Chocolate Gravy and Other Comfort Foods

As I continue preparing to speak to the Monterey Depot Museum on April ninth, I was thrilled to read chef Bruce Wilson’s description of the dessert he’s planning:

“…my personal favorite course for this dinner is my signature dessert that combines my love of sundaes with my favorite childhood breakfast of chocolate gravy and biscuits! The freshly made whipped cream melts with the ice cream into the chocolate sauce and soaks into the sour cream pound cake and replicates the texture of that breakfast dish that we've all had growing up in this region”

And you know, that got me thinking…

Chocolate gravy was a favorite of my childhood too.  And I learned to make it at the feet of my Grandma Golda Stepp and I’ve continued to make it for the whole family.  In fact, we love to have family breakfasts – any time of the day – and hot biscuits and chocolate gravy are a staple of those meals.  Yet, outside of my family, I’ve found lots of people who’ve never enjoyed this delicacy.  In fact, an awful lot of people can’t quite imagine a combination of chocolate and gravy.  Still others don’t quite think chocolate for breakfast is proper.

But if you’re raised on it, this is the most normal thing in the world.  Of course, we think that of any foods from our childhood, don’t we?  I also ate “coffee and bread”, also known as “soaky” which is simply biscuits soaked in coffee with a little sugar on it.  I suppose that’s the ultimate comfort food for me – it’s certainly what I eat when I’m really stressed. 

All Gone!

I’ve seen an interpretation of some of my childhood foods in restaurants, especially in the South.  Apple dumplings are a popular restaurant food but I’ve never seen anyone make them like my Grandma and they’re never as good as hers.  Apple stack cake is rarely presented in public eateries, probably because you can’t quite make it pretty yet it’s an utterly Appalachian treat, as are blackberry dumplings.

I’m eager to see Chef Wilson’s adaptation of chocolate gravy and biscuits!

I’ve never really discovered the origin of chocolate gravy.  So maybe y’uns can help me with this one, because I’m thrilled to have readers who hale from all over the place.  How many of you have ever eaten Chocolate Gravy?  And was it from your childhood or something you were blessed with later on in life?  Just click “comments” below – if you have any trouble leaving your comment, click here for simple instructions.

Trains and Riding the Rails

Trains are a favorite subject of mine – there is a romance about the idea of rail travel that draws boys and girls of all ages.  The day of the railroad was a slower, sweeter time – at least in my imagination!  Imagine then my joy when the Monterey Depot Museum invited me to speak at an upcoming fund raiser.  I have all kinds of ideas bumping around in my busy brain as I try to organize this presentation.  More importantly, I am immersing myself in rail-research.  So I thought I’d share some with you.

I found a great little book entitled Railroading in Putnam County by Cookeville Depot Museum (2003) from which this article originates.

Cookeville, TN looking down Broad Street prior to the arrival of the Tennessee Central

For years, local residents knew that the Upper Cumberland held a wealth of natural resources.  However, without roads or mechanized means of traveling on them, and with no railroad any cash crop had to make it to a major waterway.  From Monterey, Celina was thirty-five hard miles and the closest steamship dock.  That must have been utterly impossible for farmers of the mid-nineteenth century.  Therefore, most folks just raised what they needed and survived on what they raised. 

Then in 1893 the first trains began to make the long climb up the mountain to Monterey and almost magically opened the world’s markets to lumber and coal as well as livestock.  The idea of an east-west railroad had been alive for more than half a century.  In 1866 an engineer first surveyed the region for the Tennessee and Pacific Railroad.  He saw the wealth of resources the region had to offer.  He also saw the steep grade and rough terrain that would have to be conquered.

Those obstacles were overcome by sheer force of many hands.  Timber was cleared and rocks blasted to lay the tracks first from Nashville to Cookeville, then on to Algood and Monterey. 

Key to the rail project finally moving forward was the purchase of mineral rights to thousands of acres of Fentress, Overton and Putnam counties where coal beds would be harvested for the nation’s persistent energy needs.  Thousands upon thousands of loaded coal cars would leave the tri-county area over the next seventy-five years.  In fact, it was originally the Crawford family who both bought the mineral rights and funded the laying of the first tracks.  Jerre Baxter didn’t purchase the Nashville and Knoxville Railroad until 1893.

