimes my friend Billy was roped into helping us. As an only child, Mama had to import playmates for me each summer.  Nannie and Billy are both gone now, and I’d give about anything to spend one more day in that corn patch with them.

Time marches on and I’m still playing in a garden. This year’s crops have been horrible with all the rain. The tomatoes were a complete bust. So were the Brussel sprouts, although I might get an autumn harvest of them. Cucumbers, squash, and zucchini have been ok, and the carrots are consistent. The daily storms have made a mess of it. I actually had to weed-eat the rows instead of hoeing and weeding by hand. I’m just re-planted the last of the squash and cucumber for the season, and I’ll get some autumn greens. Covers over the raised beds will give me carrots through most of the winter, so all isn’t lost.

And of course, I’m already planning on what can be done better next season. Hopefully it won’t involve an umbrella.

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Farming for Rocks

It’s that time of year again. Time for me to start working on the garden. And the first crop every year is always a rock crop. For almost 50 years I’ve picked rocks out of the garden. Fifty years. I’m getting old. Better than the alternative, I suppose. I believe our garden spot may be the rockiest place in Rabun County. I’ve been filling buckets full of gravel and rocks out of that mountaintop since I was four years old. And Daddy did the same thing for several years before that.

I’ve always envied the New Englanders and the beautiful stone walls surrounding their farms. Of course there’s a reason for those stone walls. Generations and generations ago the farmers pulled these rocks from their fields as they broke the new ground. And likely kept pulling rocks for several generations after the ground was first plowed. Those old codgers were resourceful and tenacious; I’ll give them that. The reason I’m jealous? At least they got beautiful stone walls from their efforts. All I get is bucket upon bucket of basically gravel.

My Sweet Wife doesn’t believe me, but I’m trying to be a “glass half full” kind of guy. I really am. The garden is located on top of a ridge with a steep access road, so all of my yearly rock crop gets put in the roadbed to fight the never-ending battle against erosion. So there’s that. And each year there seem to be fewer rocks to pick up. Glass half full… On the downside, I’ve found hundreds of arrowheads in the garden through the decades. Those seem to be getting few and far between. Can’t win them all. At least I don’t have to deal with the freezing winter weather and the spring mud of New England. Here’s to many more years of filling buckets with Georgia rocks. Glass half full. I’m trying, Sweet Wife, I really am.

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Snows of Winters Past

Last month we received the first snowfall of the year. It was the first snow since Amy and I moved into the “Apple House.” We both act like big kids most of the time, so you can only imagine how excited we get about the possibility of snow. After twenty years, I’m finally over my disdain for snow from living in Ohio for four years. Amy’s playfulness makes it fun again.

I thought about the snows of my childhood while we watched the snow come down that Friday afternoon. When I was a really little rascal, I didn’t believe snow was real. Mama and Daddy read me stories that mentioned it, and I had seen it in television shows, but it didn’t snow at our house. The first snow we had came just before my fourth birthday. Most of the snow fell during the night. I knew it was coming, but when I woke up and actually saw the white magic I almost lost my mind. Daddy picked me up in my Spider Man footed pajamas and threw me off the front porch into the yard. Good times…

As I’ve written before, Daddy and I had lots of fun in the snow when I was a kid. Being an only child with no other kids in our neighborhood, Daddy was my partner in crime when it snowed. He loved every minute of it. After Mama made us a big breakfast, we geared up to go play. Freshly oiled boots, long johns, and toboggans on my head. We sledded down the hill in the yard until we were wet, frozen, or both. After the first couple of snows, Mama decided we couldn’t come back into the house until the end of the day. She wasn’t going to clean up after us all day. No problem for us. We have a beautiful antique Home Atlantic parlor stove in the basement. Daddy would take the decorative dome off so it functioned as a cooktop. He would haul two coffeepots to the basement. One of them he used for coffee all day, the other held plain hot water so I could have Swiss Miss hot chocolate all day. Some of my best memories are of the time Daddy and I spent posted up in our 1970’s lawn chairs with our drinks just talking in front of the Home Atlantic. He told some of the best stories during those periods.

As the years passed, we began pulling sleds around the yard behind the four-wheeler, went sledding down the giant hillside at Uncle Rip’s house, often on an old car hood, and even sneaked onto the county golf course with Big John and Little John Dixon. By the age of twelve or thirteen, I was raising hell around in the snow riding the four-wheeler with Kerry Garland and Cecil Fountain. We’d ride all over Clayton and Warwoman, sometimes hitting the 20 Penny drive-thru maybe while pulling a sled. As the years went on, Daddy and I just rode the back roads taking pictures.

