1 50 6 https://omeka-test.library.appstate.edu/files/original/2c86652603ef47516c8574ac1c44906b.jpg 5e842cea0388d584fe38ecdefc4400ca Omeka Image File The metadata element set that was included in the `files_images` table in previous versions of Omeka. These elements are common to all image files. Width 322 Height 238 Bit Depth 8 Channels 3 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Leo Finkelstein Papers Description An account of the resource This collection contains materials relating to Leo Finkelstein, resident of Asheville, North Carolina, the Asheville Lions Club, and the Beth Ha-Tephila Cemetery in Asheville. It contains computer discs, notes, scrapbooks, book drafts, correspondence, photographs, programs, fliers, and other materials related Leo Finkelstein, his wife Sylvia, and the Lions Club, Elks Club, and Jewish Community in Asheville, North Carolina. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Finkelstein, Leo, 1905-1998 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Group of Children in front of Car, Asheville, 1910s Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource circa 1910 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 107_cd1_06_kids in car Subject The topic of the resource Asheville (N.C.)--Photographs Children Automobiles Description An account of the resource Photograph of a group of children in front of a car in Asheville, North Carolina. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a title=" In Copyright - Rights-holder(s) Unlocatable or Unidentifiable" href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-RUU/1.0//" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> In Copyright - Rights-holder(s) Unlocatable or Unidentifiable </a> Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource JPG Photographs Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a title="AC.107 Leo Finkelstein Papers" href="https://appstate-speccoll.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/192" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> AC.107 Leo Finkelstein Papers </a> Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. <a title=" Leo Finkelstein Papers" href="https://omeka.library.appstate.edu/collections/show/27" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> Leo Finkelstein Papers </a> Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. https://www.geonames.org/4453066/asheville.html Type The nature or genre of the resource Image Temporal Coverage Temporal characteristics of the resource. 1910s 1910 Asheville car children https://omeka-test.library.appstate.edu/files/original/ed9c615029fc3522825f535f029a3966.jpg 2a8b3d7d897db9a5128cb52da33395f6 Omeka Image File The metadata element set that was included in the `files_images` table in previous versions of Omeka. These elements are common to all image files. Width 927 Height 1037 Bit Depth 8 Channels 1 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Leo Finkelstein Papers Description An account of the resource This collection contains materials relating to Leo Finkelstein, resident of Asheville, North Carolina, the Asheville Lions Club, and the Beth Ha-Tephila Cemetery in Asheville. It contains computer discs, notes, scrapbooks, book drafts, correspondence, photographs, programs, fliers, and other materials related Leo Finkelstein, his wife Sylvia, and the Lions Club, Elks Club, and Jewish Community in Asheville, North Carolina. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Finkelstein, Leo, 1905-1998 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Harry Finkelstein in Front of Car, circa 1910 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource circa 1910 Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 107_cd1_04_father Subject The topic of the resource Finkelstein, Leo, 1905-1998--Family--Photographs Finkelstein, Harry--Photographs Description An account of the resource A photograph of Leo Finkelstein's father, Harry, in front of a car. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a title=" In Copyright - Rights-holder(s) Unlocatable or Unidentifiable" href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-RUU/1.0//" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> In Copyright - Rights-holder(s) Unlocatable or Unidentifiable </a> Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource JPG Photographs Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a title="AC.107 Leo Finkelstein Papers" href="https://appstate-speccoll.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/192" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> AC.107 Leo Finkelstein Papers </a> Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. <a title=" Leo Finkelstein Papers" href="https://omeka.library.appstate.edu/collections/show/27" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> Leo Finkelstein Papers </a> Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. https://www.geonames.org/4453066/asheville.html Type The nature or genre of the resource Image Temporal Coverage Temporal characteristics of the resource. 1910s 1910 car Harry Finkelstein https://omeka-test.library.appstate.edu/files/original/65294dd3a42086d804b328b5020c7683.pdf 8f3e93d509b1a8423ede8ffc3295b8e0 PDF Text Text Oral History Transcript Appalachian State University • Collection 111, Tape 249 Interviewee: Early Earl Interviewer: Barbara Greenberg 22 August 1974 Transcriber: Marty Tschetter, October 2011 Background Early Earp was born on July 31, 1891 in the Bairds Creek Community of Watauga County, North Carolina and died on December 25, 1988. His parents were Lewis Calloway Earp (b. June 5, 1844 – d. November 11, 1919) and Rebecca Williams Earp (b. May 15, 1861 – d. March 27, 1937). They were farmers and raised a family of fourteen children. Many of Mr. Earl’s siblings had long lives. His parents were originally from Wilkes County and his maternal grandfather was killed in the Civil War. The interview took place at his house, the original property that his parent’s owned. TAPE INDEX Counter Index Topic 06 Introduction including when and where he grew up. Early wages. 146 Farm work, briefly mentions working in a Burke County sawmill, and the U.S. Army during World War I. 328 Mentions his living brothers Willie and Coy, and sister Nora. 429 His parents grew up in Wilkes County. His maternal grandfather was killed in the Civil War, and his father died in 1919 at age 74, his mother died in 1937. 546 Parents names were Lewis Callaway Earp and his mother was Rebecca Williams Earp. His father bulldozed the original family home place circa 1900. 643 Entire family worked on the farm, mentioned that only other work for females might be in someone’s house. Wages were typically fifty cents a week. 749 Talks about how crops were planted, and how the quantity was determined. References growing sugar cane for 1 �molasses, selling wheat for flour, canning vegetables, drying pumpkin, and helping neighbors hoe crops. 1052 Recalls a corn shucking held by a neighbor Mart Isaacs (b. October 1851 – d. March 1938). Describes the specifics that include shucking until 3am, food was cooked by the women and there was a large gathering. 1215 Explains how farmers used to plant by the moon. 1326 Making sauerkraut, selling it in Lenoir, Gastonia, and Charlotte. Emphasizes that it had to be made at the ‘right’ time. 1443 Growing up his family had plenty of food, even during the Depression. 1537 Breakfast typically included biscuits and parched their own coffee. Later they purchased a local brand called Pilot Knob. 1701 Price for coffee used to be five cents a pound, and sugar was three to five cents. References the Smithey Store opening up in Boone. Mr. Smithey was from Wilkesboro. 1812 Talks about the Depression, did not affect his family too much. His father positioned himself never to be in debt to others. References the Federal Farm Loan Act enacted under President Woodrow Wilson in 1917. Recalls a conversation that his father and neighbor Mr. Moody had about the program. 2102 Briefly talks about the 1940 flood in Watauga County and what he recalled about ending the Tweetsie Railroad service. 2115 Talks about cash crops, he started raising tobacco in 1931, bringing it to market in Abingdon, Virginia and Johnson City, Tennessee and also selling Cabbage. He sold beans in Mountain City, Tennessee. 2419 Did not get rich selling produce, did not own a lot of farm machinery. Mentions Frank Taylor in Valle Crucis told farm machinery, and then in 1944 he entered into the cattle business. 2 �2815 Talks briefly about the county agriculture agent and his opinion on his services. SIDE TWO 03 Continues with his feelings about the county agriculture agent. 210 Talks about the school he attended including the location. He only obtained the seventh grade. His teachers were Powell Harmon, Frank Wilson, and Marion Thomas. 346 He attended a school for only three to four months of the year. He estimated about forty students. 509 He reflected on his schooling and how education had changed in the 1970s. He felt that current students did not have a lot of direction. His teachers were very religious people and had students read a passage from the bible every morning. As a result he felt that that was a positive that he experienced in school. 654 The Baptist denomination was the most dominate. Also recalled a presence of the Methodist Church. He shared his personal disdain for the growth of the Catholic Church in western North Carolina. 830 Funerals were held at the home and all the arrangements were taken care of by family and neighbors. 1003 The Danner Cemetery was a local community plot. A lot of his family was buried there. It was named after Fred Danner, the first person buried. 1100 Briefly talked about local stores. Newt Mast had a big store in Cove Creek, and Will Mast had one in Valle Crucis. Remembers older residents playing checkers. 1217 Asked about what was happening in Boone during the 1910s-20s. He recalled county judge Greene, Rob Laney, and the Councill family. 3 �13:42 Talks about the first car that he saw in Boone, was owned by man from Lenoir. People were mesmerized. He bought his first car in 1924, the first resident in his local community. 1539 Talks about hauling people in his car, owning a Model-T Ford Roadster, there were no speedometers on cars at that time. 1647 Community leaders during this time were his father, Lindsey Trivett, and Lane Farmer. He felt they were respected because they were older. 1805 Reflects how times have changed. He felt that in the past, people cared more for their neighbors well-being, especially when sick. 2212 There was not a lot of formal entertainment. He recalled corn shucking’s, log rolling’s, and talking as fellowship. Movie theatres did not exist when he was growing up and were subsequently not important at this time in his life. 2315 Expressed how growing up people helped each other out. If his family had excess produce, they would share it with neighbors without expecting payment in return. 2454 Asked about superstitions, he remembers people talking about witches, but he did not believe in them. He did share a story about his brother attending a funeral circa 1900. His brother had planned to meet up with a friend afterward. They both road horses and it was dark. They also both wore white shirts, which they faintly could see each other, which ‘spooked’ both men. 2756 Talked about his mother spinning yarn and wool to make socks and their clothes for the family. His family did not have excessive clothes, but enough to last. He recalled being a mid-teenager when he bought his first pair of clothes from a store. 4 �BG: Barbara Greenberg EE: Early Earp 0:06 BG: This is a recording of Mr. "Early" Earp done by Barbara Greenberg at his home on Bairds Creek Road. Today's date is August 22nd, 1974. BG: Well Mr. Earp -- do you want to start off by telling me a little bit about yourself -- where you were born and when you were born? EE: Well, I was born in 1891. I grew up right up in the field there, no houses matter fact. (Rooster in background). BG: Is the house still standing? EE: No, its been torn down for seventy-five years. So I was raised up top there. I live on the place I was born on (laughs)....and own the land I was born on... BG: Great. EE: There are not too many men that can say that. BG: Right. EE: So we had a hard time coming up. When I got big enough to work, we worked for twentyfive cents a day. And it was....I guess for about ten years before I ever got more than twentyfives cents a day. Because I started when I was small. We finally got up to where we could make a man's wage and it was fifty cents a day and sometimes it was seventy-five (cents). 1:46 BG: What would you do, what kind of work? EE: Farm work, farm work. Oh no, there was no work like any public works in this country at that time. BG: Wow. EE: You see, there was for years and years -- I can't even tell you how many years it was before anything...and sawmilling was about the next industry that we had in this country. When I was 16 years old I went to...down in Burke County to (inaudible) Sawmill, a (inaudible) and worked for him and got a dollar a day (laughs)…and board. And so, and then in 1917, they took me in 5 �the army. I spent two years in the army and then came back and have been a farmer practically ever since. BG: Okay, tell me...you said that you were born right now the road here, did your parents own that land? EE: Ma’am? BG: Did your parents own the land that you... EE: Yes ma’am. BG: How many acres did they have? EE: Well, I wouldn't be able to tell you lady...I guess...well, they owned way up above where I do now. I guess it was one hundred and twenty-five or fifty acres in all. BG: And how many acres do you own today? EE: fifty-six. 3:28 BG: Did you have any brothers and sisters? EE: Oh yes, I have one sister living and two brothers. Willie Earp is the oldest...he is seventyone. No wait a minute...eighty-one. And then Coy, he is about seventy-five. And Nora is eightyone. That's my brothers and sister. They live…Nora lives about two-three miles over here. And Willie and Coy live just up the road here -- the first two houses above here. BG: That's great that y'all still all live so close together. 