However, Mr. Baxter is the one we remember as the force behind what would become the Tennessee Central Railroad.  He envisioned a railline from Memphis across the state.  He was blocked by other railroads that didn’t want the competition and they were powerful.  They kept him out of Nashville proper, forcing him to bypass the city.  He turned his attention to the eastern side of the rail but was never able to reach beyond Rockwood. 

Still, to the people of Monterey, the TC was a blessing.  Directly employed by the railroad, were numerous locals who cleaned and repaired locomotives, laid and maintained track and worked daily loading both frieght and passengers.  The whole world must have seemed open to locals who could now ride “the Shopper” to Nashville for the day and be home by nine to sleep in their own beds.  By the early 1900’s there were six passenger trains passing through Putnam County each day.  You could ride the long distance to Nashville, or you could hop off at any of the communities along the way. 

Prices seem low to us today, one resident told of riding from Monterey to Ozone in the late 1930’s for thirty-five cents.  Of course, he was earning ten cents per day at the miscellaneous work a school boy could pick up.  Still, that thirty-five mile jaunt would have been impossible without the railroad.

The Tennessee Central called itself “The Road of Personal Service” and every member took that motto to heart.  From the flagman who would help you step out of the tall car to the brakeman who hopped between the cars to manually apply brakes as the train made the descent from Monterey to Algood, everyone along the route seemed eager to serve their customers.  No doubt they were happy to have the railroad and the many, many opportunities it provided them.

These were boon days for the Upper Cumberland region.  Jobs were available for local folks and were drawing in slews of outsiders as miners, railroaders, loggers and all of the services those cash-yielding jobs require.  The Tennessee Central would continue to haul freight through the region until 1967.

Hog Drives

Between John Wayne movies and television series like The Virginian and Bonanza, Hollywood has romanticized and institutionalized cattle drives.  But no one ever talks about hog drives.  Is there any such thing?

Have you ever asked yourself how would a farmer get a ‘crop’ of hogs to market on the Plateau before he had a truck?  Would you imagine he would load them up on a horse-drawn wagon?  I saw that in a tv-western episode once where a cattleman bought a prize bull and moved him home in a monstrous enclosed wagon and team of sizable horses.  It didn’t seem plausible to me, but neither did it seem difficult to drive or even lead a single bull.  However, I never gave much thought to moving hogs until someone mentioned the hog drives that used to come up the mountain into Monterey to meet the train.

If you’ve read Replacing Ann, you will remember that Bill Lewis was well respected for his skill in raising hogs and in his early life he worked as an overseer on big hog farms down near Livingston.  Well, here’s a confession – many of my fictional characters are inspired by legends of real people from the region.  And, I’ve heard a family legend about a man who really did work on big hog farms under the mountain and at least in his family’s memory, was very skilled and respected.  The railway came to Monterey years before a spur was built into Livingston.  (The Tennessee Central arrived in Monterey in the 1890’s but of course I can’t find the date of the Livingston spur when I actually need it.  Maybe one of you would be good enough to share that information with me if you know it.) In order to sell any stock or produce beyond a very close radius, you would have to get it to a rail-head so that meant Monterey for many years.  

So I was getting fairly convinced that this legend was based in fact but wondered if the art of driving hogs was unique to our neck of the Appalachian woods.  I found an article at atlasobscura.com that confirmed this was a regular occurrence in the nineteenth century.  In fact, they explain that the plantations of the South preferred to buy their pork and grow the crops that brought in more cash.  That article says the supply of hogs was mainly in Tennessee.

Now, I’ve experienced moving a few pigs from one pen to another or trying to get them into the barn.  And those were pigs that lived their whole lives in fenced enclosures.  Remember that the feeding range for hogs prior to the 1947 fence law, was anywhere the animals could get to.  (Now, here’s an interesting piece of history for you – prior to 1858, the law actually said that livestock owners were required to keep their animals fenced.  The 1858 change reversed the requirement saying that crop producers must ‘fence-out’ livestock.  So the concept of open ranges in Eastern states was really pretty short-lived.  With that said, we still have to remember that Tennessee was the wild west in the mid nineteenth century so I’m not sure how these laws were received or even enforced.)  So moving these hogs was surely a bigger challenge than today’s hog farmers would experience.  Still, I suppose if you could get the whole herd moving, it would be possible.

The atlasobscura article mentioned, “In 2006 a prominent archaeologist, a specialist in livestock, baldly insisted that pigs ‘cannot be driven’.  The historical record suggests otherwise.”  The author goes on to quote an 1847 tollgate record from North Carolina totaling the livestock moving as: 692 sheep, 898 cattle, 1317 horses, and 51,753 hogs.

