Chapter 1

Born in a Log Cabin

I was born on June 11, 1913, in a log cabin at the head of Mountain Creek. Mountain Creek is six miles from Ruth­­­er­­fordton, which is close to fifty miles southeast of Ashe­ville, North Carolina. My daddy said it was so cold the day I was born that he had to wear a coat while he harvested his winter wheat.

My mama said I was the ugliest baby she ever saw. She told folks she was ashamed to carry me anywhere. People would be talking about pretty babies, and she would tell them how ugly I had been. I’d bet a pretty I heard her tell that to folks a dozen times before I grew up. She even said it after I was grown. By the time I grew up I saw that my looks favored my mama and her side of the family. Maybe that was the reason she thought I was ugly, though I've heard folks say that she was a good looking woman. I know I thought she was.

When I was born Daddy and Mama already had one girl, Louise, who was nearly two years old. Mama went on to have three more girls and five more boys.

My earliest memory is of the flood we had in the summer of 1916. Daddy carried Louise and me down the hill from our cabin to the barn to see water rushing out into the bottoms. It looked like a big muddy river. Old logs and sticks and stuff were floating along.

Uncle Rob, one of my daddy's brothers, had a house by the Broad River. One room of his house and his hog pen were washed away. Lots of houses along the river got destroyed. It was a mess the way that river played smash with people's property.

I was very shy when I was real young. One day one of Mama's brothers, my Uncle Reid, came to visit us. I hid behind the door and stayed there till he left. I was that way. When someone came to visit, I ran off and hid till they left. Matter of fact, I stayed kind of shy until I grew up and got married. When I got to be courting age I had a hard time going up and talking to a woman that I didn’t know well.

My first memory of my grandpa, Martin Devault Hill, is when I was four years old. He was sitting up in a straight chair, leaning back against a brick kiln. When Grandpa stood up he was about five and a half feet tall and wore a thin moustache. I don’t think Grandpa had an ounce of fat on him.

Grandpa was a brick maker. There was good clay over on the branch where my cousin Lona Hill Hicks lived, and they made a lot of brick there. Grandpa mixed up the mud by hand and packed it in a tray that held four bricks. After the mud dried and shrunk some Grandpa dumped the tray over and freed it up. Then he put the mud bricks in a kiln to bake. Later on Grandpa bought a brick making machine that ground up the mud and squirted it out in the shape of a brick. When the unbaked brick slid out so far a wire cut it off.

When I was five years old, someone told me, "Your grandpa is dead.” Daddy and Mama took Louise, me, and my little sisters Ellen and Beatie over to Grandpa’s big house. His body was laid out in a coffin in the parlor room. That was the first time I ever saw someone who was dead.

When somebody died folks kept the body at home. The undertaker came out and fixed the body up and put them in a room for people to see. The room they put Grandpa's coffin in was the same one that my first child Joann was born in twenty some years later.

When I got older Daddy told me that he never expected Grandpa to die that young, but Daddy took it standing up.

A big flu epidemic came through in 1918. Everybody was scared that they were going to get it and die. Our neighbor Dave Sims told Daddy that he had carried some food to somebody's house because they were so sick they couldn't go to the store. He left the food on the porch because he was afraid to get any closer.

One day somebody came by and told Daddy the news that the World War had ended.  He went out in the yard and yelled toward the house of the Lewis family who lived about a quarter of a mile away. Daddy wanted to let them know that the war was over as quick as he could.  He could have got on a horse and rode up there, but I guess that wouldn't have been quick enough.

Uncle and Aunts

Mama's Aunt Julie and her husband Uncle John owned the cabin we lived in. Aunt Julie was Mama's mother’s sister. We called the log cabin and farm the "White Place" because Uncle John's last name was White and it had belonged in the White family for a long time.

Mama had only been two or three years old when her mama died, and Aunt Julie and Uncle John raised Mama. Mama’s daddy went off and remarried but he got killed at a shingle mill a few years later. A wooden pulley busted loose from the saw and struck him in the head. 

