The Country Store

I’m sure I’ve mentioned here before that when I was growing up my Daddy and Grandpa were in a big way of bean farming.  Not owning a great deal of acreage themselves, they rented fields all over the mountaintop and under the mountain as well.  I have so many memories - both fond and a little scary, - of mountain roads rutted deeper than the truck’s wheel wells, trees reaching into the path so far you drove on faith that there was indeed a roadway and little fields cleared for a pair of mules and now accommodating modern diesel equipment.  Among those memories are innumerable little country stores. 

Today, most of those stores are closed and falling down.  As the department of transportation prepares to improve highway 127 through Fentress and Cumberland Counties even the paths that were dotted by this neighborhood mainstay will be obliterated. Ah, but that’s our purpose on this blog - to record and celebrate those memories – isn’t it?  So here goes…

First a memory.

I doubt that we stopped in the little country stores everyday that we worked in the bean field because we were pretty poor and while those places weren’t out to get rich, I’m sure brown-bagging is always cheaper.  Plus, we were in such out-of-the-way places that it just wasn’t practical to pull out at mid-day and go hunt a sandwich.  I guess the times we stopped at the little stores stand out in my memory because they were pretty special.  They sold most anything you’d need around the house, especially basic foodstuffs and you could always ask the clerk to make you a bologna (that’s baloney on the mountain by the way) sandwich.  Thick slices of meat on soft white bread with real American cheese and a slab of tomato and lettuce – maybe it doesn’t sound like much now.  Maybe it was just the atmosphere or maybe a day that started before dawn and spent beneath the hot sun of an open field really whets your appetite.  Maybe it was just a treat from Grandpa.  But it was a really good sandwich.  Then we washed it down with a cold Pepsi Cola from a tall glass bottle you pulled out of a beat up cooler and popped the lid on the side – I remember not being strong enough or coordinated enough to get the lid off myself.  And the clerk, who usually was also the owner, would sit down in a straight back chair and chat for a few minutes for there were always a few chairs and empty crates sitting around for the loafers.  No one had air conditioning but after hours of beating sun, the cold concrete some of the stores used for flooring seemed a cool paradise. 

These are not the kind of memories a 7-11 can offer and Exxon isn’t even interested in that kind of atmosphere.  The clerks hired by the big chains don’t have the same interest in their clientele and we’re all eating pre-packaged stuff that just does not compare to the old sandwiches.

Now my childhood memories don’t include barrels of pickles or crackers and I never carried eggs to the store to trade for groceries.  However, those same country stores – or ones exactly like them – welcomed a generation or two before me who would remember those things.  I’m including a picture of Peter’s Store in Clarkrange from the early 1900’s.  There’s still a store at that location – has been my whole life although the owners and the buildings have changed several times.  But Peter’s is a legend in itself!  They weren’t unique in the least for there were similar general stores across the country. 

The name of this store is unknown but it's laid out much like our local country stores.

Here you could bring in the eggs and butter your little farm produced and exchange them for things you could not grow like sewing thread and coffee.  You could get shoes there when the children’s handed down footwear could simply not be repaired again.  They had fabric – and they had feed, fertilize and bulk foods packaged in colorful cotton bags.  And if you recently made a windfall, there were candies and colorful glassware, a few ready-made clothes and books.

The local post office was housed at Peters so a trip into the store was necessary from time to time.  Yet my grandfather asserted that in bad weather it was harder for his parents to get to Peter’s than it would be for us to drive to Nashville today. 

At Uncle Lester Key’s store in Martha Washington, a kid could walk through carrying a single egg and exchange it for a sucker.  I wonder how many disappointed children didn’t quite make it with an un-cracked egg?  Peter’s sold suckers for a penny so it was pretty accommodating of the Keys to make this exchange for their youngest customers.

Even after cars became more widely available following the second world war, the neighborhood store remained an essential part of the community for decades.  They knew the people and would run a tab for you so the kids could walk to the store for a bag of sugar or other necessity.  They were a meeting place and a trip to the store was a social event where you were certain to see folks you knew and learn some piece of news.  Anyone returning from the store was asked, “Who’d you see?” and the report was as much anticipated as the goodies in the brown paper bag.

Appalachian Tea Cakes

Tea Cakes

Today I wanted to share a story from another blog that really struck a chord with me.  We’ve talked here before about Apple Stack Cake and the strong tradition that dessert has throughout the Appalachian Mountains.  So when I saw Appalrootfarm.com writing about “Old Timey Appalachian Tea Cakes & Mini Kentucky Apple Stack Cakes”, you know I was gonna follow that link.  Well, she taught me so much more!