4:20 EE: Oh yeah. BG: That's nice. EE: So, we were born right around here and we stayed pretty well put together ever since (chuckles). 4:29 BG: Did your parents…were they born in this area? 6 �EE: No, my father and mother both were born in Wilkes County. I can't tell you exactly where…but they were raised both up to (inaudible). And then mother she came with her mother to Ashe County and stayed over there a year, then moved here to this county. And that's been a long time ago (both laugh). My grandfather on my mother's side got killed in the Civil War. And then my father, he lived until he was 74 years old and nine months. I believe he died in 1919. 5:46 BG: What was their names? EE: Well, my father was Lewis Callaway Earp (b. June 5, 1844 – d. November 11, 1919) and my mother was Rebecca Williams Earp (b. May 15, 1861 – d. March 27, 1937) (chuckles). And she's been dead for thirty-eight years. Of course we (inaudible) on the farm (inaudible) and well, I went 'up north' and worked in Cleveland for a little while, but practically I’ve been right here in close. My daddy bulldozed it, the place, right up here, where my brother lives and we moved up there in 1909. And we've been right here ever since. 6:43 BG: Did your brothers and sisters, did you all share doing the work on the farm? Did your sisters do one thing or did you all work together? EE: We worked together. There was a big crowd of us (laughs) and it took us all to make a living. You take (inaudible). I was young, a lot younger than I am now (both laugh). There wasn't any work at all for anybody unless it just…work for a woman, a girl could get a job maybe staying with someone for fifty cents a week. And that was about the wages, about fifty cents a week. But we always worked and managed together. 7:36 BG: How did you determine how much of each crop you should plant each year? EE: Each crop? BG: How much did you, you know, how did you decide how much to plant each year? 7:49 EE: (Chuckles)...my father, always thought that he didn’t have around fifteen acres in corn, than he wouldn’t have corn (inaudible). Now of course back in his day, they figured it out...twenty or 7 �something like twenty or twenty-five bushels to the acre...is as much as they could produce. Well now, you can go way up to a hundred and fifty -- two hundred. That’s a lot different between now and then. And we always had a cane patch to raise molasses and that was our major sweetener. There was no such a thing as buying sugar in a store at that time. We had always sold our wheat and then sold our flour. We raised it in the garden to get things...vegetables. We had 'canning'. There was not any canning back at that time (referring to canned products bought at stores). We had to dry most of our stuff that we preserved for food. I don't expect that you've ever heard of drying pumpkin? (Laughs). BG: Drying pumpkin? No, I.... EE: We used to dry pumpkin, and that was...we would hang it up on poles over the fireplace and dry it. And then beans, dried beans, and fruit, and peaches. Stuff like that. We didn't have any canning, couldn't can. Lord I was...I don't know...we didn't have any canning and the thing about it...for a long time. I can't tell you...my memory is too short (chuckles). So that is just about the way we lived. We worked together, farmers worked together then. You know what I mean? We would help our neighbors hoe their crop and then they would help us to hoe ours. We would work them out, and then we would do the same thing. We would have logrolling, corn shucking... 10:42 BG: Can you remember any particular log rolling or corn shucking that you could tell us about…something happening or something like that? 10:52 EE: Well, I can remember corn shucking. There was an old fellow Isaacs, uncle (James) Mart Isaacs (b. October 1851 – d. March 1938). Right up here on this hill, up on top of the mountain. He had a big field of corn and invited all of his neighbors around to help him shuck corn on a certain day. Well, we shucked corn until dinner then we went back and shucked until night and they all agreed that they would shuck until they were done if they had supper. And they sent to the house...the women folk fixed supper and carried it up on the mountain and shucked until we got done at three o'clock the next morning (laughs). And he had six hundred bushels of corn. 11:50 BG: Oh. Wow. 8 �EE: That's about the best of them that I can remember (both laugh). But we (inaudible) corn shucking and log rolling and things like that anymore. That doesn't happen much any more. 12:15 BG: Did your family believe in planting by the moon? EE: A lot. Yes, they did. They wouldn't plant corn on the new moon at all. They thought that it would grow too tall and that there would be no ear on it? And it don't. You plant a crop of corn in particular on the new of the moon and the ear will look about 'so long' (uses hands to show size) sticks right up like that. And you plant it at the right time and the ear will be that long (uses hands again to show size). 12:59 And in fact I believe in...I believe in signs...which, probably you don't. BG: I do, I do. EE: (Laughs). BG: I do, very much so. EE: Well I do. The Bible speaks of signs....and says you will 'watch the moon' and 'watch the stars' or so and so. Well, we both do it. BG: I think so. 13:26 EE: You take for making kraut (sauerkraut). If you make kraut when the signs are wrong your kraut will be slimier or kind of (inaudible) not good. But if you make it at the right time, it’s good. BG: When is the right time for making kraut? I'm getting ready to make some and I don't want to do it on the wrong day (both laugh). EE: Well, I'm about to tell you...when it’s a good time to make it. I used to know. I've told a hundred thousand women when to make kraut. I used to truck it and down the country, down in Lenoir, and Gastonia, and Charlotte, and down in that way. And women folks would always know…would want to know what time was a good time to make kraut. And I had to tell them (laughs). So that's just about the story now...(laughs). 14:43 9 �BG: Well, now tell me...were there any years when your family didn't grow enough food to keep you all winter? EE: Not that I remember of. There was a big crowd of us as I told you. We had lots of help...and we put out enough that we (inaudible) a few times. We would run out of corn in the summertime and then just buy it by the bushel if you could find it. Very few times. 15:37 Back when I was just a young boy (inaudible), we didn't have biscuits every morning for breakfast. There was just no flour to be bought in the bag at all. You had to take it to the mill where they grind to make flour. So it was harder to get flour than most anything. And coffee...buy green coffee and parch it...on your fire…fireplace. BG: Did that coffee taste as good? EE: I believe it was better (laughs). If you got a good parch...we just used to call it parching coffee. If you got a good java done it made a delicious coffee. And then...later on in the years we got to buying coffee from the stores. I forget the name of the brand of coffee...Pilot Knob was one. 17:01 BG: Pilot Knob? EE: Oh yes, you've seen that I guess.... BG: I think so, I think so.... EE: Well that had come in three pound buckets...and it was good...and others. But coffee used to be five cents a pound. And sugar was three to five cents (laughs). And it doesn't sound possible does it? BG: Sound great (both laugh). Sounds great. EE: This Smithey...that used to be over...well, the Smithey Store its in Boone today. There was an old man from Wilkesboro (who) came up here and built a store in Boone and his name was Will Smithey. And he sold fatback meat for three cents a pound, and coffee for three cents, and sugar for three cents. But now its...past (laughs). BG: It has, for sure. 18:12 10 �BG: When the Depression hit did that have much of an affect on your family? EE: How's that? BG: When the Depression came in 1929, did that have much of an effect on your family? EE: Well, not too much. We...we tried the farm to make enough...it didn't hurt us. There was no work to do and we got along just about as good as usual. It didn't affect us or me individually much more than any other time. My daddy would never go in debt, above what he thought he could come out at. When he made a debt he promised when to pay it and he wanted to pay it when that time came. And he always made plans to do that, so he wasn't in debt when the Depression came. In 1917, Woodrow Wilson put up the share of Federal Land Bank business. He is the one that organized federal land. A neighbor up here Mr. Moody...he was talking to my daddy one day about how great that federal land bank was and would be for the farmer. And my daddy, he told him that he didn't believe in it. And Mr. Moody said that was one of the greatest things that (inaudible). He said (his father), “Mr. Moody -- there will be lots of men that will lose their home right over that one thing.” Well, in the Depression it came true. Now my daddy he wouldn't give a mortgage on his place to the Federal Land Bank or nobody else. So when it came it didn’t affect him…we just…. BG: Kept on... EE: Kept it going. And today, I don't believe in putting yourself under a bigger obligation than you can ask. BG: That's right, that's right. You can get in trouble. 21:02 BG: Tell me, what about in 1940 when the big flood came. Did it flood this area very bad? EE: No. The biggest hurt in this county, we had a little railroad coming from Johnson City to Boone. When that ‘40 flood came it washed the railroad tracks out from Linville to Boone. They had to…I think the train itself was on the other end of the mine…at Johnson City. But the flood, it didn’t come in…so they took the track up and hauled it to Johnson City or somewhere. But individually it didn’t hurt this county too bad, only the railroad. And it’s known as “Tweetsie” now (laughs). BG: Right, right. 11 �22:15 BG: Did you family ever have any cash crops? EE: Cash crops? Well, in 1931 I began to raise tobacco. You could sell tobacco for three and four cents a pound. (Laughs). We hauled it to Abingdon, Virginia and sold it for three and four cents. Of course that’s not much of a ‘cash crop’ (laughs). At that time of course tobacco (inaudible). Last year (1973) it sold for better than a dollar a pound. BG: Did most of the farmers that did raise ‘cash crops’ would they sell to large businessmen or to small businessmen? EE: There were not many ‘cash crops’ that I can recall. Now tobacco and cabbage were the main money crops. We had to haul our cabbage down south to Salem. And tobacco we had to haul to Abingdon (Virginia) or to Johnson City, Tennessee. Because there was no other market. Now beans, we raised a lot of beans for a good part of the year in this county. We sold them in Mountain City, Tennessee. 24:19 BG: Was there any politics involved with who you sold your crops to, or what kind of price that you got for your crop? EE: Politics involved? Not that I knew of. We sold to just some company that was put up at Mountain City at these tobacco markets and I don’t reckon there was any politics. We didn’t get rich out of it anyway (both laugh). I raised one crop of tobacco and took it to Abingdon and sold it and I didn’t have quite enough to pay for (inaudible) bill (laughs). We didn’t get rich. BG: Yes, I understand that. What about farm machinery? EE: Farm machinery? Well, now (inaudible) in my shed I’ve never owned any…farm equipment…very little. I’m not a big farmer. I just tried raise enough to carry me over from one year to the next (chuckles). If I had to have any machinery I would just hire it from someone. BG: Now when all the modern farm machinery started coming out, did this have much of an affect on the farmer? EE: Oh no (emphatically). BG: It didn’t? EE: Very little. For years and years…in 1915 or ’16, they gradually picked up this and that and the other in farm equipment. Now I believe that the corn planter was about the first thing that I remember. Then this fellow (inaudible) [Krueger??] with a fellow Taylor. 12 �Do you know Frank Taylor? Over in Valle Crucis. His daddy sold turning plows and corn planters and stuff like than and finally got to selling mowing machines…driven by horses. Then he went out of business. And they kept getting a little bigger and a little bigger, and a little bigger. And then in 1944 I got into the (inaudible) cattle business. And I raised (inaudible) cattle business for…I guess ten or fifteen years. BG: Who would you sell your cattle to? EE: Just to whoever would (inaudible) (laughs). I took them ….I sold them up at Bristol and sell them at (inaudible) market and then I would take them to Statesville, North Carolina and sell them. BG: How often would you take them there? EE: Truck them. Haul them in a truck and then we…sold them off individually. Somebody would come along and want to buy something…a male or a nice heifer, and just the two of us would make a deal. 28:55 BG: Were there any government agencies that helped the farmer at that time? EE: Well, not that I know of. The county agent came into this county about…1930 or along about there. But I never thought that he requested too much of the county or any body else (both laugh). BG: Well, I didn’t say that. EE: What? BG: Well, I didn’t say that. EE: Well (emphatically), anything he tried to get people to do never did help us any. I think a county agent works at the ‘wrong end of the line’. A county agent lady, is to…for instance say you’re a man now and you own a little farm out here…. 