Found: A New Cemetery

Highland Cemetery in Dry Hollow, Tennessee.  Can you see the steeple of the little church peeking up beyond the hill?
 

Well I had a grand time on Decoration Day last Sunday and I sure hope you can all report the same.  I’m sorry I didn’t get to visit with many of you.  When I arrived at Campground with rain threatening, there were only a handful of people.  I did get to see one neighbor, Lorene, who isn’t able to get out much these days due to an ailing husband, several Atkinson and Miller cousins and a couple of Stepps.

My Uncle Leon made a passing statement about locating some ancestral graves and mentioned a cemetery that I had visited once many years ago.  You know it doesn’t take much to send me on an adventure and he did it!  So, after the traditional visit to The Whittaker Cemetery (and no ice cream this time, I’m afraid), we headed North East off the mountain toward Livingston.

Highland Freewill Baptist Church

In 1928, my Great-great Granmdother, Sarah Jane Langford Stepp was staying with her son Wilburn on the mountain bench below Monterey in a community called Dry Hollow.  At seventy-nine years of age, she passed away in her son’s home.  Even on today’s roads and in cars that run the fifty-five mile per hour speed limit, that’s an hour’s drive from the Burrville community where she raised her family.  I can’t quite imagine what it would have been in that day.  We don’t actually know where her husband had been buried thirty-seven years earlier but we believe it to be near Jamestown, which would have been forty-five minutes in another direction – again that’s driving on modern roads – but all of the family had left that area anyway.  So, they did the only thing they could do and buried her in Highland Cemetery.

I don’t know if she saw the end coming and was able to have any input on her final resting place, but I cannot imagine a more beautiful spot to leave your mother.  The cemetery sits atop a low rise amid towering mountains on all sides.  At the foot of the hill is an absolutely picturesque little church, Highland Freewill Baptist Church.  Pastor Derek Parsons was good enough to supply a brief sketch of the church’s history.  While that adorable building only dates to the 1970’s, the congregation was established about 1907.  When their churchouse burned they continued meeting in homes or yards until a new building could be erected using volunteer labor and lumber harvested from the neighboring hillside.  The floor joists were hand hewn. 

The cemetery is even older, with at least two civil war veterans buried there.  The oldest grave I found was 1873, unfortunately the name was unreadable, however someone clearly knows its occupant for that was one of the graves adorned with a brand new Confederate flag.  The community has continued to utilize the land and new graves with modern granite stones share the space with the very old, covered graves.  A new section seems to have opened with two graves sitting on the opposite side of the driveway.

Not knowing this part of the country very well (if you’re reading this and can enlighten me, by all means please do so in the comments below), I can’t help but wonder where the large slabs of quarried stone came from.  There are several graves completely covered with them, and some are huge.  I couldn’t imagine the effort required to haul those stones to the top of that mountain.  Although it’s not too hard to believe loved ones were more than willing to put that effort into preparing and preserving their family plots. 

As I looked around this quiet little community, my creative brain began to spin with questions.  That same creativity will write the stories if it can’t find any facts – this valley will certainly appear in an upcoming book.

Rock Wall on Bear Hollow Road.  The original Highland Freewill Baptist Church building stood on Bear Hollow Road; it burned in the 1970's.

Decoration Day Memory

Sunday is Decoration Day at Campground.  We’ve talked about this holiday here before but as I go to place flowers on graves, I am always reminded of a special memory that I wanted to share with you today.  Now, this is not quite so historical as most of my research and writing – especially since I like to consider myself young enough that my childhood isn’t HISTORY.

I have a lot of memories of piling a bunch of people into the cab of a Ford F150 pickup truck.  Both of my grandfathers drove these trucks and whenever they carried the grandkids around that’s what we all hopped into.  We always thought it would be great fun to ride in the back, but they never let us go to town that way, just around home.

My maternal grandfather, Henry Livesay, was a quiet man.  He didn’t have a lot of deep family ties, but he was fiercely loyal to his eight siblings, and of course was dedicated to caring for all us grandkids.  He was also serious about caring for the family’s graves. 

Grandpa wasn’t a church-goer; he wasn’t saved until he was seventy-seven years old.  Each year just before Memorial Day, we all rode out to Monterey to visit the Whittaker Cemetery and attend to his mother’s grave.  He would carry rakes, a shovel and bucket of dirt, and the decoration flowers. 