I remember my Grandma Stepp making Tea Cakes – it wasn’t a regular treat she gave us, in fact I guess I only remember a handful of times that she made them.  But they were so good and I’ve looked for a similar recipe since but remembered so little about them that I could never find one that seemed right.

Well, Lorene writes that her Mamaw used to make tea cakes from the same batter as Apple Stack Cake.  That made me wonder if my own Grandma was doing the same thing.  (Oh how I wish I could pop in her kitchen and just ask – I can’t tell you how often I wish I could ask one of my grandparents for clarification on something I learned from them!  Alas, we can only learn from each other now.)  And that’s why I was so thrilled to read about this little Kentucky Mamaw treating her family in Ohio to tea cakes.

I thought that Grandma had found a recipe – either in a newspaper or old cookbook – and just thought she’d try it.  But now I wonder if she was prompted to try it because she remembered tea cakes from her own mother or grandmother.  Maybe that’s the question I need to pose to you readers with roots on the Cumberland Plateau:  Do you remember old folks on the mountain making little cookie-like cakes that they called Tea Cakes?  Or do you remember cookies made from the dough of the Apple Stack Cake?

Please leave me a comment if you can further educate me.  And you can click on any of the underlined blue words in this article to follow the link to the original AppalrootFarm story.

Tea Cakes:  Going Fast

Old Home Place

Deep roots are a familiar theme both in my writing and among our Appalachian people.  Whatever it was that brought a particular family to the mountains, some remnant of them always seemed to stay here.  Last weekend I had an opportunity to visit the home site of what must have been one of my first relatives to move to the plateau.  It’s an honor to still be able to find such a place and standing among scattered foundation stones I’m flooded with both sentiment and questions.

Stephen Key was born in 1825 and according to the census records, he moved from Overton County, Tennessee to Fentress County between 1850 and 1860.  Down near the great Hurricane Creek, there’s a branch whose name I suppose is lost to history but seems to have a steady flow of water and therefore would make a good home place.  Today it’s a hard one and a quarter mile walk down, down, down from civilization.  You see, in the one hundred fifty years since Stephen built his home we’ve all moved up, and our roads now dictate that this home site is terribly remote.

That remoteness made me ask, in some ignorance, “Whatever possessed them to locate here?”  Surrounded by dense forest, I couldn’t even see the big creek.  Now, I think of Hurricane as being a significant creek, and it can sure roar after a good spring rain.  And we know that waterways change over the years as bigger rivers are dammed and swampland drained.  However, I doubt Hurricane was ever navigable for any kind of commerce.  But it’s not too far as the crow flies down to the Baldwin Gulf which is the site of one of our many ghost towns.  There a prosperous village developed around a logging operation which floated logs down the East Fork of the Obey River. 

Maybe I’m off base making any comparison in today’s woods, but if you’ve ever hiked any of our plateau backcountry – and I don’t mean the well-marked and cleared trails of some of our beautiful parks – then you may be able to imagine the difficulty of this terrain.  Underbrush hinders not only movement but orientation, nearly blocking the sun in many places.  Tall hardwood trees intermingle with massive evergreens as you descend toward the river. 

While we pondered the remoteness of this farmstead, Daddy told us about another relative who found a good spring on a promising piece of land and built a cabin.  Then he walked a day and a half and spent the night on a high ridge.  At daylight he listened for a rooster to crow and was able to locate his nearest neighbor by the sound.

Freda Key Thompson (Great Granddaughter of Stephen Key), Logan Shaver, Darrell Stepp and Harlon Thompson stand in the clearing that remains where the house once stood.

There is a sense of independence in a place like this.  Free of the modern tethers of power lines and highways, these settlers located their homes among abundant resources and relied on their own skills and family to build a home there.  Even on a hot July day, the temperature was tolerable by the side of that little branch and no mechanical sounds interrupted the calm of the hillside.  While a part of me asked why they would ever build there, another part knew immediately.

Me, Cana Geer, Daddy and Harlon Thompson back up in civilization.

Do you need an Appalachian Dictionary?

Do you ever have to pull out your dictionary or Google a word when you’re reading?  I’ve been reading through the Psalms and recently hit a word that I had to look up – twice.  And that got me to thinking about my own writing and use of Appalachian English. 

I think my marker got moved from my Bible and I read Psalm 45 more than once.  Verse one starts out, “My heart is inditing a good matter…”  I knew I had recently read that Psalm because I had to look up “inditing” both times. (If you’re wondering as I was, it means ‘overflowing with’.)  Thankfully, my study bible has a handy-dandy column that defines these words so maybe I’m not the only one who needs it. 

