Old Christmas

I trust you’ve all had a blessed Christmas!  This Christmas season seemed short to me – more so than what is normal these days as every month and season seem to pass in the blink of an eye!  I think because Christmas Day fell on a Saturday, and there were only 3 December Sundays, every church service seemed to be a special program of one type or another and… well I guess I can’t really explain why Christmas went so fast this year. 

I can definitively say that I cooked myself out.  Saturday evening I told my husband I didn’t think I’d cook again for a week – and I stuck pretty close to that declaration but I’m over it now and I’m feeding them all again.

What would you think if I told you that there is still another Christmas Day to come in this season - so keep your festive spirit alive, and the wilting Christmas tree too, I suppose.

This is Old Christmas and as I was reading about it, the independent, Appalachian spirit seemed so strong that I really wanted to share it with you!

First of all, let’s establish that there has long been speculation of exactly what day of the year Mary actually gave birth to the baby Jesus.  Now I’ve probably mentioned this a few times, but the exact date of one’s birth is much more important to us in the 21st century than it ever was in the past.  We are known not by our name, familial association or even public reputation as much as we are known by our Social Security number and our date of birth.  If you call your doctor, bank or insurance company it is rarely good enough to say, “I’m Beth Durham” because they will ask for that D.O.B.  When Jesus answered the pondering Jews’ in John 8:58, “…Before Abraham was, I am”, no one asked for his date of birth. 

Tradition says that the early church chose to turn a pagan holiday holy by celebrating the birth of the savior when the Romans celebrated the sun – sort of the sun’s birthday because they were hoping to implore longer days and more sunlight.  And that’s how we settled on December 25th.  I’ve always said, if you want to bake me a cake and bring presents, we can call any ole’ day my birthday and if we celebrate Jesus’ birth in the right spirit, He is surely pleased with it.

LearnReligions.com says the first Christmas celebration was in 336, then some 1200 years later Pope Gregory XIII saw fit to change up the calendar, replacing the old Julian calendar by removing 11 days.  (The Pope thought the Julian calendar was causing Easter to move too far from the Spring Equinox and he wanted to correct that.)  Now, in 1582 the only Appalachians were native and never heard of Pope Gregory or the Catholic church.

It would be nearly 200 years before England embraced the new calendar and by that time the American colonies were well established and the Scots-Irish had begun to settle Appalachia.  Here’s where you really see that independent spirit – as well as the isolation of the mountaineer.  For many years, the people of the mountains continued to use the old Julian calendar.  That meant that their Christmas celebration was held when the Pope’s calendar read January 6th. 

This makes January 6th Old Christmas Day.

Next Thursday I may have gotten a second wind for festivities and maybe we’ll just celebrate again… what do you think of that idea?

Quilt Repair Chronicle Week 1

Please recall from last week’s article that I’m undertaking to repair a nearly 70 year old quilt.  As with most of my projects, I have WAY underestimated the scope of this repair.  I find myself wondering what my grandmothers would’ve done if faced with this.  I doubt they would have had such a question because they would no doubt have conducted repairs along the way, instead of waiting until holes worked their way all the way through the quilt and batting poked its way out.

But I can’t go back – I say that a lot, you know.  You can never go back, you can only deal with what’s in front of you. 

Okay, first question – what to use for patches.  I don’t make my clothes, therefore I don’t create a whole lot of scraps.  And so many of the clothes we wear out are synthetic fabrics that don’t lend themselves to quilting. 

I kept remembering Matthew 9:16 that says, “No man putteth a piece of new cloth unto an old garment…” while I understand there is a deep spiritual lesson there about Jesus bringing a whole new age of grace and dispensing with the old age of the law, the literal meaning of his words seem to ring true in this situation.  It just so happens that I have a good supply of very old scraps – and I am so excited to tell you about these.

Domino Sugar Bag - it’s actually a creamy white, I’ve enhanced the photo to better highlight the faded brand name.

Back in 2016 I shared a story about my Great Aunt Willie Ward – she’d turned 100 years old in that article.  Aunt Willie was of a generation that despised waste.  She saved everything and found a use for most things.  Every time we went to Aunt Willie’s house, she tried to send us home with a car load of the stuff she’d saved.  These scraps came from her. 