30:10 END OF SIDE ONE, TAPE ONE; BEGIN SIDE TWO, TAPE ONE BG: …and the big farmer doesn’t give the little farmer a chance. 13 �EE: Well, of course…if the county agent would work with the little farmer and tell him plans…work related…he would improve farms all over the country…. BG: Would that cause prices to come down because there would be more produce? And than prices would come down…is that right? EE: No, I wouldn’t think so. It would help us all. We would have more of bigger things and that would open up better markets, bigger markets all over the country. If we had the cooperation of the county agent and so on….I think that it would be beneficial to everybody. 1:17 Now when I was in the (inaudible) business we had several folks in this county that were raising cattle. Well, the county agent worked with the ‘big man’ and he wouldn’t try to help the ‘little man’ at all. That was discouraging to us. So that’s…the better your products and the more of the ‘right’ kind of products that you got to sell will bring people in that would never see you otherwise. BG: Yes, yes. EE: Wouldn’t you think so? 2:10 BG: Yes. Now tell me a little bit about your schooling. Was there a school around here? EE: Yes, there used to be a schoolhouse up here at the forks in the road…where you turn down this way (gestures with hands). Where you turn down there used to be a schoolhouse just above the road after the forks in the road. One teacher schoolroom. I started school in that building. I forget of my teacher’s name at that time. It was a woman but I can’t tell you her name. Eventually we built another schoolhouse down this way (points with arm) from that one. I went to two schoolteachers…from the name of Powell Harmon and Frank Wilson. Oh I had three, and Marion Thomas. I never got any farther up than the seventh grade. But the seventh grade was not as far as teachers got at that time (both laugh). 3:46 The first school I went to was three months long. Well, we had three months a year of school for….I don’t know how many years. The last school I went to was four months. We had to study like everything to make it (laughs). BG: How many students in their schoolhouse? 14 �EE: How many rooms? BG: How many students? EE: Students? Well, I declare I couldn’t hardly say. But I guess it was thirty-five to forty with all the children in the community there…and just one teacher now had to do it. He had to start at the beginning of the day at 8 o’clock and work till four or five to get home from school (chuckles). BG: Tell me, do you think that the school system was better then with all the small community schools or do you think its better now with the one great big school that busses children in from all over the county? 5:09 EE: Well that’s a hard question (laughs). In some way I think the old way was best. For the teacher taught the young the ‘right way’. Now they just about turn the students loose and let them learn themselves how. We got teachers that ought to be ‘digging roots’ for a living (both laugh). Now, my teachers that I had…the biggest part of them were religious teachers. One teacher was a preacher and he taught school (rooster in background) throughout the year and he did teach us ‘right’. Well, the other two were religious men but they were not preachers. But they taught us and they had prayer in the schoolroom every day, every morning. One of the students had to read a verse or two in the scripture and then they would pray themselves (rooster in background). So I would say that I appreciated the ‘old way’ better (laughs) than what we got now. 6:54 BG: What church was the most dominate around here at that time? EE: Church? Baptist. BG: Baptist. EE: Well, we had the Methodist Church over at Valle Crucis and (inaudible). But the Baptist was the leading church. I don’t know if you want this, but in World War II, when Kennedy (quickly corrects self) Franklin D. Roosevelt was President of the United States, the Catholic Church – now you may be a Catholic? (to the interviewer and laughs). But the Catholic Church…the closest was about forty to fifty miles in Spruce Pine over here. And when he went out of the presidency there was a Catholic Church in Lenoir and Johnson City and Boone and…I mean in Blowing Rock and Lenoir and all around here. Of course they were small, but they came in and now they are all over the nation. I am not trying to fight any denomination but I think that we 15 �could have gotten along just as fine without them (both laugh). 8:30 BG: What were funerals like and weddings? Were they held at the church? EE: I didn’t understand you. BG: Were funerals and weddings held at the church? EE: Funerals? Well, sometimes. There was a long time that they were not. But weddings…it was just the right thing to have a wedding in the church. But now back (to funerals)…there was a long time that for a funeral they just sent out and got some preacher who would come and preach the funeral and the neighbors took care of everything. Of course I am not fighting the funeral home, they are nice but it took a lot of the love out of the people. Don’t you think? BG: I think so, I think so. People used to be buried wherever they owned land, is that correct? They didn’t have big graveyards like they do today. 10:03 EE: Well, I wouldn’t think that they had (graveyards) just on their land. But a lot of them, you are right. There has always been – ever since I can remember – a cemetery right up here on the hill. It goes with the Danner Graveyard and there was a family of Danners’ that lived right across the hill over there. Old uncle Fred Danner was the first ever buried up there and it started from that name and it goes with the Danner Graveyard. Some of my people are buried up there. Well just about all my people that are dead are buried up there. 11:00 BG: You started to tell me before we started that there were only two stores in this county. You want to tell us about those and what when on at the stores. Did people gather there and sit around and play banjos? Tell us what it was like? EE: (Laughs) Well, I couldn’t tell you much about that now lady. That’s all I knew about the stores. Some of the men would gather in to play checkers but that’s about all I could tell you (laughs). Now Newt Mast ran a big store on Cove Creek and Uncle Will Mast over here at Valle Crucis, but ah… 16 �BG: Were those two Mast related? EE: I’d say distantly related. I couldn’t tell you just exactly how much, and I wouldn’t try. 12:17 BG: What was happening in Boone at that time? EE: What was happening in Boone? Nothing. (Both laugh). BG: What was there? EE: In Boone? BG: As far back as you can remember. EE: There was a family in the name of Harding, and some of them (inaudible) over there. The Judge Greene, he was the county judge and he lived over there back when I was small. Rob Laney and the Councills’. There is one Councill over there now – Jim Council. But the rest of them I reckon have passed on. Now that was just about Boone (laughs). 13:42 I can remember when mud was that deep (gestures with arm) in the wintertime in Boone. And I can remember the first car that ever came to Boone. And now you can’t get a parking place anywhere (both laugh). Fred (inaudible) from Lenoir called up here and told him that he was coming through Boone that day with a car. And I happened to be over there. It wasn’t the first car that I had ever seen. I had seen one just before that. BG: What kind of reaction did the people have towards this car? EE: Just about like a circus would now (both laugh). It was a new thing (emphatically). Of course we had heard about them, but seeing is believing you know. It was right smart scenery so people had never seen one. BG: Did it have much of an affect; did it bring about a lot of changes when people started getting into buying cars? Did a lot of changes take place then? EE: Well, not too much. I was the first to ever buy a car on this creek here (laughs). BG: Oh yeah? EE: I bought my first car on August 10th, 1924. I just bought it for my own use and then others 17 �began buy them, but it didn’t have too much of an effect on them. Everybody tried to be neighbors and so on. 15:39 [Sounds as though the tape cut-off and starts again in the middle of a new conversation. Where the conversation picks-up is out of context] EE: And I’ve hauled people from Winston-Salem to all over the country; never charged a nickel yet (chuckles). BG: What was the price of gasoline in 1924 when you first bought your car? EE: Lady, I couldn’t tell you (laughs). It wasn’t what it is today. I believe it was around twenty cents. Now I wouldn’t tell it for certain. But it strikes me that it was around twenty cents. I paid four hundred and ten dollars for my first car. (Rooster in background). BG: What kind of car was it? EE: Model-T Ford. Ford Roadster. BG: What kind of gas mileage did you get? EE: I couldn’t tell you that (laughs). There was no speedometer on the car so we couldn’t… (both laugh). BG: Oh, I see. 16:47 BG: Who were some of the community leaders around this area? EE: Well, I couldn’t hardly say (long pause while he thinks about question). I guess some people might say my father was one (chuckles) and the “Smoke on a Trivett” over here, Lindsey Trivett and Lance Farmer. BG: Why were they considered to be the leaders? EE: Well, they were older. And people looked (up to) and listened to older people and (inaudible) you have to understand. I guess that would be the biggest thing, and there was a lot of religion then. And if that wasn’t it, I couldn’t tell you. BG: Just respect. 18 �EE: Yes. 18:05 BG: Tell me, what are some of the changes you’ve seen take place in people then compared to now? EE: Lady I could not even start to tell you (both laugh). Back then, when I was a kid now, if people did get sick – we didn’t have any hospitals. If you got sick, people would come in and help in every way they could. Cooperation was the best thing then. Well now, if you get sick they take you to the hospital and your neighbor doesn’t know anything about it. I’m like the old man; I like the old way best (laughs). You know we have a neighbor up here...she went to the hospital on Sunday…and she stays by herself. I happen to be in Boone on Monday, I believe it was Monday or Tuesday – one. And somebody told me that she was in the hospital. Now I wouldn’t have known (inaudible) unless I happened to run into him. Well, back when I was a kid, you get sick and people would let you know it and talk about through other people and it went by the word of mouth faster than it does now on the radio (both laugh). BG: Why do you think people were so much closer then than they are now? EE: Well, that’s another hard one (laughs). Let’s not answer that one (laughs). BG: All right, all right. It’s really kind of strange to me, I can’t really understand. Because it seems that people your age, that lived in your lifetime…they are so much warmer and deeper and they can ‘feel’ whereas people now…they don’t care… EE: Don’t care is right (sternly). They don’t care for one another anymore. BG: It’s not good I don’t think…not at all. EE: I don’t think that it’s the right thing to do, but we were living in that (inaudible). You get sick now and it’s just…let them die and (inaudible) they don’t care and they know it. A couple of years ago my wife got sick and I had her in the hospital and there were very few people that found it out when she came home. So it’s just a change, a big change…that’s all I can say. 22:12 BG: What did you use to do for entertainment? EE: Well, there wasn’t too much entertainment back then…only to get together and have as I 19 �said a while ago…corn shucking and log rolling and the younger folks would meet up at homes, just to talk and pass…fellowship I say just as much as anything. Anymore and you have different entertainment all together. A lot of people have to go to the theater to these shows…well, I wasn’t raised to do that (child in background). 23:15 BG: Was there very much of a barter system, trade system when you were a boy? Did people trade their excess to their neighbor for whatever they had? EE: No, not too much. If your neighbor needed anything and there was more giving than there was selling. We tried to work to one another’s advantage. For instance let’s just say that we had too much vegetables say, we would divide it with our neighbor and never charge anything for it. Just give it. But now it’s entirely different. Just for instance, I have a few beans and a neighbor that lives on (inaudible) came over here the other day and wanted to buy them. Well, I couldn’t sell them to him because I promised them to him a year ago. Instead I gave to him…he offered me $5 for a bushel for them…the green beans. When I was a youngin, we gave them to somebody if needed. You see that’s the tilt of change…completely turned over. The ‘right’ thing. BG: Yes, seems to be. 24:54 BG: Did people believe in witchcraft and superstitions very much? Folktales? EE: Well, we’ve always talked of witches. But never did believe in them (laughs) and so I couldn’t tell you. BG: Do you remember any of the tales that the people used to pass down? EE: Well, I don’t think I could. I never did believe in ghost stories (laughs). I’ve heard people tell ghost stories but I always doubted them. BG: Never did scare you? EE: No. Way back…it’s been about seventy-five years ago (Circa 1900), this fellow died up here, was buried up here at the graveyard, the cemetery. My brother was out that night and he had on a white shirt…he had been to the funeral. And then another fellow…he had on a white shirt. I guess both of them had been to that funeral. They were coming to meet one another. They used to say that there were ‘things to be seen’ up here at this spring just up the road from here. 20 �Each one seen the other one coming and they stopped, they didn’t know what in the world to think. My brother, he never seen anything that he didn’t investigate. He stopped and he said he made up his mind and said he would find out ‘what’ it is. He got right up to that fellow and that fellow said to him, “Tony (or Toby) is that you?” (Both laugh). Well, that is the only thing that got (inaudible). So, that’s just one of those things (both chuckle). 