When the King James Bible was originally translated in the seventeenth century, maybe words like ‘inditing’ were so common that no one would have cocked their head when they read it.  Well that’s the way I feel about the Appalachian terms that dot my works of fiction.  But I can’t help but wonder how many readers find those words that easy to read and understand.  So today I want to take the question to you faithful blog readers:  Do you need and would you use a glossary of terms in a novel?

A couple of my favorite authors do include this aid and I sometimes enjoy glancing through it when the story involves immigrants from another country or speakers of another language.  However, I usually read through it only after I’ve finished the book.  I guess most of the terms are explained in the context of the story and I really hope that’s the case in my stories as well.

If you’ve read Replacing Ann then maybe you will be best able to answer the question.  A couple of people have asked me questions about the terminology in that book.  For example, one cold morning, Harry asked his brothers, “Din’ you bank that far?”  Well, there are a couple of questions there. 

“Banking” a fire is both a common practice and word on our mountain because a stove or fireplace has to be prepared for the night when no one will tend it for several hours. A Bing.com search tells me that lots of folks are using that verb. 

What about the pronunciation of fire as far?  Here’s where it’s hard to write out the things we all say and understand so easily.  A far will keep you warm in the winter and the tars on your car roll smoothly on the road.  And you can har some help to waar your house for electricity.  Now if you’ve spent any time at all on the mountain, all of these terms are very familiar to you.  But isn’t it a little harder in written form?  I find it difficult even to write phonetically.

Millard and Emma Stepp
Millard's story of the first time he saw the girl who would become his wife is the inspiration for the novel, Plans for Emma

I’ve just finished a novel that is set at the turn of the twentieth century in Roslin and Martha Washington communities.  As I quickly scanned the manuscript thinking I would include an excerpt I find I’ve used our familiar pronunciation of names (dropping the ending letter and applying a “y” to anything ending in “a”) and I’ve rarely applied the “g” on words ending in “ing”.  So you take a look at it and let me know if you can hear the mountain accent but still understand what’s happening and what’s being said.

Sunday morning was so cold there was a thin sheet of ice on the top of the water bucket.  Only a handful of the men were moving about as Millard stirred up the fire and set the copper wash-pan on the iron stove to warm the icy water. He thought to himself, The good thing about cold mornings is they make a fella’ get to movin’ faster. 

 The brisk wind smacked at his freshly shaved face as his long stride covered the few paces to the kitchen’s back door.  He knew he could get a cup of coffee to fortify him against the walk to Jonesville.  The homey smell that greeted him at the door brought a smile and the threat of a tear as he instantly remembered his mother as well as the dreams he now had of his own household with Emma at home in the kitchen.

 “Mornin’ Mrs. Goodell, any chance a cold fella’ could get a hot cup of coffee?”

 She was normally a little sharp of tongue but Millard was always kind to the old cook and she generally helped him out if she could.

 “I reckon you can have a cup if you can he’p yourself.  I ain’t got time to be waitin’ on nobody.”

Millard smiled as he lifted the heavy coffee pot from the back of the stove.  It was strong and this morning he was glad of it. 

 “What’re you about this morning Millard?”  Mrs. Goodell didn’t look at him as she continued her work.  She already had a row of pans filled with dough and sitting near the iron stove to rise.  Her hands were still covered in flour as she patted out dozens of biscuits to feed the loggers. 

 “Perty early for a young man to be up on a Sunday mornin’ and I don’t reckon you gotta feed the stock, do ya’?”

 “No Ma’am, I’m a’goin’ to church.  Gonna walk to Jonesville so it takes me a little bit to get there.”

 “Jonesville?  Well I reckon there’s a girl at the root of this.  That’s the only reason a boy like you’d walk that fur on a mornin’ like this.”

 Millard hung his head for a minute as he pondered how to explain it to her.  He was certain that he must explain.  “Well now, that’s how it started but then the good Lord got ahold of me and made me to understand that I had to be in his house on account of him or else nothing good would come with that girl.”

 Mrs. Goodell paused in her biscuit-making and looked him directly in the eye.  “I hope that girl knows what she’s got.”

 He took a last sip of the coffee, drinking so quickly he got a bite of grounds in his mouth.  He set the cup in the deep wash tub and pulled his hat down on his head.  “Thank you Mrs. Goodell.”

 She shoved a handful of bacon toward him and winked as he stepped out the door.

 Emma pulled from her hair the thick woolen rags Mama had carefully wound the night before.  After she returned from her walk Mama spent most of the evening talking with her but never asked a single serious question.  She’d helped Emma wash her hair in rainwater they’d caught in the big wooden barrels and warmed on the kitchen stove.  Then brushing the long brown tresses just like Emma was a little girl, she parted out thick sections and wound them with the rags.  Now they revealed volumes of loose curls and Emma couldn’t help smiling as she remembered how beautiful the curls had made her feel when she was younger.  She carefully drew them up into a loose bun at the crown of her head.  She was just pinning a few loose strands when Lena stepped into the doorway. 