That old grave, planted without the benefit of modern vaults, continually sank and Grandpa was always adding more dirt.  Buried beside Great Grandma was her brother who had passed away in 1927 presumably unmarried and without children.  There were few people left to attend to that grave.

Most of Grandpa’s siblings had left the plateau in search of work.  Lee, who lived in Ohio, would often make it back home for Decoration Day.  If he wasn’t going to be able to make it, both he and their sister Willie Ann would send money to Grandpa to buy flowers on their behalf.

After the work was finished at the cemetery, we’d stop to visit Tom and Nova (Livesay) Todd who lived right next to Whittaker Cemetery – you simply couldn’t go to the cemetery without stopping at their house.  I still can’t go to that cemetery without thinking I need to visit them.  However, they’ve passed on now too and even their little house is gone.

The final stop on the big annual trip to Monterey was Dairy Queen.  Everyone in the truck got a cone and frankly we kids were probably more eager to get the treat than visit the old aunt or to drop off flowers for the dead.  I don’t know if Grandpa had a great psychological plan in buying us ice cream but it certainly created a tradition that I am now loathe to abandon. 

Because Decoration Day was so important to him, I have pledged to always decorate his people’s graves, if I am at all able.  The flowers are awfully expensive these days, but it’s really not about big boquets.  The important thing is remembering.  I never knew Grandpa Livesay’s parents so my memories about their graves are entirely centered around my Grandpa.  Now I also have to decorate Grandpa Livesay’s grave, as well as my Grandpa and Grandma Stepp’s.  Those three certainly are rich in memories and even though I have tears in my eyes as I type, they are beautiful, precious memories that I choose to enjoy despite the occasional moment’s mourning.

Personal Space

We in the Durham household are very honored to have a missionary family staying with us for a few weeks.  The Lyons have five children aged nine and under, add in my two and that’s a lot of energy.  A home with seven children is pretty out of the ordinary these days – if they stayed very long I’ll bet we could even get our own reality show out of it.  However, a couple of generations ago, this would have been a very normal household.

As we’ve talked about adjusting schedules and feeding the crew, I can’t help but imagine how my great grandmothers managed their own homes.  The families of my four sets of great-grandparents had five, ten, eleven and twelve children.  Even with very high infant mortality rates, they raised five, nine, and two families of eleven of those children. 

The story on The Printed Word two weeks ago prompted some precious reminiscing among my cousins when I posted the picture of my great grandfather’s steamer trunk.  Those cousins remembered it so well because it was in their own homes when he stayed with them.  For you see, just a couple of generations ago aging parents lived with their adult children when they could no longer care for themselves.  That added another person or two to full houses.

The concept of personal space certainly differs around the world.  I’ve heard folks who’ve lived in third world countries where large, extended families sleep on dirt floors in a single, common room.  In the morning, they roll up straw mats and prepare their meals in the same room.  Here, we have kitchens and dining rooms, living rooms and dens, as well as studies and playrooms – and would you believe that on average there are just about two and one-half people living in over two thousand square feet of house?  (The 2010 family size per statista.com was 2.59.  The same year, census.gov reported a median home size of 2,169 – that was the latest year data was available for the home size.)

About a year ago, I wrote a series of articles about historic homes around the area.  As I look back at some of those houses, I realize they seem spacious enough if I think of living there with just a husband and one or two children.  But those houses counted their families in double digits and their square footage in hundreds instead of thousands of feet.  I’ve shared the picture of my Uncle Lester Key’s house with you before.  The house I knew had been significantly enlarged from when the children were all home, and it was still pretty small.  That family of seven children slept in the loft of the house, the only son had a ‘room’ partitioned on one end by a curtain.  My grandmother who was born in the mid 1920’s remembers sleeping at the foot of her parents’ bed.  She doesn’t remember that as, “I had a bad dream and ran to their bed”.  Instead, it was just her place to sleep. 

Shawna with her brother in front of the Lockhart House, home of her great-grandmother.

One home I didn’t mention in that architecture series was the Lockhart house in Clarkrange.  Built in 1926, it was one of the finest homes in the community for many years and still stands proudly near the junction of Highways 62 and 127.  Dr. Joseph Lockhart was a second generation medical professional and I’m sure when he built this stone house he expected to both raise his family in it as well as treat patients.  In fact, his daughter, JoBlan LaRue tells in the 1987 Hitory of Fentress County book that she remembered her mother caring for people who were too sick to go home.  The house had two downstairs bedrooms – one for the Lockharts and a second reserved for patients.  Shawna Sibley, one of their great-granddaughters, remembers the house which had a whopping six bedrooms, but they were tiny rooms.  This house was larger than many of the era but I’m sure when the nine Lockhart children were home it seemed full to overflowing.

