The Power of Smell

In the 1950’s and 1960’s movie producers experimented with incorporating scents into the theater experience.  Their project didn’t work too well but they had a great idea.  Our sense of smell is a powerful trigger to our memories.  I suppose that’s one of the key drivers of the multi-billion dollar scented candle industry.  Everyone loves for their home to smell like Grandma’s apple pie or fresh baked cookies.

Well there are scents that will forever remind me of my childhood home.  The unmistakable odors of cattle or sun-dried hay would hardly make popular candles but it will always take me back to hard work and happy days. 

This olfactory stimulus is one of the reasons I still regularly dry my laundry in the fresh outdoor air.  These days in our drought-stricken valley, we’re surrounded by wildfires (nearly 7,000 acres are burning across Tennessee) and the smoke is working its way into everything including my laundry.  Again, wood smoke wouldn’t sell very well but I grew up on sheets dried beneath the smoke from the wood stove and that’s what I’m reminded of while folding laundry today.

If you ever lived on or visited the mountain twenty years ago you too will identify with this memory.  It used to be that everybody heated their homes with wood.  This renewable energy source could be harvested from every hill and holler.  Hard winters often toppled the trees for you and chopping up stove-sized pieces would keep you warm for two days – the one when you chop as well as the one when you rest by the fire.  And since you’re gonna’ need a fire from November till April, every load of laundry gets a dose of the smoke.

You won’t ever find towels stiffened by cold winter winds and infused with wood smokein a luxury motel where they think you’ll be so impressed with their linens you may buy a set for your house.  But if you’ve ever had the pleasure of wintering on the mountain, I imagine you can appreciate them.

Janavee Stepp Sisco

This week my family lost another precious memory-keeper.  Aunt Janavee was the last of my Grandpa Stepp’s siblings and somehow despite seeing her so seldom, so long as she lived there was a link to Grandpa and to all of my great-aunts and uncles that surrounded my childhood.  Ironically, Daddy and I were talking about her just last week and I had tried to reach out to one of her sons to check on her.  I had just been saying I really need to go see her.

If you’ve been visiting the blog for a while, you’ll remember my new year’s resolution a couple of years ago was to visit.  Well I’ve been pretty successful at keeping that resolution, but there are just so many folks to visit that I don’t seem to be able to make much headway on my running list.  Still, every moment I get to spend with an aging neighbor or relative is a win in my mind because every visit yields new stories or reminders and details to stories I’ve always heard. 

Janavee, her mother Emma Stepp, nieces Roberta and Janiene holding her son Sheldon

This whole weekly blog is dedicated to preserving these memories of our mountain people.  Losing an octogenarian strengthens my resolve to record their stories, to tell them to my children and my children’s children.

I’m always asking you faithful readers to share your thoughts on the blogs.  Today I want to ask you to share your stories.  Please click on “comments” below and share a memory you have from your own childhood or from time with your grandparents.  Maybe you’d like to share a story your grandparents told you about their own childhood.

So let me share a little story from one of Janavee’s childhood friends, Dimple Norris Young (in her own words as nearly as I can transcribe them).

We’s talkin’ about the time they’s gonna give us shots for Small Pox.
They said it was goin’ to be Small Pox shots.
I remember Janavee found out what it was going to be and she slid out some way or another and she just flew down the road.
She said, I’m not stayin’ and let him poke me with that thing.
I’ve always wondered if she made it home or if somebody went and got her.

I remember not too many years ago, we went to church and somebody brought us part of the way home.  We had to walk over there by Conard’s [Atkinson] and all there.  And a dog got after me and her and like to scared us half to death.  We jumped bean poles and I don’t know what all through the yard there down to Uncle Millard’s before we ever got down there we just about tore ourselves up gettin’ away from that dog and it probably wouldn’t bite nothin’. 

Janavee with Great-Grandson Nathaniel and Grandson Kevin

Civil War Veterans

War is ugly.  Yet from our earliest accounts of history, mankind has “beat[en] plowshares into swords” (Joel 3:10) and faced down enemies.  Even today we have men and women marching under the stars and stripes on foreign soil in an attempt to preserve our way of life.  They deserve our prayers and a prominent place in our hearts.

Today is the 241st anniversary of the inception of the United States Marine Corps.  Tomorrow is the day America has set aside to honor veterans in every branch of service.  It seems a fitting time to share a recent research experience.