The allure of the recent snow was too much to pass up. I took the dog out right at dusk the day after the snowfall and the snow-covered hillside was irresistible. I found my childhood plastic sled buried under some junk in the basement. After digging it out of the pile, I went upstairs and fortified myself with a couple of adult beverages.  It took a few minutes, but I dared Amy into going into the dusk with me. It was just before dark; the old-timers called it the “gloaming.” We took turns hauling the sled up the hill and riding down. Much of our stuff is still in storage while the remodel continues, so we made do with our outerwear. My Sweet Girl flew down the hill wearing a fleece onesie and a pair of Muck boots. It was perfect.  Neither of us injured ourselves and we got our sledding fix for a while.

I’m not going to weigh in on global warming. All I know is every year I start the garden a little sooner and harvest veggies a little later into the fall. And the snows are few and far between. I miss them, along with many things of years gone by. I ran into Cecil Fountain right before the snow and tried to talk him into some mischief once the snow fell. No luck, but maybe next time. We’re still young…

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Wisdom Lost

Today would have been Daddy’s 81st birthday. He’s been gone for four and a half years already. I think about him a hundred times a day. It’s still hard to believe that he’s gone. Not a day goes by that I don’t get sad thinking about all the things we never got to do together, all the places we never got to go… The fly fishing trips we wanted to take. The backpacking and other camping trips we dreamed of taking together.

            I think of all the stories about his life that he still had to tell. During the final couple of weeks he lived he was still telling me new stories that I had never heard of his younger years, his exploits making liquor and mischief while running around in his hot rod 1956 Fords.

            Every day I need to ask him something. Whether it’s general life advice or how to do something, there’s always something.  Like most rural Appalachian folks of his generation, he knew how to do pretty much everything. An expert at cobbling things together to keep machinery and tools together without replacing them, I have no doubt that he saved thousands of dollars in repairs. When Amy and I cleaned up his house to sell after his death, she was amazed at his ingenuity. He had hand carved doorknobs, latches, and even hinges at his house.  

            I’ve been a woodworker for 40 years, and still need his knowledge daily. I wish I had another 20 years with him to learn more woodworking skills from his vast store of knowledge. I make Appalachian ladderback chairs, but Daddy never got around to teaching me how to weave the hickory or oak bottoms. I have to farm that out to someone. Daddy could weave a beautiful herringbone pattern in an hour. I’m sure I will learn the technique, but I wish he had taught it to me.

            And then there are the tools. We have countless specialty tools in the shop for making musical instruments. I’ve made instruments since I was a little boy, but I have no idea what some of the templates and jigs are used for. Daddy had jigs, templates, and patterns for everything. He had all of the stuff to sharpen and set teeth on crosscut hand saws. I wish he was here to show me the proper way to do it.

            I’m sure he’ll be smiling down on me (or laughing at me) in the next few weeks. Amy and I moved back into my childhood home last year. The remodeling project is ongoing, but it’s getting there. Daddy would be a great help as I muddle through it. We are making a huge garden this year. He would be right there with us, riding the Cub tractor and telling us what we were doing wrong. I guess he is still here in many ways. And I’ll be starting a new batch of chairs at the end of the summer, splitting out the wood for them by hand with Paw Paw’s hundred-year-old froe and an ancient wooden maul. I can envision Daddy sitting on his stool drinking coffee and telling me stories of doing it when he was young. He taught me how to make the chairs and how to use a froe. He showed me the ways to read the grain of the log in order to get the easiest splits and the best pieces. He managed to use almost every inch of the wood. The processing of the logs was too labor intensive to waste anything.

            When I do all of these things Daddy is still here with me. While there is so much more that I could have learned from him, the skills he taught me and the life lessons are priceless.

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Farewell to Andy’s

How do you say goodbye to a landmark, an institution, an icon? The news broke on Facebook a few weeks ago that Andy and Deborah Hunter are closing Andy’s Market at the end of this month and are retiring. No two people deserve to retire more than them. Their work ethic likely won’t be seen again. The only other store owner whom I had the pleasure to know with a work ethic like that was the late Charlie Mac Dickerson. As Andy was quoted, “After coming through these doors six days a week for 54 years, it’s time.” Wow… 54 years…

 I still remember going there as a kid back when Andy worked there for Rick Mason, several years before he bought the place…  I have literally been going to the store since I was born. Mama grew up next door to the store site, and I grew up a half mile away. Daddy and his best friend Charles refused to shop anywhere else and were in there three or four times a week. The store is the last tie to my childhood left in Rabun County. Everything else is long gone. Reeves is still around, and arguably better than ever with the younger generation running the business, but it’s not the same anymore. It’s become a conglomerate of stores, with the “hardware” store on Main Street not even really selling hardware anymore. It has lost the small town feel of my youth.

But Andy’s has always stayed the same. It even smells the same. I could be blindfolded and transported there, and I’d know where I was. Every single time I walk through the doors a flood of memories washes over me. Not a few, or even a few dozen, but probably hundreds of them. I’d stop there with Mama for weekly groceries when I was a little boy and usually begged for ice cream or candy while there. Bomb Pops, brown cows, the little bags of maple log candies. Maybe that helps explain my Type 2 diabetes diagnosis… One time our German Shorthaired Pointer sneaked around and ate a whole bag of unattended Brach’s chocolate covered peanuts from there and liked to have died.  Other times, I’d jump in the truck with Daddy to go grab something that Mama had forgotten, and she was already in the middle of cooking supper.  Sometimes when Daddy forgot to stop on his way home from work Mama would make me walk back down there and pick up the forgotten items. I told her she should make Daddy walk back down and the next time he wouldn’t forget.