I’ve talked about my own grandparents’ home which was often overflowing with family.  For all of our connected-ness and social media we are not a generation that really enjoys each other.  That previous generation would ‘gang up’ every chance they got.  People would sleep on pallets on the floor or with four to a bed.  (John Denver’s “Grandma’s Featherbed is echoing in my head right now.)  We thought little about comfort in those days, we were just happy to be together.  You know there is much about yester-year that I miss and long for and this is certainly one of the biggies.  I’m always sad that we are losing touch with extended family and no longer sharing our stories and history.

As the days pass with my house filled, I’ll no doubt share some of the joys and the struggles.  I’m sure I’ll drive some of my guests absolutely crazy, but in the end, I believe we’ll all be blessed for the experience.

The Purpose of The Land of Saddlebags

I write fiction.  I read fiction.  It’s not that I’m opposed to non-fiction, it’s just that the reality of our world is often so bleak that in the limited time I get to read, I think I want to escape into a good book.  Understanding this desire, I’ll confess that my writing has been criticized as “too real”.

However, historical research must be conducted in the realm of facts – at least as much as is available, and a lot of the history I want to learn about isn’t recorded in detail.  So when I’m reading a book like The Land of Saddle-Bags, I often forget to ask myself why was this written?

In reviewing books for publishers, I recently got ahold of one whose agenda was immediately so clear and so contrary to my personal views that I had to return it and beg to be excused from reviewing it.  That was certainly not the case in reading James Watt Raine’s The Land of Saddle-Bags.  However, by the end, I realized he did have an agenda albeit not one that is particularly offensive to me.

Please recall that when I first began sharing this book with you, I was thrilled that he was nearly native to the mountains (having been born in Scotland and raised in West Virginia and Arkansas) as well as sympathetic to the mountain people.  Throughout the book, unlike so many early-twentieth century treatises about us, Mr. Raine proved his knowledge and sympathy.  Missing was the attitude that we are an ignorant, do-less people who must somehow be fixed by educated people from cities – and usually northern cities. 

Early 1930's Mountian Farmer - you can see the farm in the background with the split rail fence.  He's proud enough of his horse that he's posed for a picture with it.

Then I came to the final two chapters, Wealth and Welfare and The Challenge.  Here, the author began to summarize the needs of the mountain people and to theorize the method by which those needs could be met.  I wouldn’t argue with his summary – historically, there’s been little cash-flow in mountain homes, difficult transportation, only rudimentary education, and a lifestyle that reflects each of these limitations.  However, to see a challenge and to formulate a methodology, you have to find a desire for change. 

Herein lies the rub.  When I was in high school my English class was assigned a paper based on interviews with family and neighbors who lived on the Plateau before electricity was available there.  Now, this was a contest sponsored by either the local electric cooperative, or maybe by TVA.  We had learned how to interview and how to present a balanced and unbiased news story and silly me set off to complete my assignment with those lessons in mind.  The people I interviewed (my grand parents and maybe a great aunt or uncle) well remembered life without lights.  They remembered wood-burning cookstoves and keeping your butter cool in the spring.  They recalled the first appliances they bought – and my Daddy remembered the excitement at being able to freeze popsicles in their brand new refrigerator.  And they all remembered good times.

Now, it won’t surprise you that I didn’t win that contest – don’t remember the grade I got on the paper but since I completely missed the point of the essay it may not have been a very high score.  You see, the sponsors were looking for a thrill associated with the coming of electrical power.  They wanted to hear how dark and low was the life in the powerless home.  That just wasn’t what I was hearing. 

And as I listen to the mountain stories of yesteryear, I don’t envision the bleak life that posed a challenge for outsiders to overcome. 

This is a familiar theme on this blog – and I don’t mean to be repetitive.  I’ve talked before about how thankful I am that we have good medical care now.  And my generation has had far more opportunities for education than any previous generation on the mountain – and those opportunites have multiplied in the ensuing years. 

So the question I pose to you now is whether we are the same now.  Or, are we a totally different people?