How To Comment

A number of readers have told me that they are having trouble leaving comments on the blog.  I certainly understand why.  If you don't have a login for my website host (and I can't imagine why many of you would have that) then it's not obvious.

So, here's the lowdown:

If you click "comment" at the bottom of any story, a box will appear for you to enter your comment.

Then click "Post Comment" and you will see this black screen.

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Thanks for Reading!

Stories of Early Inns and Taverns of the East Tennessee Country

If you are following “Author Beth Durham” on Facebook, I mentioned last week that I have run upon a fascinating book related to last week’s post.  I wanted to share some of it with you this week but it turns out after skimming it, that this will largely be a book review of Stories of Early Inns and Taverns of the East Tennessee Country by LaReine Warden Clayton (1995, The National Society of The Colonial Dames of America).

Mrs. Clayton introduces her stories with an entry from her grandfather’s journal, “He wrote that in 1847 while traveling from his home in Virginia to Alabama to teach school he had forgotten to exchange his Virginia scrip for Tennessee scrip at the state border.  He ‘had stopped over at the best inn in Knoxville and waited while I got this done at some loss’.”

I would certainly have been intrigued by such an entry from my any of my family, and Mrs. Clayton began a quest to learn about the accomodations that existed in the wild country that would become Tennessee. 

In early frontier days, almost any cabin would give shelter to a traveler.  And the travelers were scarce.  I can only imagine that a family was as happy to see the guest as the traveler was to see the comfort and safety of their home.  The first inns in East Tennessee were only family homes and they really had no extra room for guests.  However, the family was willing to ‘move over’ and make room for them.

What I first noticed in this book and had mentioned on Facebook was the absence of ‘stands’ from the index.  You will recall last week that a number of the inns along the middle Tennessee stagecoach route were referred to as stands.  This book notes that such places were referred to as inns, taverns, ordinaries, stops, stands, stations, public-houses, necessities, way-stations, or houses of entertainment.  No explanation is given of what is the difference among the titles.  As traffic increased and more accomodations were required, many homes added lofts or lean-tos to their existing house to serve the boarders.

As dedicated building were erected, a small space was often provided for public meetings.  Many major decisions were made in such places.  With no courthouse, the tavern often served.  If no church house had been built a congregation would gather at the public-house.  Innkeepers were entreprenuers who saw the value in offering space for such meetings as it brought people in, even locals who weren’t traveling.  A 1797 price list shows the cost of a room was six cents per night.  Keeping your horse would cost another four cents – and the horse was priceless to you when he was the only means of transportation in the frontier. 

When the stagecoach made its appearance in the early 1800’s, inns opened along the route.  Now we can trace those routes and see the waypoints at the historic stations.  Many are unfortunately long gone.  However, the Chester Inn in Jonesborough has been converted into a museum.  It was built in 1797 and is now owned by the state.  However, Jonesborough still hosts not less than four historic inns built from 1793 - 1840 that have rooms open today. 

One notable historic location has been lost to progress as Cherokee Lake flooded the Bean Station inn.  Built by slave labor at the direction of Mr. Thomas Whiteside in 1814, this was a three story brick house with a front passageway (or porte cochere) large enough to accommodate “the largest of stagecoaches, piled high with luggage to come through and unload passengers at the great front door”.  It served for many years because one description notes that the pine floors ‘show[ed] little wear after nearly a hundred thirty years of use”.  It burned in 1886 with only a single wing surviving.  That portion was removed before the land was flooded, however, the building where it was stored burned as well so only the tales of this inn survive.

Traveling along the Great Stage Road, this book details stories from dozens of inns and would make a great companion to an East Tennessee road trip. 

She also takes a look at the life of the innkeeper’s family.  Life on the frontier was hard, for everyone.  Just like on a farm where everyone works, the innkeeper had jobs for his whole family.  Older boys started their day in the barn caring for their guest’s horses.  Younger children were kept busy fetching wood for the numerous fireplaces required to warm the large buildings and cook for many mouths.  All the water used in the house had to be carried as well and all of the children would forage for the necessities supplied by the land.  From greens to berries, wild produce was carefully collected when it appeared.  Gardens were planted as well and would require much attention from the whole family.  Of course this assessment of the family assumes the inn is the primary business of the family.  As mentioned earlier however, the early stations were located on working farms so the family would have all of those duties after their guests left each day.