Uncle John's two sisters, Aunt Crissie and Aunt Lizzie, were both old maids who lived in a log cabin a couple of hundred yards down the hill from us. Actually, Aunt Lizzie got married for a few days when she was young, and then she had come back home. She married a man named Frazier but she never even changed her name, or if she did then she changed it back after she returned home. People asked about her marriage to Frazier every once in a while but she more or less brushed them off.  

Daddy and Mama were living in the little town of Rutherfordton when they had Louise. About that time Uncle John went blind. Uncle John and Aunt Julie asked Mama and Daddy to move out to the White Place to help them all out, and that’s how I came to be born out there.

Uncle John and Aunt Julie said that they needed Mama and Daddy to see after what they couldn't do for themselves. They needed a man to go to town to fetch their medicine and to get the wood up and grow the crops. They wanted to be sure that Daddy would be there to take care of them as long as they lived. In return for being under his care, we were going to inherit their property, two log cabins and one hundred acres of land. So Mama and Daddy and Louise moved in with Uncle John and Aunt Julie.

We all had to take care of Uncle John and help him get around. Aunt Julie not only cared for Uncle John but also helped out with all the chores Mama had in raising us. Daddy didn't have to do a lot for the older folks until they took to their deathbeds. Before then they done for themselves and each other as well as got help from Mama and us kids. 

Uncle John sat in a rocking chair in front of the fireplace for hours at a time. He was always friendly with us kids and he had a long beard. When I was a child nearly all old men had beards or at least moustaches. But Daddy and several of his brothers were always clean shaven, it was kind of in the family and the way times were changing.

From the time I was about four years old, I went to visit Aunt Lizzie and Aunt Crissie most every day. When I walked in their kitchen door, first thing I did was drag a chair over to the cupboard and climb up to see what they had to eat. That's where they kept the biscuits and fried-out meat that they fixed for breakfast. The meat was usually pork that was left lying in the grease they cooked it in. I helped myself to some of whatever they had left. Boy, was that ever good! They didn't have an icebox, so they had to eat whatever meat they had cooked that day. One of them always stood beside me when I got into the cupboard.

The kitchen had been added on next to their log cabin. They had to go outside and down a couple of steps to land on the porch and then turn and either go into the kitchen or out in the yard. The only heat they had in the kitchen came from their cook stove. Besides skillets, Aunt Crissie and Lizzie had a coffee grinder that they hung up on the wall.

After getting something to eat, lots of times I went into the main part of the cabin and headed for a cabinet where they kept their chewing tobacco along with a knife and whetstone. I got out the whetstone, spat on it, and cleaned the knife blade for them. The chewing tobacco wanted to stick on that knife. I thought I was sharpening the knife. At least I was trying. I'd work on that whet rock and make the knife blade pretty and shiny. 

The cabinet was small enough so that it sat on a table. Before Aunt Crissie and Lizzie got it the cabinet had been used at a general store to display spools of Clark's thread. It had six drawers in it, and each one was deep enough to hold a spool of thread.  

Aunt Crissie and Lizzie bought their tobacco in big old plugs. A plug was about the size of a big Hershey bar, but I bet it didn't taste like chocolate. They stuck the plug of tobacco in one of the drawers. Then they'd come along and cut off a piece to chew. They spit the tobacco juice into the fireplace where it sizzled and popped. But in the summer time, the fireplace wasn’t running and they spit in a can they had sitting around.

Aunt Lizzie and Crissie had a spinning wheel for making thread that they used for mending their clothes. If they were spinning thread, I stood and watched. They liked to talk to me, and I enjoyed watching them turn that wheel.  

Aunt Crissie and Lizzie had made cloth on a wooden hand loom when they were younger. I saw the loom stored down in the barn, and Daddy explained to me how they did it. The loom held warp threads snug that ran up and down so that weft threads could interweave across them.  They pushed a pedal to make the warp change and then they threw the shuttle with a weft thread through. After they changed the harness they slung the shuttle back to the other side. The harness is the thing that the threads go through to make a design or pattern, but they only had two because they were trying to make plain cloth. A while back one of my daughters got hold of some of the cloth that Aunt Crissie and Lizzie had hand woven and she divided it up with my other kids for a keepsake.