Do good roads and cars change who we are or do they simply change where we spend our time?  Does literacy change the character of a people or does it merely enlarge our coast (as Jabez prayed in 1 Chronicles)? 

I hope you’ll comment below and share your thought; you can surely guess mine.

Many of the suggestions that James Watt Raine published in 1924 have been implemented.  Farm training was offered in the 1940’s, and many young men took it because they were desperate for cash and the government paid them to attend.  Strong cattle breeds are present on our farms now, and we have a lot of steep land lying fallow and rebuilding soil - we are constantly fighting the erosion that will always challenge our mountaintop.  And we now enjoy hard-surfaced roads that allow us to ship produce and stock anywhere in the world.  We have good schools and I’d wager out literacy rate outranks many urban areas. 

I would further assert that we are still the strong people that settled this difficult land and survived where so many others would not.  While we’ve learned new ways, many of us still remember the old ways – ways that have persevered for centuries and will sustain our people through the hardest of times. 

I get pretty protective of my people when I read derogatory reports – consider this my defense, even if the attack is nearly 100 years old.

What do you think?

The Printed Word

Last week my husband left my bible behind at church and I was without it for a whole week.  I grabbed it up on Sunday and it’s back in the house this week.  It’s rather like having found a lost friend.  But it made me think about the bibles we have in the house – in fact about all of the books that we have.  Our access to the printed word (both traditionally printed on paper and digital works as well) is really overwhelming if you think about it.  And you know that I can never help but make the historical comparison.

I have a great old heirloom in my home – it is an antique steamer trunk that belonged to my Great Grandpa Key.  His youngest daughter was born in 1931 and she remembered that Grandpa always kept his clothes in that little trunk (reality check number one:  would your entire wardrobe fit in there?).  Also stored in the trunk was the family’s only bible.  She explained that many of the kids had a little testament but Grandma, Grandpa and their eleven children shared the single bible.   She revealed that memory with me as she told how her mother would read where her name, Lois, was mentioned in the bible.  She would go to the trunk, get out the family bible and read to her from Second Timothy 1:5.  The young Lois was sure that her name was mentioned in other places in the bible and she determined when she could read that she would find them.  Her sweet smile as she told me that story is one of those mental snapshots that I can see clearly in my mind’s eye.

I have books stored in that steamer trunk now… it’s chocked full of books!  Books are so cheap for us and so readily available that they seem to multiply on us.  In fact, I have a box in my truck that I keep meaning to take to the used book store to exchange – see, then I’ll have just as many books but different ones! 

Now, the Keys were literate people – which wasn’t terribly common in their generation.  My father remembers his grandpa reading every newspaper he could get his hands on, and he read from front to back.  He studied the trends of the stock market and really seemed to understand it.  Yet, we would have to call him rather ignorant simply because he had no access to the vast collection of written knowledge. 

Lots of people have worked hard to make books available to children; of course, rural locations still struggle with that.  On the mountain, you still have to drive into town to get to a library, and that doesn’t seem very practical if your kids are in school close to home and you are maybe working on the farm.  Some counties have their libraries only open to city residents.  However, I recently discovered that the Tennessee library systems are working to make a digital collection available for free download and that’s pretty exciting as we see the internet in nearly every home these days, even in remote locations.  A love of books is a wonderful gift to give a child.  I’m not sure where I got this love but clearly I did. 

I am not what you would call wealthy – in fact, I’m far, far, far, from it.  Yet, when I make these historical comparisons and realize that books were possessions of very wealthy people in years gone by, I realize how much I really do have.  The ability to read was prestigious and it was often flaunted whenever possible.  In the Victorian era, a parlor would have a table in the center of the room with books upon it as a symbol to any visitors that educated people lived here. 

In mountain families where every hand was needed to scratch from the earth enough food to survive the cold months of winter, the luxury of reading or even learning to read was not to be had.  I’ve been amazed as I’ve worked on genealogical research to find ancestors who accumulated significant land and ran successful businesses yet when I find a land deed I find it signed, “by my mark”.  Of course many of our ancestors could scribble a signature and read a just little bit.  I find that many parents longed for “learning” and because they couldn’t have it themselves, it was a high priority for their children. 

These good ole’ days we recall and study had a lot going for them.  But sometimes I do get a bit of a reality check when I see something like books where we enjoy such great access.  With our social woes and overpopulation, amid growing persecution of Christian people around the world and governments that seem to encroach more of our personal liberties every day, we do enjoy many benefits in this modern world.