 “Are you still working on your hair?  My goodness, me and Mama have breakfast on the table and we’re waitin’ on you.”

 “Oh Lena, I didn’t realize it had gotten so late.  Mama pampered me so last night that I’m still bein’ lazy this morning.  I’ll have to get the milking done so I will skip breakfast I guess.”

 “Metie’s done the milkin’.  Took her twice as long as it does you, but there’s fresh milk on the table and that’s all that matters.”

 “Oh, thank you – or I guess I’ll have to thank Metie.  There was a mud stain on the hem of my Sunday dress and it took forever to get out.  Here, will you pin these last bits behind?”

 Lena obliged with a deep sigh, “There’s mud everywhere Em, why did you waste your time on that stain?”

 “Mama always says God deserves our best.”

 “I’m thinking it ain’t God your doin’ this for.”

 Emma smiled as she stood to follow Lena downstairs. 

 She chastised herself as they went, Lord, I guess she’s right.  Am I tryin’ to win this man with my looks now?  Please forgive my vanity.

 The family was already seated when the girls made it into the kitchen.  Rhoda looked directly into Emma’s eyes fearing she was not well. 

 “Em, you had me worried.  Are you feeling well?”

 “Oh yes, Mama, I am just fine.  Just lost track of the time.”

 “Well you are dressed for church so I guess you are feeling well enough to go?”

 “Yes, of course I’m going to church.  Metie, thank you for taking care of the milkin’ for me.”

 Almeta was already reaching for the gravy, “Well it’s perty cold out there but we have to help each other out, don’t we?”

 The whole family smiled at her echoing the lesson Rhoda had taught them again and again.

Tom had scarcely slowed eating when Emma and Lena joined them.  “We’ve already returned thanks so you’ll need to pray for your food yourselves.”

 Emma nodded her head and silently bowed it to pray over the food, and the day.  Lord God, thank you for these blessings and please bless Millard Stepp this morning.  Lead him to the preaching service I pray.  Amen.

Let’s talk Laundry

Children are a precious, wonderful, miraculous and infernally MESSY gift from God.  Let’s talk laundry!

I’ve mentioned here before how much I value some of my modern conveniences, especially major appliances.  Well if you ever doubted the value of your washing machine, you’ve never had seven children in your home.  As I told you several weeks ago, our household swelled to twelve when we were blessed with the addition of a missionary family.  This has really opened my eyes to some of the life my great-grandmothers must have lived. 

My children love to play outside and I’m thrilled that we live in conditions where they can.  My son says his favorite thing is dirt and he routinely brings a supply of it inside on the seat of his pants.  He’s probably not unique in this affinity.  So I know that any mother of young children will no doubt completely relate to the endless stack of soiled clothing I battle almost every day. 

Now I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining, there is another mother here taking care of her own children’s needs.  So between the two of us, the lines are always full and while I know the crops and the stock need a little more rain than we’ve been seeing, I’ve been awfully happy for the sunny days that provide such perfect drying conditions. 

In thinking about this chore in historical terms, I took a look at the Foxfire book number two (Anchor Books, 1973) where there Dickersons share the process of washing clothes in an iron pot.

First is the location.  It’s easier to take your clothes to the branch than to pack the water to the house.  Ah, for a good source of water.  Old homes were positioned where water could be found.  If something happened to a spring or a well the family might well leave the place.  You just can’t live where there’s no water.

They heated their water in a big iron pot over an open fire – a whole other discussion when the temperature is 82 degrees as I’m typing this.  The cold water that serves the first rinse would be a welcome break until you started beating the clothes or battling them and that would work up a sweat without the fire to contend with.  This of course assumes you don’t have a factory-made wash board which was patented in 1833 – I wonder how long it took for that idea to catch on?

Of course, any heavy stains will have to be rubbed out with the aid of your strong lye soap.  You made the soap another time and kept a good supply on hand of course.

By now the water’s boiling in your iron pot so in go the properly beaten garments.  Agitating is done manually with a long pine paddle.  While they’re simmering, you’ll need to empty the battling water and refill the tub for rinsing.  Whew, this will be cold water again and I’m betting there’s sweat a’pourin’ off your face after stirring the iron pot over the open fire. 

After a couple of rinses – because you sure don’t want to leave any lye-soap-suds in there, you can start hanging.  Oh, wait, you’ll need to wring them out well or otherwise it’ll take forever to dry them. 

Whew, I’m sorry I complained!