Aunt Crissie and Lizzie kept busy helping out where they could. Dad needed more cow feed than what we had. So Aunt Crissie and Lizzie took a hammer and beat corn cobs against a rock till they were all busted up. Then they soaked the pieces of cob in hot water till they got softer. They took a bucket full of them and spread the cobs in the cow trough where we fed the cow and sprinkled milled cotton seed on top. The cow might of thought she was getting a big meal but she wasn’t getting much of anything.

Aunt Crissie and Lizzie said the winters had been much colder when they were younger. When they traveled in the winter they had to heat bricks and wrap them in cloth to keep their feet warm. Once Mountain Creek froze over so hard they could drive their horse and buggy over it and not break through the ice.

In their back yard, Aunt Lizzie and Crissie tended to a half dozen bee gums, but they always wanted Daddy to rob the gums. They loved the honey that he collected for them. They put the honey in a glass goblet that had a lid on it. I loved to spoon honey out of the goblet or cut a chunk off what was still in the comb.

When we moved away from the White Place, Daddy moved their bee gums on the wagons with us. We had to make sure that the gums were stopped up good so none of the bees got out. That must have been a rough ride for those bees.

Besides the kitchen being attached to the porch, someone had built another little room beside it. It had a second story loft that was open, where they could toss in things for storage. Chickens hopped up on the porch, and then flew up to the open side of the loft where they made nests in the scraps and laid their eggs.

One day Aunt Crissie and Lizzie heard their chickens go a clucking loud out on the porch. They ran out and saw a big black snake crawling up the wall to the loft where it went to swallowing eggs. They started hollering and going on. My sisters and brothers and I were out in the yard when we heard the racket and carrying on. We all went running down to their cabin to see what was going on. When Daddy heard Aunt Crissie and Lizzie hollering he grabbed his shotgun and ran down there too. He took one look at that snake and shot it.  The snake twisted and jerked and slid down to the porch. Egg yellow smeared all over the boards that boxed up that room. The yellow ran all the way down the wall and out on the floor. That snake must have swallowed a bunch of eggs, and the smear was where it had slid down when Daddy killed it.

Out in the sticks

We lived out in the sticks, away from everybody. Our cabin was at the end of the road, about a quarter of a mile from where any one else lived. We were so far down the road we couldn't see any other house, and we didn't see many people. 

If anybody came in walking or on a horse or in a wagon we spotted them a long way before they got to our cabin. There were so few people around us that when we walked four miles over to the big house where Grandpa Hill lived we usually never saw anybody on the way. In fact, we got scared if we saw a car. We weren't used to seeing them.

Our cabin was made from big old logs that had been hewn out. Some of the logs were over a foot in diameter. The cracks between the logs were daubed with red mud that Daddy sort of smoothed out. The mud turned into hard dirt like a brick, but not as strong as one. Some places the mud kept wasting out, and it needed to be packed back up.

All our heat came from the kitchen stove and a fireplace built out of rocks and mortar. We had windows, but we didn't know what screens were. Flies came in and out as they pleased.

We used kerosene lamps to see by of an evening. Daddy had a Victrola where the recording was on a cylinder and it played on the outside edge. The records were shaped kind of like a can of salmon. We slid the record on to the player and turned it by hand. We had to get the swing of it, we had to turn it at the right speed to get the voice to come out all right.

Most of our furniture was homemade. Some Daddy made, some Uncle John made, some he bought that other people had made, such as chairs, cupboards, beds, and kitchen table.  There were furniture stores but they weren't for poor folks. We still have a dresser Uncle John built, and he made the bed that we still use. We bought our chairs from people who lived down the branch from us.