27:43 BG: Was your family involved in any type of crafts? EE: No, not that I know of. 27:56 BG: Did you know to make your clothes? EE: Oh yes. She would spin her yarn…her wool and knit her own socks…and weave her own clothes…all that she could weave. And make her own clothes. She had a loom setup in the living room. She would run that old loom all day long, weaving this and that, and the other you know. That was the only way to get any ‘new’ clothes, you had to make it. Entirely different the way it is now. BG: Did you have a lot of clothes or did you have just one or two pair of pants? Did they last a long time? EE: Well, we made them last (laughs). No, we didn’t have too many clothes. We just made out the best way that we could. I was...I’d say sixteen or eighteen or seventeen years old when I bought my first clothes out of a store. I’d work and had five dollars, that’s what I remembered that I had… 30:07 Tape Ends 21 � https://omeka-test.library.appstate.edu/files/original/bb6f971b68648ed498fbec173e7716fa.mp3 179799a3d9e970c3a7d50c991e489d8a Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Appalachian Oral History Project Interviews Description An account of the resource In 1973, representatives from Appalachian State University (ASU) began the process of collecting interviews from Watauga, Avery, Ashe, and Caldwell county citizens to learn about their respective lives and gather stories. From the outset of the project, the interviewers knew that they were reaching out to the “last generation of Appalachian residents to reach maturity before the advent of radio, the last generation to maintain an oral tradition.” The goal was to create a wealth of data for historians, folklorists, musicians, sociologists, and anthropologists interested in the Appalachian Region. The project was known as the “Appalachian Oral History Project” (AOHP), and developed in a consortium with Alice Lloyd College and Lees Junior College (now Hazard County Community College) both in Kentucky, Emory and Henry College in Virginia, and ASU. Predominately funded through the National Endowment for the Humanities, the four schools by 1977 had amassed approximately 3,000 interviews. Each institution had its own director and staff. Most of the interviewers were students. Outgrowths of the project included the Mountain Memories newsletter that shared the stories collected, an advisory council, a Union Catalog, photographs collected, transcripts on microfilm, and the book Our Appalachia. Out of the 3,000 interviews between the three schools, only 663 transcripts were selected to be microfilmed. In 1978, two reels of microfilm were made available with 96 transcripts contributed by ASU. An annotated index referred to as The Appalachian Oral History Project Union Catalog was created to accompany the microfilm. The catalog is broken down into five sections starting with a subject topic index such as Civilian Conservation Corps, Coal Camps, Churches, etc. The next four sections introduced the interviewees by respective school. There was an attempt to include basic biographic information such as date of birth, location, interviewer name, length of interview, and subjects discussed. However, this information was not always consistent per school. This online project features clips from the interviews, complete transcripts, and photographs. The quality and consistency of the interviews vary due to the fact that they were done largely by students. Most of the photos are missing dates and identifying information. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Collection 111. Appalachian Oral History Project Records, 1965-1989 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1965-1989 Sound A resource whose content is primarily intended to be rendered as audio. Artist Earp, Early (interviewee) Greenberg, Barbara (interviewer) Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:01, Corn shucking Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Early Earp, date unknown Subject The topic of the resource Earp, Early (1891-1988)--Interviews Vilas (N.C.)--History--20th century Vilas (N.C.)--Social life and customs--20th century Agriculture--North Carolina--Vilas--History--20th century Farmers--North Carolina--Vilas--Biography Description An account of the resource Early E. Earp was born on July 31, 1881 in the Vilas community and Bairds Creek community of Watauga County to Lewis Calloway Earp (b. June 5, 1844 – d. November 11, 1919) and Rebecca Williams Earp (b. May 16, 1861 – d. March 27, 1937). They were farmers and raised a family of 14 children. Many of siblings lived long lives. He parents were originally from Wilkes County and his maternal grandfather was killed in the Civil War. He passed away on December 25, 1988 at the age of 97. During the interview he talked about early wages, farm work, how crops were planted and how the quantity was determined. He discusses growing sugarcane for molasses, selling wheat for flour, canning vegetables, drying pumpkins, and planting by the signs. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a title="Appalachian Oral History Project Interviews, 1965-1989" href="https://appstate-speccoll.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/195" target="_blank">Appalachian Oral History Project Interviews, 1965-1989</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource unknown Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright for the interviews on the Appalachian State University Oral History Collection site is held by Appalachian State University. The interviews are available for free personal, non-commercial, and educational use, provided that proper citation is used (e.g. Appalachian State Collection 111. Appalachian Oral History Project Records, 1965-1989, W.L. Eury Appalachian Collection, Special Collections, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC). Any commercial use of the materials, without the written permission of the Appalachian State University, is strictly prohibited. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource MP3 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 21 pages Language A language of the resource English English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant <kml xmlns="http://earth.google.com/kml/2.0"><Folder><name>OpenLayers export</name><description>Exported on Thu Oct 24 2013 13:55:07 GMT-0400 (Eastern Standard Time)</description></Folder></kml>||||osm Watauga County (N.C.) Bairds Creek car cattle Civil War Danner Cemetery farming funerals planting by signs religion Vilas Watauga County N.C. World War One https://omeka-test.library.appstate.edu/files/original/c0fda66486b11b32e32cefae4864f3fa.mp3 da32e4a686b13e86c5ca44db2778b99f https://omeka-test.library.appstate.edu/files/original/5344c91deed430f25c6ddcfaf3733297.pdf cc47525b342044c703215c0f6e88d073 PDF Text Text Oral History Transcript Appalachian State University • Collection 111, Tape 214 Interviewee: Charles Bolick Interviewer: Barbara Greenberg 21 June 1974 CB: Charles Bolick BG: Barbara Greenberg BB: Charles Bolick of Blowing Rock, North Carolina interviewed by Barbara Greenberg on June 21, 1974 at his home. Well, Mr. Bolick, Charles you… CB: Charlie, that’s my name and that’s Libby, my little darling over there. BG: You want to start out by telling me a little bit about where you were born and your family. CB: Oh, well…its just about ten miles from Blowing Rock over in Caldwell County. Mulberry Valley, a good farming community. BG: And did your parents own their land there? CB: Oh, yes. They owned their own home. BG: How much land did they have? CB: Oh, I think it was 150 acres in that place. My mother had a couple of hundred somewhere else. And, we just lived…that was all there was to it. We had to work. We had to do this, that, you know. And go barefoot, summer time us kids did. And we would get so danged tired playing, that if we stubbed a toe over a flint rock…the sparks would fly, that’s for sure. They would, we could light our way after dark by stubbing our toes. BG: How many people were in your family? CB: There was one little girl that died, I don’t remember her, I wasn’t even born yet. But there would have been eight had she lived. There were seven of us. Five boys, two girls. BG: What did your father do? CB: He was a farmer, just a plain homesteader. He had to be, like most of the people back those days. They had to be. They just had to do what they had to do and there was not much, as I understood it, not much money back in those days. The people, but yet the old timers they had to have cash to pay their taxes. And he told me that his father, my granddad, old granddad 1 �Abner, he had his own still. He used to make whiskey and he sold it at ten cents a quart, 40 cents a gallon, in order to get money to pay his taxes. That had to be in cash. Otherwise they could barter you know, the barter system. If we have something we have a little surplus of, we could swap to our neighbor who may have had something we needed. You know that’s the same as cash and sometimes I think maybe it was better off that way than it is today. The only thing we’ve got that isn’t worth anything is our dollar. Everything else is worth something today. BG: Especially the land. CB: Oh, Lord yes. Even the barrel box cost you 25, 50, maybe 100 dollars. Well, it’s a homestead; okay you got it from now on. We had to think of those things too. That’s permanent, to pay taxes. Those are the two things that will last right on through. BG: Till the end. CB: Yeah, just right on and on. BG: Well, when did you start farming? CB: When? Oh, I was about knee high I guess. Kept clearing new ground. We burned a lot of good wood, just piled them up, you know new ground. Logs, brush, everything. But farming, that is the way we grew up back in those days, we had to. BG: How did you decide how much of each crop you should plant? How did you know how much you would need for the next year? CB: Well, that was just a matter of what folks knew, it was experience. They would just plant what they thought and hoped they needed with perhaps a little surplus, you know. It was just that way. Sow turnip seeds, you know, when we were laying the corn by. They lay corn in the new ground we would sow turnip seeds, then pumpkin seeds. And maybe fill up an old hollow chestnut stump with turnips in the fall of the year. They’d keep maybe, if we covered them over good. Haul them out by the sled load, you know, and pumpkins, they’d break loose from a vine and go rolling just having a big time down the mountain. BG: Do you farm as much now as you used to? CB: Oh no, we just to a little gardening now. Just a little gardening and the better half does most of that right? I don’t see my way around too good any more. BG: were there ever any times when your family didn’t grow enough food and when you were hungry? 2 �CB: Oh yeah, we went through all that. We just had to make do without. The only things we bought back in those days was sugar and coffee and once in a while rice if we wanted to be real fancy, we would buy enough of rice for breakfast. But the rest of it we just grew on the place. And we raised our own hogs and killed a beef in the fall of the year, salt them. You know, we didn’t have all that fancy stuff, it was just plain salt. And some of the best eating. We made kraut, we raised cane, I mean the kind you make sorghum out of it. Well, we just had to make it or else we didn’t have it. BG: Did you have chickens and cows? CB: Chickens? Yes, and turkeys. BG: How were the chores divided on a farm? Did the boys do certain chores and the two girls do other things or…. CB: Oh, a whole lot like now. The girls did their share of the chores and the boys of course worked outdoors like gathering corn and hoeing corn and digging potatoes. And the girls were more interested in quilting or making their clothing. BG: Helping your mom in the kitchen? CB: Cooking, yes, exactly. And Lord knows the mothers had plenty to do back in those days. Besides raising a bunch of little heathens that we were. BG: Did you give your mother a hard time? CB: No, she was always our best friend. BG: That’s great. Did the Depression have very much effect on your family? CB: Well yes, it did to me. I wasn’t here then, I was out in the western country, but Lord it did hit out there. The Depression? Do you mean that 1928, ’29, ’30 Depression? It was tough. And it must have been rough on other people, because I was single then. I hadn’t been exposed to marriage at that time. So no responsibilities other than, well…I was working on this construction camp, and this friend of mine, Old Smiley Thomas, he said, “You know something?” I said, “What Smiley?” He said, “The times are getting better.