There are cloth bags, even a scrap of a Domino sugar bag.  There is unbleached Domestic fabric (I think this is commonly known as muslin, however, it is always called domestic on the mountain and is a common quilting fabric).  Domestic fabric came in various grades of quality and thickness and I have several examples.

I don’t know quite what I’m going to use those bags for, but I couldn’t bring myself to cut them up for patches so I’ve opted for the Domestic.

Replacement Top over Whole Cloth Quilt

Aunt Willie also gifted me with several quilt tops – these are pieced tops that have never been quilted.  So that was a great option to cover one side of this quilt.  And it’s a very old means of salvaging a worn quilt.  In fact, I have another project waiting in the wings which is an appliqued cat quilt which wore out and was covered with a simple patchwork top and tack-quilted.  That one came from my husband’s family in Georgia. 

I especially love using one of Aunt Willie’s quilt tops on this project because it’s just the sort of thing she would’ve done.

Finally there’s the binding around the edge of the quilt.  This had apparently been replaced because it was  a poly-cotton blend of fabric which is too modern for this quilt.  Also, it is in really good condition, and the binding is usually the first part of a quilt to wear out.  As I began looking at the machined stitches that attached it, they were tight and sound while the surrounding fabric was loose and worn so I opted to just cut it away and save more of the original fabric.

And while it seems precious little, that’s my progress for the week!  I have patches cut and pinned in place; I’ve located and sized the replacement top and cleaned out the lumpy batting the surrounded the tears and edges.   We’ll see where we get to next week…

The Rural Poor Always Manage - Somehow

A few years ago I heard a news interview with a lady from Alabama who had taken a job in Washington, D.C.  She secured lodging outside the city and talked about the poverty she saw as she drove in each morning.  One comment she made really stuck with me, and came to mind as I’ve been preparing my next book.  I can’t exactly quote her (and don’t remember her name to site that quotation anyway) but she said ‘out in the country, poor people always find a way to survive’.

On the mountain, we often consider ourselves poor people – so maybe that’s why I identified with her comment.  Yet, the more I learn about the generations who came before me, the more I realize the abundance they enjoyed.  Of course when you discuss wealth, you have to determine which ruler to use.  A scammer called me once and after I shared the gospel of Jesus Christ with him, he told me “I thought it would be okay to scam rich Americans.”  I would normally say I’m anything but rich, but I realize if my home, car, wardrobe and dinner menu were compared to the poor in Niger, Sierra Leone, or India (where that gentleman said he lived), they might just think I live like the queen of a small country.  And this is 2020.

In 1935 a cellar stocked with a good crop of potatoes, dried beans hanging from the rafters and a hog quickly fattening on fall’s acorns would’ve made most of the world envious. 

Don’t you wonder though, what did prosperity look like in 1900 or before?

In 1900 John D. Rockefeller, known as the wealthiest American of all time, would have been 61 years old and his Standard Oil Company was still intact.  The Biltmore House was just 5 years old and the industrial revolution was, well, revolutionizing America.  On Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau, the Tennessee Central Railroad connected the Plateau to Nashville and the wide world with a line that reached to Emory Gap. 

While the railroad allowed stock and crops to be sold beyond the plateau, families here were still largely subsistence farmers.   Somehow, that term has become almost derogatory, as though survival is not enough.  In that day before you could compare whether your car was newer or faster than your neighbors, when no one had the latest iteration of cell phone or other technological gadget, wasn’t it enough to have good food on the table and healthy children?

And all of that abundance takes us right back to the land.  I think the land and the culture of those who’ve grown up close to the land is probably that ‘managing’ part of the rural poor. 

In years past, if a man could manage to get a little spot of land, he could begin building something – not just a home, but building a family and a life.  He would cut timber, work in the mines or hire himself out as farm labor until he could save enough cash money to buy a milk cow and maybe a mule to pull a plow.  He would put out a crop to feed both family and stock – and his whole family would help him. 

Sure there were cold times – homes weren’t insulated and heavy woolen coats were often a luxury.  Yet, if he worked hard cutting wood, his wife could sit close to the fireplace with the baby and they’d be okay. 

And there were hungry times as well, when crops didn’t fare well and the forest didn’t give up the game.  Yet, with a little grace (and a garden must be planted with prayer), and a lot of hard work, the land would give just about everything that family needed.  Clothing spun from cotton or wool, meat and vegetables to eat, could all be had with just a tiny amount of knowledge and a little spot of land.