Our wooden bed frames had cords that wove from side to side as well as from end to end. Every cord Mama put on she made as tight as she could so the bed didn’t swag down in the middle. The cords were checked in squares about eight inches apart. We laid our straw ticks and feather beds on the cords for sleeping. The straw ticks were the cloth that Mama and Daddy stuffed with wheat straw under our feather beds, and the feather beds were cotton batten that Mama filled with goose feathers. We slept under quilts or comforters. The cords held the bed together as well as supported the straw ticks and feather beds. When Daddy grew wheat he was always anxious for the thrashers to save out fresh straw for our beds.

After we slept on the straw ticks for a night or two, they had the imprint of our body on them. So Mama had to regularly fluff up the straw as well as the feather beds. That kind of bedding offered good places for chinches to live in. Everybody living in the country back in those years had to fight chinches. They were bed bugs, small but sort of like a dog tick that was flat before it got on somebody. After dark when people went to bed and got settled in, those chinches came out. They crawled around and went to biting, so people didn't get much sleep. Those chinches tormented everybody, and they hated them.

When the chinches got bad enough, Mama took the bed frames apart and carried them outside piece by piece. Then she carried the straw ticks and feather beds out in the yard. She poured boiling water anywhere she thought a chinch could hide in the wood frame. Scalding those frames killed them things, and we slept better till they came back.

Daddy framed a shed on the side of the cabin that we used for the kitchen. That's where Mama fixed food and where we ate. He used rough planks for the walls, and they didn't have any insulation. Some of the boards got real warped and bowed. The kitchen was not sealed on the inside at all.

One year it come up a big snow. The boards on the kitchen wall were so bucked up that the snow blowed in. It was about the same temperature in the kitchen as it was outside, so the snow didn’t melt right away. Enough came through to make little mountains of snow more than a foot high on the kitchen table. Mama always put her salt in a coconut shell that had been carved out, and when she picked it up it was full of snow, with a little bit of salt underneath.

The cabin and the shed made an L shape and Daddy put a gutter on the roof where the two sides met. The roof was made of split oak shingles. Daddy boxed the kit­chen roof up with more of the rough planks he had used for the walls and floor. He didn’t have the money to buy shingles to cover the whole thing. Where boards were warped and twisted so that they left cracks, Daddy nailed small boards over them. It was the same kind of roof he built to cover our cow barn.

Most of the rain ran off the roof, but some of it always leaked through if it rained much. There were always some places that needed patching.

Once when I was down with Aunt Lizzie and Crissie, the roof of our log cabin caught on fire. A spark must have blown out of the chimney and landed on one of the oak shingles and caught fire. When I saw the flames I went running to where I could see real good. Mama grabbed a big washtub that was filled with water and carried it up into the loft. Then she climbed out the window onto the shed roof and set the tub under the overhang of the roof beneath the gutter. The flames were shooting three or four feet high. She got a water dipper and started throwing water at the fire. Whatever water was wasted ran down the gutter and back into the tub. She kept on till she put out that fire. If she hadn't discovered it for another five minutes, the whole cabin would have burned down. It wasn't much of a place, but it was all we had. There was no man around to help put out that fire, it was just Mama and the rest of us. She put it out. She saved our house.

Learning to help at an early age

Starting when I was about five years old, Daddy took me to the woods with him to cut shingles for the cabin roof. We walked a ways until he picked out an oak tree he knew would split good. He chopped it down with his ax, and then got out his cross cut saw, wooden mallet, wedges, and froe. A froe is a tool for cleaving wood. It has a heavy blade set at right angles to the handles, which makes it efficient for splitting oak.

Once he had the tree chopped down, Daddy had to use the cross cut saw to cut the tree into round blocks at least a foot in length. Then Daddy struck the froe so he could split the oak blocks down their grain. He kept on hammering the froe and then prising it wider apart until the wood split in two. If that didn’t work he used wedges that were metal or wooden.