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “They are making the hotcakes bigger and thicker.” Every morning, we were living in this boarding house; the hotcakes were bigger and thicker. Oh Lord, is that thing on? BG: Tell me, when you planted your crops in the spring of the year, did you know whom you were going to sell your crops to? 3 �CB: Oh, no. We were just growing them ourselves. BG: There was no cash crop? CB: Well, whatever we might swap with a neighbor for something, if they had a surplus of more that they needed. I’ll never forget one time my mother sent me over to old uncle Will Green’s. He’d always butcher a yearling, take down to the Grove Store and sell it on Election Day. That was usually in early November, the 6th I believe. And my mother said, “Charlie, go up there this morning and get us a good mess of beef. Your dad, when he goes for live beef, he always brings back part of the neck; the brisket they call it.” She said, “Get something better.” Well, I bought ten pounds of steak, 50 cents for 10 pounds, or five cents a pound. Well, I got back home with it and my mother balled me out for buying such expensive meat. Can you imagine that? She did. She said, “Charlie, I didn’t mean for you to buy such expensive beef.” I’ve thought of that time and again. Five cents a pound for good steak, just a yearling beef, you know not an old or a tough one or something. BG: Good eating wasn’t it? CB: Yeah, it was. But I couldn’t quite get over her kind of balling me out about buying such expensive meat, it was five cents a pound, ten pounds was 50 cents. And you know how I made that 50 cents? I used to help my dad run his still. BG: Did your dad run his own still? CB: Oh yeah, copper stills back in those days. They weren’t government inspected. We had a lot of fun. We talk now how to make apple brandy. BG: Tell me how you make it? CB: Well, you just grind up the apples and set them in wooden barrels and when it ferments and gets to the proper stage, before it turns to vinegar, you just boil it. Just distill and boil it. And that’s all it and you get something. It’ll be brandy tomorrow. And two or three sips, you could make a rabbit walk up and spit in a bulldog’s face. BG: Well, tell me…you don’t have to put any sugar in it? Just… CB: No, we didn’t then. We were not that smart. No, it just made more. It produces more. Like this old farmer was telling me about his corn crop this year. He said, “I’ll calculate that it will grow about 60 gallons to the acre.” BG: What do you mean 60 gallons? Did you mean 60 bushels? CB: No, we get two gallons to the bushel. So he figured it in gallons. Except one fall of the year, 4 �some of the neighbors got worried because he wasn’t going to their revival meeting at night. You know those country folk…back in those days; I guess here and there they’re still that way. My dad said, “Charlie, some of the neighbors are wondering why you’re not attending. Maybe you would better go down to the Bryant’s and sort of wash up a little bit and put you on a clean pair of overalls. Just shut the still down and go on to the church. That will take the pressure off.” Well, it did. It worked. BG: What was it like (running the still)? Did you have to hide this still a lot? Did you have to hide the fact that you had this still? CB: Oh yes, that was all way back in the cove, the little burner. Otherwise you would get “chopped down” as they called it then. The revenue agent, the IRS, the same outfit that collects our income taxes. They are something. BG: I hear they are bad people. CB: Well, we had a lot of fun. It was rough growing up in that time and day, but we did enjoy life, just like people do today. Just a little different style and manner that is all. We were ourselves, and they were themselves. Like the old saying out west, “Well men are men, and women are glad of it.” That’s the way it was then, down here at home, right through these hills. I wouldn’t mind living through it again, knowing what I know now. It was rough, but that was only what we had, so we had to live it. BG: That’s right. Do you think life today is harder or easier than it was then? CB: It’s much easier, but it’s too fast. Everybody’s in a hurry today. Back in those days you just didn’t rush through like they do it now, it’s the way I see it. Somebody asked me not long ago, “How did you do it? How did you hang on so long to life?” My answer is by not hurrying. The only time I ever got in a hurry in my life I was trying to stop. Just one time I got in a hurry. BG: Well what happened? CB: I had straddled a danged riled horse and he was running away with me. That was it. The next thing I knew I was sitting there looking at the other mountainside, blinking my eyes like a frog in a hailstorm or something. And didn’t know who I was or where I was. Two arms, one collarbone busted, and my head and neck bruised. They made me a trough to eat out of, I couldn’t feed myself. Well, I still like horses now, if you can imagine that after that one near beat me to death. It was a little two or three year old stallion. The horse was as gentle as a kitten, but he just decided he was going to have his fun, and he did. BG: How old were you then? CB: About 17 or 16. I was old enough to have known better. 5 �BG: Really? CB: When I look back at things like that its sort of amusing and, you know, if you didn’t have a sense of humor you wouldn’t have much. At least I wouldn’t. I sort of like that idea of taking things lightly, you know. Don’t be too serious about things and don’t get in a hurry. BG: Yes, you get by a lot easier. Talking about getting in a hurry, did people go visiting very much when you were a boy? CB: Not very much. Well, they did on Sunday. That was church day, you know…Sunday school. And that was the chance they had the whole week to see their neighbors. People would have this church group where they would get together and get acquainted again. And do a little gossiping sometimes on the side. But it was interesting. That was the only thing that we had to look forward to. There were no picture shows, no little league baseball. The only place where kids could go. Sunday morning we could put on our clean shirt and go to church without asking mom or dad, “Can we go?” That was understood, that was a part of life. They knew where we were going. We knew where we were going, there were no questions asked at all on Sunday morning. Do as you please, as long as you go to church. Well, sometimes as little boys we would always go to Sunday school first then church. Sometimes we would prefer the swimming hole that was about a half mile below the church. We would play “hooky,” I believe they call it. We sure did, but it was fun. Once in a while we would have to kill a water snake or something. BG: Does the water stay pretty cool up here all summer long? Is it warm enough to go swimming? CB: Well, this was down in Caldwell County about 2,000 feet lower than Blowing Rock. Down in the valley, John’s River Valley and Mulberry Valley, which was just under the mountain three or four miles away. Yes, up here the only way I would go swimming is to fall in and hope that didn’t happen. It’s too cold up here. BG: Pretty chilly. What about your schooling? Can you tell me something about your schooling? CB: Yes, ma’am. If I can remember. We had a three-day rain one time, way back in the teens. That’s a little further back than you remember I’m sure. It washed the foot-log away, and we were living on the wrong side of the creek. The schoolhouse was on my side. So I had to go to school for three days before they go the foot-log put back. BG: That’s the only schooling you ever had? Those three days? CB: Yes, that was it. Except for just reading the Boone Almanac and a few newspapers. BG: Where did you learn to read? 6 �CG: At my home by firelight. Preacher Savage used to be the Episcopalian minister here. I think that he was raised over somewhere in Allegany County. He gave me a book; the name of it was Treasure Island. I started reading it on Christmas morning, that was my Christmas gift, and I finished reading it about midnight. I just had my head buried right in that thing. First in my bedroom, then I had to go out on the porch, then upstairs. I was so danged scared I called my mom to show me to my bedroom after reading that book by firelight. The house was a bit crude, it didn’t have things so modern back then. That is, not compared with today anyway. Its like those old timers used to say it was “root hog” or “die them days,” and hogs didn’t root them like they do now. BG: What do you mean by that? CB: Well, hogs would just stick their nose in the ground and start walking. Now these days they have smarted up, they go “hunching along.” I’m sure that is going to be interesting now. BG: Go ahead. CB: Pardon? GB: I just said go ahead and tell me some more. CB: About what? BG: You’re doing just fine. CB: Well, thank you. I hope it will not create too many red faces. But, just thinking of things back those days like they were then and like they are today, there is really no comparison. Back in those das when I was a young fellow, we just had one-track roads. It was either a buggy or a wagon or a sled. Just right of the river. Most of the roads followed the creek bank, through the farm area. Back in those days farmers were what kept us alive and they couldn’t afford to give valuable level land, it was with corn or wheat or something for a road. That had been unheard of. BG: Doesn’t the way people used to utilize what they had, taking advantage of the land and misusing it? CB: Well, they just had to do it. Yes, we used to make molasses like I told you a while ago. Boil molasses, you grind the can round with an old cane mill, horse or a mule, or an old steer or something. That used to be my job. Pulling that thing, pushing him along, grinding candy. It took one complete circle for the horsepower to equal one turn of the cane mill. So it was a slow process. And it was just a toss up which one of us got dizzy first, going around and around. And lots of times we would have to take one out when it would fall. Put in a new one that wasn’t so disturbed, or something. 7 �And chestnuts, the forest full of chestnut trees then. It was a lot more fun to pick them up and road them in front of the old molasses boiler furnace. That was made it worthwhile was roasting chestnuts. BG: I don’t think that I’ve ever eaten any chestnuts. They are just not around anymore. When was it that the blight hit and wiped out all of the chestnuts? CB: When? Well, it was some sort of blight. It got all of tem. All of our original, now they are what they call blight resistant Chinese chestnuts. They are not too good either. I planted a few of those. They are a very poor substitute for what we used to have, our original chestnut trees. BG: When did this blight hit? Do you know what year that was? CB: Oh, it started when I was a kid. My granddad had a big old field he called his chestnut orchard. Great big old chestnut trees that were three or four feet in diameter and he would go out there and pick them up. He would just fell for them, but they started dying. I was probably ten years old, that’s a little while ago. Life was really interesting back then. It still is for that matter, but people are living so different today. Too much hurry. Too much, well just we’ve got to get there or we don’t, these days. And I don’t see where it quite, I don’t know…maybe it’s a wholesome life. That’s all people know. The young people these days, is what they’re living. Just like we did. The thing is its just different for us old timers. But yet its all the young people know. This is their life. And some of them are living it up a little bit. BG: Way too fast. CB: That’s what I would say. It’s no use hurrying through. It’s too short anyway. I’m not mad; I don’t know whether they quit. It just doesn’t work that way. BG: You’ve got a real good attitude. CB: Well, thank you. I have been that way most of my life. Like I say, if you didn’t have a little sense of humor, you wouldn’t have any sense. It all goes together. It works together. It’s about what you make of it, is the way I see it. But the main thing, don’t get in a hurry. Even thought it might be a lot of fun, don’t get in a hurry. Just go along in the agony. I’m going to tell you a little shady joke or two. You would be better put that on another tape. BG: All right. Can you tell me what a typical farm day was like? What time did you get up in the morning? CB: Sunrise or earlier. BG: And what was the first thing that you did? Try to remember one, a particular day and just 8 �tell me every detail about it. CB: Well, the first thing we would usually have breakfast. Mom would get up and cook breakfast. BG: What did she usually cook for breakfast? CB: Just whatever there was. Eggs, bacon, ham; we usually grew our own hogs and our beef. Just whatever there was. And turkey, once in a while we would have a stuffed turkey or something at Thanksgiving. But it’s just a plain country family. Get up and work after breakfast. Hoe corn; dig taters, whatever there was to do. BG: There’s always something to do. CB: There sure was. If nothing else we could on rainy days, we could get out there and straighten up old bent nails with a hammer. Straighten nails they call it, because you couldn’t afford new nails or anything. We made our own fence rails. We made our fences. We couldn’t afford buying barbed wire, it was called barbed wire. So the cattle and cows and everything they just roamed around through the pasture and the woods. And we would in the evening, our job as kids was to go out and round them up, bring them in for milling. Just plain country life. BG: What time would you come in to eat? CB: Before dark. We would usually be in by dark, after supper. Bread and milk for supper. It was wholesome, it was right good eating. And one time, I’ll never forget this. We had something different for breakfast. Usually it was cured meat, ham, and stuff like that, maybe salted bacon. But one morning, it was in wintertime, sort of cold. And mom left her old oven door open, this old range stove. Back in those days we used to have a cat hole in the door. Have you heard of that? A cat hole so the cat could come in or go out as he pleased. And some of them, before they got sort of wised up they would cut a little hole for the kittens. But by and by they found out the kittens could go through the same hole the old cat could, so they just cut one hole, a big one. Mom left the over door in a range cook stove. Two or three cats in there. It was cold, wintertime. They decided they would keep warn in that oven. Well, we got up way before daylight always every morning, and she closed the oven door and started the fire going. It was a wood burner, and by and by she heard this awful yowling. She started looking for the cats, they weren’t anywhere in there except in the oven and they were baking. That’s one time we came right near having a baked cat ham for breakfast! Well, mom opened the door. They left there so fast and both hit the cat hole at the same time and they jammed up in it and then they got in a fight. The hair was scorching plum in the woods! But we nearly had cat ham for breakfast that morning. 