It’s really no wonder that the home-place was revered.

Intertwining Family Trees

Proudly hailing from the South, I’ve heard a lot of jokes about family trees with no branches.  I often counter those with some comment about intertwining families. 

While researching genealogy I often see marriages where siblings from one family married siblings from another family.  These relationships often get an odd expression (or even that “no branch” comment), especially from people who haven’t looked back at their family tree or who are unfamiliar with the large families that were the norm a century ago.

A member of my own family recently mentioned with both downcast eyes and a bit of a smirk that “Uncle Ernest married Mama’s sister”.  Since Ernest was her father’s brother, there’s certainly no legal, genetic or obvious moral reason for the embarrassment.  In fact, as we talked through these marriages the path seemed clear and logical to me.  And since I’ve seen these marriages not only on Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau but also in Southeast Tennessee, Northern Georgia and Alabama, they were surely widely accepted in days gone by.

When families had a dozen or more children and limited transportation, joining families at multiple points seems convenient in the least.  If you further consider the role parents traditionally played in choosing a spouse, the logic works out even better.  Certainly if parents found a family of like faith and good character, choosing more than one match would seem very valid.

As with so many topics this history blog addresses, it can be difficult to look at these marriages in the proper, historical context.  Today, we are connected to people all around the world; can virtually ‘meet’ people from almost any nation and walk of life.  And certainly, the social barriers to marrying across socio-economic, racial and cultural lines have decayed.  So when you think of these sibling connections, try to imagine the day when handwritten letters were not just the preferred method of communication but usually the only method.  Even those letters took days and weeks to reach their destination with the time doubling before a response could be received. 

I’ve heard of many romances that blossomed across the miles as letters were exchanged.  I can think of two example couples who met, saw each other once or twice, the man left town (both were soldiers) and courted his girl solely through the mail.  One of those married the day after the fella’ was discharged and returned home and the other sent a bus ticket to his girl who traveled across the country to marry him.  While war-time romances are unique, both of those examples lasted until they parted in death.  I present them to show the difference in courtships over the ages.

Even without the threats and passions of war, young people of earlier generations were serious about marriage with both boys and girls seeking a life partner.  As young adults left large families to start their own families, it was very common for a younge sibling to join them for a time to help with home and babies which introduced them to a new family and perhaps to a new church congregation.

Church has always been a choice location to look for a spouse.  After all, Christian parents teach their children not to be unequally yoked to unbelievers.  While church attendance wasn’t a sure test it surely seemed a good start. 

I’m just trying to paint you a picture here that the “modern” idea of picking up a stranger-date online or at a social gathering would have been pretty foreign in the small towns of 19th century America.  As I so often ask you on this site, whenever you hear of these intertwined family trees, try to imagine their circumstances and the vast differences in their lives as compared to ours.

Now I have a question for you…I tried to do a little internet research and found lots of famous (and royal) people who married their cousins.  But can you think of any well-known instances where siblings-in-law married?  Just click “comments” below and SHARE.

The Logston Tide

The mountain is replete with stories of haints and ghosts.  Despite very deep Christian faith we tend to be a superstitious people.  Now this is something I don’t want to perpetuate so you won’t usually find ghost stories among my Tennessee Mountain Stories.  However, Callie Melton has included several in “Pon My Honor” and I want to share this particular one because of the history I found behind it. Here you can read a series of old newspaper clippings that detail the crime and trial of young Logston.  The difficult execution is also detailed as well as nearly 2,000 witnesses.  That would be a crowd in Jamestown today, can you even imagine all those people gathering in 1872 when they had to walk or ride a horse? 

This story is the one that Grandpa Smith always told us about the time that Wolf River got so high just after the Logston hanging.  This flood has always been called the Logston Tide.  Whether there was any connection between the two, or it was a mere coincidence, I leave entirely up to you.  But this flood did occur in April of 1872, a few days after Calvin Logston was hung at Jimtown in Fentress Country.

Wolf River at York Mill in Pall Mall, TN

Way back yonder when Grandpa and Grandma Smith were first married, they moved down on Wolf River.  They hadn’t been living there long until Grandma’s mother, Caroline Parsons, and her grandmother Elizabeth Young, had come to live with them.  Grandma’s pa was dead and her brothers were all married, so it just seemed fitten that the two old women should come and live with them.