I’ve been doing some family-tree research and came upon a grave-site picture that inexplicably moved me to tears.  What is it about those simple white stones that bring on so much emotion?    I suppose it’s the suffering they represent. 

If you notice the death date on the picture, this man did not die in battle, but lived many years afterward, raised a family and hopefully enjoyed peace and happiness.  The survivors of America’s War between the States may have suffered more than those who fell quickly on the battlefield.  The state of medicine at the time meant that many war wounds would never really heal.  Musket balls were often carried inside limbs for a lifetime.  Without the aid of antibiotics, infections festered sometimes for years - not to mention the emotional scars of the close combat. 

Then there was Reconstruction.  Another document I’ve recently run upon records of Confederates’ oath of allegiance.  The header on this book reads, “An act to provide for the more efficient government of the rebel States’.  An article published by James R. Baker, jr. on Rootsweb explains that there was no standardized oath and that they were administered for varied purposes.  At least one ingenious Confederate commander prevailed upon his Union prisoners to pledge never to take up arms against the Confederacy.   The ledger records the citizen’s length of time in the state and everyone says 12 months so it appears that was the requirement before you would be permitted to vote.

I also found record of a young man, Preston Stepp, who died in May 1864 as a prisoner at the infamous Andersonville camp.  He died of dysentery after being captured at Rogersville, Tennessee in November 1863 - an utterly unromantic victim of one of the Confederacy’s greatest enemies.  I believe the 1850 census records a ten year old Preston living in Fentress County, Tennessee with his parents and three siblings.   I say “believe” because neither the enlistment nor prison record give any detail beyond the name and regiment.  It’s as though the war departments either had no idea there would be casualties or no intention of notifying the next of kin.  For research purposes, it seems nearly impossible to know if the record refers to your particular ancestor.  In fact, this soldier may have been the twenty year old son or even the fifty year old father who bore the same name.

Preston’s brother William appears to have enlisted with him in Tennessee’s 2nd Infantry Regiment.  As I looked at the picture of the nearly thirteen thousand headstones marking Civil War graves in Andersonville National Cemetery, I can’t help but wonder what young William went through in the weeks and months after his brother’s capture. 

When would William have learned his brother’s fate?  Would he have finished his tour of duty wondering whether Preston lived?  Did he return home to Fentress County half expecting him to come wandering home one day? 

The 1880 census shows William did return to Fentress County where he married and raised a family of his own, farming as his father had done.  Do you suppose he was ever even able to visit the Andersonville gravesite?  I doubt it as the three hundred eighty miles surely represented the journey of a lifetime.  Perhaps he felt he’d seen enough of Georgia during the war years.  Likely there would not have even been a tombstone erected in William’s day. 

As I’ve said so many times, I’m left with more questions than answers.  But this research causes me to question not just the past but the present as well.  The Bible tells us there will be wars and rumors of wars until the final days when at Armageddon good ultimately defeats evil.  And we certainly can’t bow to the forces of evil in the name of peace.  Still, it seems like anyone contemplating starting a new conflict ought to have make that decision in the center of one of our national cemeteries.

Comfort Foods

CHICKEN AND DUMPLINGS
How can such a comforting food make for such a bland picture?

Today’s article might be fittin’ for True Confessions… I woke up with a sinus headache amid overcast skies.  It seems the older I get the more my moods are driven by the weather and winter’s shrinking hours of sunshine don’t bode well for me. 

My life is so filled with blessings that it makes me downright mad at myself when I have these blue days.  A popular topic in many historical fiction novels is the depression frontier women often faced living in the dimly lit sod-houses of the prairie.  In my wide-open home with lots of windows and electric lights if I need them, I can scarcely imagine what those ladies had to deal with. 

But all is not gloom – last night’s supper was chicken and dumplings!  What is it about certain foods that just make us feel better?  It’s certainly not the nutritional value; it’s not even the satisfaction of a full tummy.  There’s just something about dumplings that kinda’ makes you smile. 

We can make dumplings on about anything.  My grandpa remembered his mother making dumplings on pinto beans – that very poor family probably didn’t have chicken very often.  And blackberry dumplings are a personal favorite.  But good ole’ chicken and dumplings are surely a universal favorite.  I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone at my table that claimed a distast  for them.