9 �BG: But they made it all right? CB: They pulled through it. They didn’t come back too soon; they stayed away a little while. BG: Wondering what these strange people are doing to them? CB: Well, this was just old country stuff you know. That’s all. Just like people used to live. BG: After you ate supper at night, did your family sit around together and have any sort of a family entertainment? Did anybody play a banjo or fiddle? CB: Well, there were not many musicians in our family. Two or three of the youngsters could kind of plunk on an old guitar. You know, just one at a time. But generally at that time of the day we were so tired we just went on to bed after supper, as soon as we could. Back in those days we had those old rope beds. They called it a corded bed. Instead of springs, we used just rope. BG: Were those pretty sturdy? Were the rope beds pretty sturdy? Did they hold the mattress firm? CB: Well our mattresses were “ticks” as they called it. Straw ticks. Filled with wheat straw. Well, by and by then they wore out we hat to put new straw in it. And the old bed, it could be any style shaped bed and ever so often those ropes had to be tightened up. My brother and I bunked together. One particular evening we got to bouncing around, the danged thing collapsed with us and the old headboard came over and caught. We were in a spot I’m telling you. Hollering, “Help! Help!” Mom finally had to go, she just died laughing, she had to come and lift the danged headboard off of us before we could move. I reckon we would have been there yet if somebody hadn’t moved. BG: What was the headboard made of? CB: Wood, it was all just old wood. BG: Were they all hand carved by somebody in the family? CB: Well mostly, yes. But there not so many factory made stuff back in those days. It was just you do it yourself you know. BG: Everything seemed to last a lot longer like that too. CB: We have an old one in here, but its modernized. It got springs and what not on it. Used to be in the family when I was a kid. You can see it after a while. BG: All right, great. I’d like to see it. 10 �CB: It can’t talk to you. If it could I’d touch a match to it I believe! BG: Don’t want it to tell any stories? Any old stories? CB: I don’t believe I would, don’t believe I would. Lib can tell you some stories. Now, any other questions Miss Barb? I’m just taking up a lot of your time? BG: Oh, I’m enjoying it. Its great. This is great. I want you to tell me some more stories, like the beds. I didn’t know about the rope beds. What was something else that is so different now than how it was? I don’t know like…rugs. Did your mother weave your own rugs? CB: She had some of those old wool cards they called it, you know…spiked things? And a spinning wheel and what not. I think couple of old spinning wheels as boys; we tore them up trying to make a sawmill out of it. Or tried to. If we had them today they would be worth something. But as kids, anything we could, we would tear up cloth and make a sawmill out of it. Just anything, kids, crazy. When the brains were passed around I reckon we just reached over and grabbed a bag of nuts, or fell out of the high chair or something! BG: Did your mother make all of your clothes? CB: Most of them. BG: What did she make them out of? What kind of material did she use? CB: They called it factory cloth back then. It was just plain old white cloth. The same kind of stuff they made covered wagons out of, the white stuff. BG: Canvas type cloth? Was it thick? CB: Well, it was made by a manufacturing company. It was thick and heavy. Well, that was the only cloth that I ever knew of, other than the overalls. Overall cloth could be bought then in the bolt. She would make overalls for us and shirts. And that factory cloth was the coldest underwear I believe. Even an Eskimo would have shivered if they put on a pair of drawers made out of that stuff! BG: Did they keep you very warm in the winter? CB: Well, after you finally got them warned up you would stay warm. They were all right, but golly they were cold to start with. BG: What about your shoes? Did somebody make your shoes? CB: Oh, we would get a pair a year. If we wore them out, we were out of luck until the next year. There were shoemakers back in those days, but my dad didn’t make any. His dad did, my 11 �old granddad. He used to make all the shoes and granny made all the clothes for all the young ones. BG: Did you know your grandparents very well? Did they live… CB: I remember my granddad real well. He died when I was about; I think I was eleven years old when he died. He was 90, somewhere in the nineties. I went to his funeral. BG: What was the funeral like? CB: It was country graveside; they just dug a hole and planted him in there. That was all there was to it back in those days. My daddy used to worry about that. He told Momma one time, he say, “We’ll, you know it would take a 100 dollars to bury the family.” There were seven kids and he said, “It will cost that to bury our whole family.” One hundred dollars, think of that. Well, an undertaker wouldn’t even sneeze at you these days for $100. BG: And then you would be buried anywhere you wanted. Is that correct? CB: Oh yes, family burying ground usually. Just anyplace on the hillside where it wouldn’t do to grow corn. Just plant them (people) there and they would stay. No questions asked. Nothing. BG: Did a lot of the neighbors come to the funerals? CB: Oh yes. Everybody for miles around. That was another one of those get together, like going to church on Sunday. But they were all there if you needed help. They would come and sit up with you and everything. That’s one think we don’t have that much anymore, very much. We still have friend s and neighbors, but back in those days you just had to do things. That was part of life, you know. BG: Showing each other. Kind of showing each other how you felt, helping them out when they were having hard times. CB: Oh, yes. It was just being neighbors and friends, that was all. We either stuck together or else we were gone. That was the way it was. Help each other. And sometimes I think its pretty nice way to live. Pretty good way to be friends and neighbors. Its still that way, but a little different…too speedy these days. Say, “Good morning” to somebody these mornings and then the next morning they say, “Oh, go to hell!” or something. Its just different than it used to be. Please excuse my language. BG: Oh, it’s quite all right. Well, you were talking a little while about the roads being just onelane roads. Do you remember when the first cars came to this area? CB: Oh, yes. They were those old Model T Henry Fords. You would crank one of the dammed things till the water boiled and maybe they would start. You know hand-cranked? Lord have 12 �mercy. The hardest work I have ever done in my life was trying to crank up one of those damned things. And then you would usually end up with a broken arm! The car would backfire if it ever did fire. That’s what this old Frenchman told me. He said, “I cranked the danged thing until the water boiled.” He was French Canadian. I said, “Dan, wouldn’t it fire at all?” “Hellfire, it wouldn’t even backfire!” he said. But that was your Model T’s. That was way back in the 1920s. BG: Did the coming of the car have much of a change on life? CB: Oh yes, it changed everything around. But it took a little while to do it. You know we still had plenty of chestnuts when they first came out. And beans and corn and there was no blight, there were no bugs. We didn’t have to spray, or dust or anything for our crop back then. But I reckon the Model T’s changed all that. They brought the bugs with them or something! BG: The pollution I guess it was. CB: Could be. I don’t know if this was so long ago. It’s hard to put everything together again, you know just at once. But sometimes I think maybe we would have been just as well off if we would have stayed with a horse and buggy. I can’t help but think of it that way. At least it suited me. And those were the good days if you didn’t mind sitting behind a horse. You could have a lot of fun on a date. Just as much fun as it is these days. If you didn’t mind sitting behind a horse. BG: What was courting like? CB: Courting? Just like it is now, I reckon. BG: Where did you go? What did you do? CB: Nowhere. You just go call on your date. You would sit at her house for an hour or two and then head for home. A little bit milder I reckon than what it is these days. I would say quieter. And you had to act respectable they called it back in those days. You had to be known in other words. If your date’s parents didn’t like you, you just didn’t date. That was all there was to it. You had to be a good neighbor and a good friend in order to have a date with whoever it was. BG: Did you have to ask the parent’s permission or did you ask the girl? CB: Well, that was usually understood. You knew if the parents didn’t approve of you, you wouldn’t be there regardless of what the girl said. But otherwise the courtship I would say was a little more modest back in those days. Less, what would you call it these days? permissiveness these days? 13 �No, that was unheard of back then. If a girl made a mistake, she was through. And they all, it seemed to be understood that way. They just very seldom ever made a mistake until they were married. And then of course, it couldn’t have been a mistake. End up in a divorce court, but very seldom. BG: Did they have many divorces back then? CB: Oh yes, the same then as now, but you were downgraded if you even though of a divorce. That was something unusual. People jus didn’t go for that. They just have to if they made a mistake. Well, they would sweat it out. Just tough it out. Rather, they were thinking of the kids. Family life in other words. Rather than degradation. BG: That sounds good. CB: Whatever it was. They just didn’t go for that back in those days. Nothing, they wanted to be on the “up and level” you know, keep going ahead. And it wasn’t a bad idea, I reckon. BG: Kept people closer together and family life more of a family. CB: Yeah, more of a close-knit family life. Rather than, I think these days that, I don’t know but it seems to me that the parents say, “Okay kids, just go ahead.” Without supervision or anything. Just to get rid of them, get them out of the house. “Go on, do what you want to do.” Well, they do. Especially if they have a sporty vehicle. Back in those days if we had a four-legged horse and a four-wheeled buggy we were, lucky. A buggy would be like a Cadillac today. BG: Were your parents very strict with you? Did you consider them to have been strict? CB: Well, they sure laid it on once in a while. I knew exactly where they were hitting too. BG: Is that what they would do for punishment? CB: Well, they would talk a little once in a while. But usually they were too dang busy trying to make a living that they didn’t have time to talk too much. But when they did decide to punish, they knew exactly where they were spanking. BG: What did they spank you with? CB: Oh, a paddle, broom handle, anything that was available. Just whatever was handy that would be it. Usually he palm of the hand. BG: It seemed to hurt the most I guess. 14 �CB: Well, like you said, I knew exactly where they were spanking. BG: Did your family dig roots too? CB: Dig roots? Oh yes, we used to dig ginseng. “Sang” we called it back then. S-A-N-G. Ginseng. That’s supposed to be a mysterious, great herb that the Chinese like so well. And then star root, and then we would also pull Galax. BG: Did the people use ginseng around here at all or did they just sell it? CB: I don’t know of anyone that used it, juts just one of those things. Maybe a few people do. I’ve found it. I’ve dug it up from time to time, but I don’t see that anymore. BG: I’ve got a few plants at my house. Got about four of them. Only one is getting a little berry on it. What do you do with the very if you want to say, increase your crop? CB: The seeds? BG: Yes. Are there seeds inside the little berries? CB: Yes, like holly berries. Same color exact. The ginseng is a pretty plant really, its just three leaves. And the seed part after they grow to a certain age, the seed comes up in the middle of he pant with al little flower, a little group of red berries. Those are the seeds. BG: Do you replant each of the red berries or is there just one, or several of them? CB: No, there are several in a little pod right in the center of this parent plant. And the birds sometimes plant them, or you can if you want to. And if a mole or something doesn’t get them, it’ll come up. My daddy used to have three or four old big hollow chestnut logs full of red soil that he grew ginseng in where we used to live. But the cultivated kind never did do quite so good as the just out in it s natural state in the woods. Well, the time it rained for three days, my dad’s old ginseng patch washed away. Those old hollow chestnut logs, they went down the river putting him out of the business. He said, “Well, I’ll just leave them where they are from now on, out in the woods in the cold.” Back in 1916, it rained so much that is caused a flood. Nearly washed everything thing down. The word got passed around, back at this time there were no telephones, but the word spread from one place to another. This old timer, our country church preacher got people together to pray at our little church for this rain to quit. He said, “Pray for the flood to stop.” It was really a rip-snorting flood! BG: Was it worse than the flood of 1940? 