Daddy knew that using sledge hammers to hit froes or chopping axes or wedges only served to spread out the head and damage them. A good mallet doesn’t get battered, but whatever it’s a hitting gets battered. So to make a good wooden maul he went out to find a tree that was hard to split, which was usually dogwood or white oak.  He said that if he used other trees, when he went to beating on the mallet, it was more likely to bust open.

He wanted the head of the mallet to be about five inches in diameter and about eight inches long. Where he wanted the head to stop Daddy chipped around the wood with a chopping ax. Then he stood the maul on its end and started chopping down till he chipped off the four sides to where the handle should be. Daddy didn’t want the handle to be square, but kind of round and smooth. So in the wind up he rounded off the four sides with his chopping ax to make it like he wanted it. Mallets didn’t last long if he used them a lot, and when he busted a mallet, he cut himself out another one.

Once Daddy got enough shingles cut I helped him carry them home so he could climb up on the roof and repair it.

Around the place

About fifty feet from our cabin was a well where we went to draw our water. Daddy rigged up a wooden drum with a metal crank driven into the end of it. He mounted the drum between two planks so the rope wound up evenly. As we turned the handle on the crank the drum revolved and lifted the bucket of water from the well. Every day I drew buckets of water and carried them back to the house. We had a dipper made from a gourd. We used it for drinking water out of a bucket that I hauled into the kitchen.

Aunt Crissie and Aunt Lizzie didn’t have a well, so they got their water from a spring. In their kitchen they had their own special gourd dipper to dip with, and they used the same one for years. At the spring they also had a gourd dipper hanging. That was because reaching a bucket into the spring would have stirred up leaves and lots of mess. It took a lot of time to fill a bucket with a gourd dipper and then carry it to their cabin. When we were working in the field by their cabin, lots of times we took off to the spring to get a cold refreshing drink.

You can bet that we didn't take much water to bathe in when we had to carry all our water from the well. When we wanted a bath we heated a tub of water, tempered it down to where we could stand it, and went to it.

Our smokehouse was beside the kitchen door, making it easy to bring in smoked meat for cooking. The barn was fifty feet or so beyond the well. More than once I carried an empty bucket from the cabin down to the well and walked on to the barn before I remembered that I was supposed to be fetching water.

The outhouse was a good piece down from the cabin past the end of the garden.  The privy had to be way off from the cabin because of the smell.

The privy was set on a sharp slope since people usually didn't dig holes under outhouses. We used a slop jar and chamber pots if people needed to go to the bathroom through the night. A slop jar had a lid that fit down tight and a handle for carrying it around. Chamber pots were smaller, and had a little handle on the side like on a tea cup. Every morning we had to empty them, clean them out, and set them out in the sun to dry.

The family burial plot

Uncle John died in 1919. He may have only been old or he may have got sick. Next day they laid out his body in a pine casket in the cabin. I don't recall what kind of service they had for him or who came to visit.

People used mule hearses to take caskets to cemeteries, but we used a wagon that Daddy had built. The wagon was a homemade bed that rested on a couple of axles, and it had iron wheels and wooden spokes.

They lifted the casket onto the wagon and hooked up the mules. There were about six of us that went to the family burial plot, it wasn't much of a crowd. Some rode in a borrowed surrey. Our family plot was out in the woods near Gilkey, about four miles from where we lived. They already had the grave dug when we got there.

A couple of days later Daddy and I got some hog wire and went back up to Uncle John's grave. We put up posts around the grave and then strung the hog wire to the posts to keep the wild animals away.

Not long after Uncle John died the government sent us a memorial stone that they gave for him serving as a Confederate soldier in the Civil War. Daddy and I took it up to the graveyard. The stone memorial sat upright. Most of the graves up there didn't have stones. They just had rocks. His brother up there has a stone too. He died after he got kicked hard by a mule.

Uncle John, along with Aunt Crissie and Aunt Lizzie who died in 1926, were the last members of our family to be buried in the plot out in the woods. Daddy took me and the rest of the family out there for Aunt Crissie and Lizzie’s burials.