Now about this time this here man named Logston was accused of killing two women and a child over around Forbus, in what is now Fentress County, not too far from Jimtown.  He finally got caught over in Kaintuck and was brought back to Tennessee to stand trial.  Grandpa didn’t recollect much about the trials, but he did know that the man had fit his case in all the courts and had lost ever time.  So the day set for the hanging had finally come around.  He’d clean light forgot the date, too, but he did know that it was early in the spring.

Cal Logston

On the day set for the hanging, Grandpa said that he’d got up and left home bright and early that morning for it was a good little piece over to Jimtown where the hanging was to be.  Now since this was the first legal hanging ever to be helt in Fentress County, and because of the crime that the man had committed, a might log of excitement had been stirred up.  When he got to Jimtown it seemed like everbody in the whole country had come and fetched his dog.  For never before or since in his life had Grandpa seen such crowd at one place.

Before the hanging there was a long funeral sermon with all the folks crying and taking on, and the prisoner having to set there on his box with his hands tied hind him.  Then after the sermon all his friends had come up to tell the condemned man good-by.  Everbody sure was mighty worked up by the time they was ready to hang him.

Now when they went to hang him, the first time the trap was sprung the rope broke right off.  Then another rope was fixed, and it, too, broke just like the first one had done when the trap was sprung.  While they was fixing the rope for the third try, Logston spoke a few words.  He said that they was hanging an innocent man and that all this proved it.  He also said that if they went ahead and hung him that God would give them a sign that he was telling them the truth, for after he was dead it would come the biggest rain ever seen in them parts.

All this talk of his made no difference to the Law, for when the third rope was fixed they hung him again.  The rope didn’t break this time.  And when the doctor said he was dead, they cut him down and put him in his box.  Then everbody went home.

It was about dark when Grandpa got home that night.  He had to hurry to get his night-work done up.  Grandma had already milked, so he went to feed his hogs.  He had fixed him up a rail pen on the other side of the river from his house, so he walked across to the hog pen on the rocks down at the crossing place just below the house like he had always done.  The family hadn’t much more than got done eating supper, till it begin to rain.  And that was the hardest rain Grandpa said that he’d ever seen or heard in all his life.  There wasn’t much thunder or lightning, it was just rain.  It looked like the sky had opened up, and the rain was coming down by bucketsful.  It rained like that all night, too.

It rained so hard that by daylight the next morning Wolf River was already climbing out of her banks.  And by the time that Granma had got breakfast ready and they had all eat, the water was might nigh up to the house.

The womenfolks got scared when they saw this, and to tell the truth, Grandpa said he wasn’t feeling any too good hisself.  “I recollected only too well what the condemned man had said a-fore they hung him the last time.  He did say that God would send a flood to prove that he was a-tellin’ the truth when he said he hadn’t done hit.   And now hit shore looked like hit,” he said.  So they started putting things up high on the rafters.  They worked as fast as they could, but by the time they was all ready to leave the water was lapping at the doorstep.

Now being that Grandmother Young was the oldest, Grandpa carried her out first.  When he stepped off the doorstep with her, the water hit him up around the ankles.  He carried her up the hill a short piece and set her down, then hurried back to get Grandmother Parsons.  By the time he got back and got her out the door, the water was might night up to his hips.  He took her up to high ground and set her down with her mother, then he went back for Grandma.  By the time he got Grandma Smith out, the water was up to his waist.  It had come in the house and was still rising.  When he’d got them all out, they stayed and watched the river for awhile.  Then they all went over to a neighbor’s house who lived further away from the river.

Well, the river did get higher than it ever had before.  It washed away a lot of houses and a lot of stock was lost.  Only a few people got drownded, though, for most of them had took off to high ground when it begin to rain.  They all recollected what Logston had said at his hanging.

In a few days the water begin to go down, but it was nigh on to a week before Grandpa and his family could go back home.  It had done a sight of damage, and that summer it was so dry that not much crops was raised.  Now Grandpa lived on Wolf River for years and years after that, and he lived in these parts until his death in 1944.  “And ‘pon my honor, never has that river been as big a-fore or since,” so many times I’ve heard the old man say.