15 �CB: Yes, it was. I remember that one too. But in ’16 it was a little rougher. Well, it was rolling boulders half as big as this house down the little creek here. It just shook the earth, like an earthquake. Most of the foot-logs washed away. Finally one of the brothers said, “Well, looked like no more of us are going to get here. We might as well go in and start praying.” Then the preacher said, “We can go in and pray, that’s all right, but it ain’t going to do a bit of good as long as those clouds are coming from the north and from the southeast. It wouldn’t do a bit of good!” BG: Well, did you say it rained for three days? CB: Three days and nights. There was no let up to it. I was beginning to wonder what old Noah felt like. BG: Who felt like? CB: Old Noah, you know, the ark. I was beginning to look for a little mountain to climb onto. But the branches were all so full of water. I couldn’t think, or get to the mountain. One little branch of the creek above the house where we lived, it dried up every summer and it got so deep I couldn’t even wade. I was 19 years old and couldn’t wade in the creek because there was too much water in it. Rock, driftwood, everything coming down. BG: Did that hurt a lot of people for that year? Was it in the springtime? CB: It washed a lot of crops away. Corn and wheat, ruining so many farms down there in the valleys. A lot of the farmers they were do discouraged. They would have sold out if they could have found anyone to buy their place. But by and by they came accustomed to the change. Where rich level fields had been, it was nothing but rock. That creek was running everywhere. No sir, the bottomland as they called it. Nothing but rock. End of interview 16 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Appalachian Oral History Project Interviews Description An account of the resource In 1973, representatives from Appalachian State University (ASU) began the process of collecting interviews from Watauga, Avery, Ashe, and Caldwell county citizens to learn about their respective lives and gather stories. From the outset of the project, the interviewers knew that they were reaching out to the “last generation of Appalachian residents to reach maturity before the advent of radio, the last generation to maintain an oral tradition.” The goal was to create a wealth of data for historians, folklorists, musicians, sociologists, and anthropologists interested in the Appalachian Region. The project was known as the “Appalachian Oral History Project” (AOHP), and developed in a consortium with Alice Lloyd College and Lees Junior College (now Hazard County Community College) both in Kentucky, Emory and Henry College in Virginia, and ASU. Predominately funded through the National Endowment for the Humanities, the four schools by 1977 had amassed approximately 3,000 interviews. Each institution had its own director and staff. Most of the interviewers were students. Outgrowths of the project included the Mountain Memories newsletter that shared the stories collected, an advisory council, a Union Catalog, photographs collected, transcripts on microfilm, and the book Our Appalachia. Out of the 3,000 interviews between the three schools, only 663 transcripts were selected to be microfilmed. In 1978, two reels of microfilm were made available with 96 transcripts contributed by ASU. An annotated index referred to as The Appalachian Oral History Project Union Catalog was created to accompany the microfilm. The catalog is broken down into five sections starting with a subject topic index such as Civilian Conservation Corps, Coal Camps, Churches, etc. The next four sections introduced the interviewees by respective school. There was an attempt to include basic biographic information such as date of birth, location, interviewer name, length of interview, and subjects discussed. However, this information was not always consistent per school. This online project features clips from the interviews, complete transcripts, and photographs. The quality and consistency of the interviews vary due to the fact that they were done largely by students. Most of the photos are missing dates and identifying information. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Collection 111. Appalachian Oral History Project Records, 1965-1989 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1965-1989 Sound A resource whose content is primarily intended to be rendered as audio. Artist Bolick, Charles (interviewee) Greenberg, Barbara (interviewer) Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:26, Making moonshine Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Charles Bolick, June 21, 1974 Subject The topic of the resource Bolick, Charles (1891-)--Interviews Farm life--North Carolina--Caldwell County--History--20th century Distilling, Illicit--North Carolina--Caldwell County Caldwell County (N.C.)--History--20th century Caldwell County (N.C.)--Social life and customs--20th century Description An account of the resource “Charles” Wesley Bolick was born on August 15, 1897 in the Mulberry Valley community of Caldwell County about ten miles from Blowing Rock, North Carolina. His parents were Emanuel (b. October 24, 1852 - d. August 16, 1926) and Mary Vienna Sherrill Bolick (b. April 1860 – d. August 27, 1934). He had four siblings and was married to Elizabeth “Libby” Gomer Bolick (b. October 7, 1881 – d. January 16, 1983). Charles Bolick died on April 29, 1996 at the age of 98. During the interview he talks about his parents and siblings, selling whiskey, making apple brandy, living off the land and making everything the family needed. He reflects on the Depression, and attending school. He also discusses making molasses, sleeping on a rope bed, courting, digging for ginseng, and the floods of 1916 and 1940. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bolick, Charles Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a title="Appalachian Oral History Project Interviews, 1965-1989" href="https://appstate-speccoll.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/195" target="_blank">Appalachian Oral History Project Interviews, 1965-1989</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 21-Jun-74 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright for the interviews on the Appalachian State University Oral History Collection site is held by Appalachian State University. The interviews are available for free personal, non-commercial, and educational use, provided that proper citation is used (e.g. Appalachian State Collection 111. Appalachian Oral History Project Records, 1965-1989, W.L. Eury Appalachian Collection, Special Collections, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC). Any commercial use of the materials, without the written permission of the Appalachian State University, is strictly prohibited. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource MP3 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 16 pages Language A language of the resource English English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant <kml xmlns="http://earth.google.com/kml/2.0"><Folder><name>OpenLayers export</name><description>Exported on Thu Oct 24 2013 14:08:22 GMT-0400 (Eastern Standard Time)</description></Folder></kml>||||osm Caldwell County (N.C) 1916 flood 1940 flood Blowing Rock Caldwell County car chestnuts cooking courting Depression farming herbs molasses moonshine Watauga County N.C. Whiskey https://omeka-test.library.appstate.edu/files/original/11d2a7d693590e36fc8e3964164d2bda.mp3 d5fc2a65acdc244f09c9aa240c17ab22 https://omeka-test.library.appstate.edu/files/original/5529024b8af3927f0db09abbf5db45ec.pdf 1ff1ba879a7ad11aa89876d06d82abc2 PDF Text Text Oral History Transcript Appalachian State University • Collection 111, Tape 26/27 Interviewee: Bill Brinkley Interviewer: Lester Harmon 1973 February 8 Introduction Snow is falling outside and we have just settled down in the Brinkley home after a delicious dinner. Bill’s home with his wife Rosemary reflects his love for people and nature. Family portraits flank the walls. Bill, over six feet tall, is a very stalwart man. His hands tell the story of a life of hard work, and his eyes speak to you in an honest, cheerful way. He is very attentive to my questioning and is very interested in our oral history project. A very congenial and intelligent man, Bill has lived in Elk Park all of his life and runs a hardware store there. He has much to offer about the Elk Park and Avery County area and is very genuine and entertaining in is delivery. This is an interview with Bill Brinkley in Elk Park, North Carolina on February 8, 1973 for the Appalachian Oral History Project by Lester Harmon. LH: Lester Harmon BB: Bill Brinkley Pam: Pam ?? Mrs. Brinkley: Mrs. Brinkley LH: Would you give us the name and the birthplace of your parents and the number and names of your brothers and sister and their ages? BB: My father was D.G. Brinkley, and he was born in Grassy Creek, which is near Spruce Pine. He was born about 1885. My mother was a Carroll. She was born in Chester, South Carolina about 1888 or 1889. My oldest brother lives in California named Edwin who is about 70 years of age. My father was 91 when he died and he’s been dead about two years. My mother is still living; she’s 88 and living in Florida with my sister. There were six children; the eldest was Edwin. My oldest sister is about 65 and she lives in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. My next brother is about 63 and lives in Los Angeles, California. The next child in line is another sister who is 60 years old; she lives in Los Angeles. Then my brother and myself are twins. We’re 56, born in 1917 in two different months – June and July. LH: Is there a story behind that? BB: We were actually born in June, but at that time of course the roads were very bad, and 1 �there was not much transportation. The doctor that brought us in, when he listed our birth in the courthouse in Newland, why, he must have gone over in August. He said, “Well, they were born the 27th of the last month.” So I have two birthdays. That’s the reason I get so many presents! LH: When did you come to Elk Park? BB: I was born here. LH: Can you talk a little bit about what life was like as a child? Did you live on a farm and grow your own food? Do you remember any scarce periods? LH: Well, as a child no. That was before the Depression. My father was a merchant, and we did raise right much food that we ate, but that was customary with everybody in this section, of course. I had a very good childhood. I had my twin brother, always had someone to play with, of course. So, as I remember, I had a very happy childhood. We didn’t realize any Depression until about 1929-30. It was about 1929 when the Depression started. It wasn’t too bad in this mountain area because people, most everyone had land, and they did raise most of their food. Maybe not a big variety, but a sufficient amount of food. Our worst period was between 1929-33. At that time, there was scarcely any money, and of course, we had very little clothing, except about one change, and that was it. But by 1935, we had about come out of the Depression, this whole area really. Although the WPA lasted until about almost up until World War Two started. The lady next door to us, she was a great hand at canning, especially peaches. She had several hundred cans of peaches, and she canned them all in usually ½ gallon jars, fruit jars, or quart fruit jars. She dated them all, and she had some that were 14-15 years old. She didn’t have any children, so it was just her and her husband and she canned peaches every year, no matter what. I’m sure when they both died; they still had some peaches in that basement. Pam: Would you tell him about the Sunday suit you had? BB: Well, the first suits we got were about 1933 or 1934; we each got a suit of clothes. My brother and I put it on to go to Sunday school. We got up the road a ways, at the time we lived across the street from here, and we looked at each other. One, I don’t remember which, but one called the other one and said, “Well, you look like a Philadelphia layer.” We just turned around and came back in, and took the suit off. We put on our overalls and went to Sunday school. That same suit after I had it just a short while. I was playing on Sunday, and it got warm, so I took it off and laid it across this fence and forgot it. Of course, we didn’t remember it, because we didn’t wear the suit except on Sundays, and it was on a Sunday when I took the thing off and hung it on the fence. 