Of course I learned the fine art of dumpling-making at the hand of my grandmothers.  So much of my cooking reflects those early lessons.  My Grandma Stepp taught me to make a basic dough that she used for biscuits, dumplings or pie crust.  In fact, a lot of the things she taught me were really universal recipes that I fall back on every single day.  Depending on how ambitious I’m feeling, dumplings can be carefully rolled and cut or simply dropped into boiling broth. 

These days it’s hard to find a good, fatty old rooster for your dumplings so my Grandma Livesay discovered packaged chicken broth to enrich the weaker product of cooking lean chicken.  This is not the same as the rooster-method, but it suffices in a pinch.  While on a camping trip this summer I carried a can of chicken and dried broth cubes just in case the fishing didn’t go well.  My family was amazed when my dutch oven produced this staple dish and I was forced to confess the shortcut. 

Perhaps my choice today is a non-traditional breakfast, but there are just days I can’t muster hot biscuits, bacon and eggs.  And before you chastise me for this particular selection, I should admit that my first choice on a day like this is a dish of coffee-and-bread… have we talked about that before?  If not, we need to!

So by the time I had fed breakfast to the children and gotten myself dressed for the day, the sun had popped out and I remembered the leftovers.  The day is looking up already.

Ancestral Properties

This year I received a gift of an Ancestry.com subscription.  It has proven one of the most wonderful gifts ever because I’ve spent hours and hours poring over census records, death certificates and wills.  I’ve learned lots of dates and names and that’s exciting.  But there are little tidbits that really make it worth the time.

In fact, I’m learning so much that I’m really struggling to compose this week’s article in any kind of organized fashion.  So let me just tell you about one document and I’ll try to share the rest in little bits over the coming weeks.

All my life I’ve heard about this one or that one that received a land grant for military service.  It makes you proud to be living on a treasure like that.  Unfortunately I have dispelled most all of those tales. 

In the early days of the United States, the government claimed all the vast lands of the continent and fought numerous wars to insure that claim against other governments who sought to do the same or to wrest the land from the Natives who’d used it for centuries without needing a registered deed.  Then, when they needed to pay their soldiers, they found they had more land than money.  Therefore, many Continental soldiers were paid with land grants.  It was a pretty good deal for both parties since the soldiers were mostly in want of land.  However, after a few decades the place started filling up with people and it was no longer worthwhile to give lands in the East – then opens the homesteading of the Plains and a whole new chapter in American history.  Therefore, the last military land grants were issued about 1855. 

If you’ve heard your own family stories like this, a few hours at the courthouse reading old property deeds will reveal the history of land.  This fella bought it from that fella then gave it to his son and so on.   Now, there were SOME land grants on the mountain, in fact, the Fentress County Courthouse has a “Grants Book”.  However, I’ve not found any of my family in there.

But I did find a land grant in Virginia and it was fascinating. 

James Todd would be my great-great-great-great-great Grandfather on my father’s side.  On February 27, 1796 a deed for riverside Virginia land was decreed to him.  This was “of the lands allotted the officers and soldiers of the Continental line of said state” and the entries before and after are similarly worded.  There is an earlier date on each record that I’m assuming is the date the men actually located and marked their claim.  For James Todd that was in 1784.  Now, there was a process of applying for your land and the early date may be the application date, but ten years seems like a long time even for the government to be working on paperwork.

These old deeds read a lot like their modern cousins giving dimensions by the sixty-six foot surveyors pole .  They are handwritten in the flowing penmanship everyone of that generation seemed to possess – don’t know how today’s scribbling developed. However, being used to the printed word I sometimes struggle to read this.  The deed clearly says it’s for fifty-four and a half acres and while there are some plots of two and three hundred acres, there are many similar to this fifty-some-odd acres.  Here’s where my math gets challenged.  When they lay out the dimensions of the land it seems to add up to a lot more acreage. 

There’s more research to be done here.  We knew of a plantation my Todd family left in Virginia and I would expect this to be the same property despite the Virginia / North Carolina discrepancy.  So I’d like to try to locate the area on historic maps.  Since it lays on a river that should be doable.  And, county boundaries have moved but their history is generally documented. 

I know I’m always saying this, but here again I’m left with more questions than answers.  It’s just that the questions are new ones and that alone is progress – isn’t it?

Please share with me any stories your family has passed along about lands that were given to them.  Have you done any research and learned the facts behind those stories?