I remember way back in the day when people still used lard to cook with. Not canola oil, not extra virgin olive oil. Lard. Mason’s, and Andy’s in the early days, had orange and white one-gallon buckets of lard stacked against the back wall near the meat counter. I used to beg Mama to buy one so I could have the empty bucket for a drum. She never did, and I was stuck with my drum set of Quaker Oats containers.

And then there was the candy at Christmas. I wished I’d have known that last year would be my final chance to get old fashioned hard candy and stick candy at the holidays. When I was really little, Paw Paw would have Aunt Virginia go to Mason’s and get me a box of stick candy for a Christmas present from him. I looked forward to it every year. Paw Paw has been gone for almost thirty tears and Aunt Virginia passed away a few weeks ago. Once I grew up, Daddy carried on the tradition of giving me a box of stick candy from Andy’s at Christmastime. Once Daddy passed away four years ago, I started buying myself one each year a couple of weeks before Christmas. Another memory and tradition gone…

And now a dilemma is before me. I guess I’ll have to become a vegetarian. Everyone knows that Andy’s has the best beef around. My family has bought their meat at Mason’s and Andy’s since the day the doors opened. Heck, they probably bought it at Talmadge and Margie York’s old store at the same location before Rick Mason purchased it. I hate change. I’ve said since the day I moved back to Clayton from law school that the day Andy’s closed would be the day I move away. I can’t get Amy to move. I suppose I’ll just eat vegetables and just mope around being maudlin for a neighborhood landmark fading away.

The closing of the store is made even sadder as there will be no passing of the torch as when Andy bought the grocery from Rick. It was only fitting that Andy took over from Rick since he grew up practically next door and worked there since he was a boy. This coming week the rugs will be beaten out on the handrail for the last time, Andy and Deborah will likely have a last walkthrough, turn off the lights, and lock the doors for the final time. That day the traditions will end and only the memories will remain.

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Still Hunting with Daddy: Glassy Mountain

As Daddy gets older, I have a sense of urgency to collect as many of his stories and memories as possible. He recently told me a story about one of his old liquor stills that he had never mentioned before. A few weekends ago we went out looking for the site. I enjoy historical outings, as I can turn them into educational experiences on the sly, so I had Brittney tag along.

The still site is located in the Bridge Creek community at the foot of Glassy Mountain. It is only a mile away from Daddy’s old home place. We found it quickly despite the almost sixty years that have passed since Daddy was there.

The first thing that I noticed was that the still site is pretty much right on the side of Bridge Creek Road. Although the road would have been graveled back in 1960-61, it was nevertheless a well-traveled road.

By 1960, the traditional copper pot still had been largely replaced with more modern and efficient stills. The still Daddy took us to was a type known as a steamer. More efficient than a copper pot still, the alcohol could be distilled at a faster rate, and the boiler for Daddy’s still was fired with coke. Coke is essentially refined coal. To heat a steamer, Daddy and his brother Poke initially built a wood fire which in turn ignited and heated the coke. Once the coke was burning, the furnace gave off zero smoke, which made it more difficult for the revenuers to spot.

Daddy and Poke bought their coke in bulk from Toccoa Coal Company and hauled it into this particular site on their backs in sacks weighing fifty to one hundred-pounds. They carried all the materials on their backs, including parts for the boilers and the sixty-pound sacks, or bales as they were known, of sugar. When initially constructed, the still had five mash boxes, but they planned to add at least another three.

By their standards, it was a small operation. Daddy had been cut down several times just prior to setting up the still at the foot of Glassy Mountain and the brothers were short of cash. The revenuers had been particularly hot on them, and an informer in the area wasn’t making things easier. The brothers hoped to get by for just a couple of months at the site to build up funds for a larger outfit.

Daddy and Poke finished one run of liquor at the still and forty cases of liquor were stacked nearby. They carried in a second load of sugar and jars during the following night. Unfortunately for them, an unrelated forest fire broke out on Glassy during the night. The next morning the still was found by wildland firefighters from the U.S. Forest Service searching for hot spots. They called the revenuers, who quickly came to the still site.

Rather than haul the still and materials out of the woods for destruction, the revenuers simply dynamited the entire site, right down to the cases of new jars and sacks of sugar. As we searched the site we found remnants of the boiler blown almost one hundred feet from the original location.

Undeterred by the loss of the still, Daddy and Poke quickly relocated to a new location on Seed Lake. When the law got hot on them at the new site, Daddy “left the country,” as he called it, and made liquor over in Fannin and Gilmer Counties for a couple of years, but that’s a story for another day.