2 �The following Sunday, I couldn’t find the suit. I couldn’t remember where in the world that coat was, and it was during a rainy period. Oh, two or three weeks later, I happened to look up where we played that Sunday, just glanced up that way, and I saw the coat hanging on the fence. And of course it was ruined, so I didn’t have another suit until about 1937, somewhere along there. But, as I say, by that time, the Depression was over with as far as we were concerned, and most people in this section. I really don’t think the mountain people felt the Depression nearly as hard as the people in this section. We have been classified as a poverty area along with the Kentucky group and so on, but in my opinion, Avery County is really not a poverty stricken country, never has been. LH: You were saying that you were living here at the start of the Depression, and were all the kids in the family here, or did any of them leave home during the Depression, or did they leave home because of the Depression? BB: No, my two eldest brothers left during the Depression, but not because of it. They went west to seek their fortunes, and they’re still out there, living in California. But it wasn’t the Depression that made them leave. The oldest one I think left before the Depression even started. LH: Your father and your mother, did the Depression have a big effect on their jobs, or did they change the jobs during the Depression, or were you working during the Depression at all anywhere? BB: Well, my father had a store and of course my mother never worked. I graduated from high school in 1934 at the age of 16, and I went to work in that store soon as we were out of high school. Of course the Depression was practically over then, well it wasn’t over, but times were certainly better by 1934. But we didn’t have enough money to go to college, and we did have to go to work. LH: You’re talking now a little bit about school. Can you tell me if your parents went to high school or if they went to college? Tell me about your brothers, sisters, and about your school life and some of the teachers or schoolmates that you had and how the schools have changed around here in Avery County and Elk Park since you were there? BB: My father went to college two years at N.C. State. My brother went to Davidson, my oldest brother. He was going to be a minister but he changed his mind on that. None of the other children ever went to college. LH: Do you remember anything about how the schools were when you were in grammar school and some of the good times that you had and what the schools were like then? BB: Well, I remember of course, the first day that I ever went to school and remember my first teacher. Her name was Miss Bean. Back then it wasn’t the first grade, your first grade was called the “Primer,” and that was because of a book that you had was named The Primer. That’s 3 �why you never went to the first grade, you went to the Primer. Then you went to the second grade. The schools were very good, but by the time we were in fourth grade, they combined two grades, the fourth and the fifth. We had the same teacher for the fourth grade and the fifth in the same classroom. She’d teach the fourth half a day and the fifth grade half a day, and the other half of course was supposed to study. Then, that grammar school was here in Elk Park, and in the sixth grade we were transferred to the high school building. It started, you weren’t in high school, but the sixth grade was taught in the high school, and the seventh grade, and then your freshman year in high school started in the eighth grade, and of course we only had four years of high school, so you were out at the eleventh grade. LH: You graduated from Cranberry School? BB: Yes, Cranberry High School. LH: The building looks a lot like the one that my dad went to school in. I think he’s 59 now, but he graduated from a school that looked a whole lot like the Cranberry School out here. BB: Well, we had very good teachers in high school, I thought, and I still think so – looking back. We had an excellent English teacher. If I learned all that she tried to teach us, I would know a lot more English I’m sure. But her primary interest thought as in literature rather than English grammar. But she was an excellent teacher, and I had her for four straight years. But she was very hard, and a lot of students tried to get another teacher if they possibly could. So her classes were never too large; really we learned more in her class, I thought, than the other ones that went to the English teacher. LH: You say that when you got out of high school, you and Bob went to work at the store. After the store, what did you do? Or have you stayed with the store up to now? BB: I’ve never done anything else other than extra things that I’ve gotten into, but primarily I have never left the store. LH: How has the store changed since back then? A whole lot? BB: Of course we started in an old building, but we built a new store that we’re in now. We built in 1940, just before World War Two started, and since that time, I built on it in 1957, built an addition on the east end and built the post office on the west end. But the building is really comparatively new although it was, part of it was built in 1940, but it’s a solid brick building. The old store was a wooden structure, very commonplace with what you would think of as an old country store. 4 �LH: Wasn’t it a good grocery store then? BB: We had general merchandise. We had groceries, dry goods, shoes, a little hardware, practically anything you would want. LH: It’s mainly hardware now, isn’t it? BB: Yes. LH: What kind of churches were in the Elk Park area or in the Avery County area then? What was the main denomination of most of the people around here? What were the churches like and how much have they changed since then? BB: They haven’t changed a great lot. I’m Methodist, my father was Methodist, and my mother was Baptist, but we all went to the Methodist Church, and it’s the same church we’re going to today. Of course the first church burned; then it was rebuilt and remodeled. The Baptist Church, of course they have done quite a bit of remodeling on it, but it’s in the same place and primarily the same church as when I was a boy. And the Christian Church here was an old wooden structure when I was a boy; it was torn down and has been a new church built since that time, but the church – the Christian Church is approximately 65 years old. The first structure is primarily the same because it was a brick building, and it burned, and it just burned the inside out and the roof off of it. It was built back just like it was except a little more modern. LH: Did a lot of people pitch in and help build the church, a lot of community people? BB: Yes, it was built and rebuilt entirely by people, by members of the Methodist Church and some of the friends of Methodists from Memphis. There was no outside help at all except from the Memphis Conference did, I think – maybe gave us 1,000 dollars, something like that. The church burned about 1952 and cost about 20,000 dollars to rebuild. LH: Is that Elk Park Methodist Church (pointing)? BB: Yes. LH: How did Elk Park get its name? Do you know? BB: Well, I’ve asked that question to many an old timer and I don’t believe any of them really ever knew. But the only tale that I have ever heard was that they claimed that the elk, which was the deer of course, because we had no elk, never had, but the deer well, this was one of their stopping places. You know deer migrate and they usually run within a certain area, and they were supposed to have had a place here that they stayed for a time, and that’s why they named it Elk River. 5 �I really don’t know whether the deer had anything to do with the naming of all this Elk and Banner Elk. I do know that Banner Elk was named particularly from, mainly from the fact that it was – everyone that lived there practically were Banners; they settled the town. But Elk Park at the turn of the century was the hub of this whole section. The railroad came here. Elk Park was about three times as large as it is now. They had the railroad, which was narrow gauge of course, coming to the Cranberry mines, which was mining iron ore. The town had a depot, had three hotels, it had a bank, had a sawmill. It had three livery stables. A livery stable is where people went to rent a horse and a buggy or a horse. There were three large ones so everybody came into this area stayed in Elk Park, and the community grew out of here to the various other places in the area. Salesmen and so on came from Johnson City from wholesale places that came up here selling goods. They all rode that train to Elk Park. LH: What train was that? BB: Tweetsie. LH: Tweetsie, that’s in Boone now right? BB: That’s right. Narrow gauge and it ran to Boone, but we had a flood in 1940, either 1940 or ’41 and the flood washed the railroad out, practically all of it out from Cranberry to Boone. And it was beginning to be a losing proposition, so they were allowed to not build it back. Got certain laws and regulations about busses and trains; you can’t just stop them whether you lose money or not. You’ve got to carry on. So they came on the Cranberry for a number of years until 1950. I believe the last run that Tweetsie made was about 1952, and they were allowed to cut the railroad out. Of course it was really more expensive to get anything in on the railroad by that time than it was by truck, because it being a narrow gauge, everything had to be transferred. It came by rail, and it was transferred to Johnson City to this narrow gauge train. We sold sheet rock and bought it by the carload out of New York and it costs us less freight to get it from New York to Elizabethton or Johnson City than it did by rail from Johnson City on up here, which is only 30 miles away. Of course the mines were operating too at that time. LH: Mines around here? BB: The Cranberry iron ore mines that was only two miles from here. One of the biggest belts of ore in this selection known anywhere, magnetized ore that is. It is magnetized, but it’s a low grade, and that’s why they are operating. The cost is no greater to get out; in fact, it’s less because granite is so strong. 6 �They didn’t have timber in any of the mines; they just left a pillar of granite every so often. They didn’t have to timber the mine with wood, so it wasn’t any more expensive to get out but the grade was so low, the ore grades were so low that it got to where it wasn’t profitable to operate. Some of the mines closed sown about 1930, somewhere long then. LH: How did Elk Park start? I mean, who first settled here and was it because of mining that the town got started? BB: No I think…deer hunting, elk hunting. I don’t know where he went (telling a story of a local old timer), maybe to Montana or somewhere northwest, and he was telling this group of people when he got back about what all he had seen, how it was way out west, what a big country it was and said, “The forest was so thick,” he said, “You can’t even walk through them, the trees were so close together.” And he said, “Elk,” he said, “You’ve never seen such elk. They had horns this large” (used his hands as wide as he could spread them). Finally somebody stopped him in the middle of the story, and they laughed and said, “If the elk had horns that big, how did they get through those trees that were so close together?” This gentleman didn’t even slow down on his story, he just looked at the man and said, “That’s their story.” This was typical of the type of stories that he told, and I guess if somebody kept a record of all of them, it would really had been a best seller. He certainly was surely full of them. Oh, he told another story about hunting. He was a great hunter and said he saw twelve turkeys sitting on a limb and he said, “I checked my gun and only had one cartridge. I jerked up my gun and got all twelve of those turkeys.” Somebody said, “Well, how in the world (laughing) did you get all those turkeys with just one shell?” He said, “Well, I’ll tell you. I shot and split the limb and when the limb went together caught all the turkeys’ toes and held them there until I got up and killed them.” But he was full of stories. We have had lots of characters like that. LH: How about some of the community leaders or decision makers, like the rulers of the town and everything over the years? BB: Well, I have been mayor of Elk Park myself and an Alderman two or three times. I had the distinction of running for mayor against the only woman that ever ran for mayor. Of course she campaigned like everything and I didn’t campaign, but I still won. She is to my knowledge, the only woman who ever ran for mayor of the town of Elk Park. LH: How long ago was that? BB: That was in 1939 or ’40, about then. We’ve had some good men, had a Harmon by the way, good community leader. He taught Sunday school and taught the men’s class for about 15 or 18 years in the Methodist church. I was superintendent at the time, the superintendent for 17 years, of the Sunday school up until the time I went into the army in fact. But Mr. Harmon, he became a U.S. Marshall under the Eisenhower administration, and he had some sort of illness 7 �and died. He wasn’t too old of a man when he died, but he had left Elk Park of course when he became a U.S. Marshall and moved to Asheville. LH: You have said that Elk Park used to be bigger than it is now. Has the population decreased that much, or just the general size? BB: Well, Avery County has grown less in population until the last three or four years. Now, what happened there was, of course, a lack of jobs, and a lot of people who moved away to get these jobs during the war, stayed so the population went down from 14,000 to 10,000 at one time, and it was because of lack of jobs. There was no industry to amount to anything for a number of years, the mines had closed. After the war, they started coming back a little bit, but not too much, but then “tourism” has done more to increase the population – to get the population back to closer to the point where it was, than anything else. People who are retired want to come to the mountains to lived because they know this I the finest place on earth. A lot of people like to come here and there’s been a good deal of the land that’s been sold to outsiders who want to come here, and will be here for the rest of their lives. LH: Has the tourist industry had, in your opinion, a bad effect on the natural beauty of the mountains around? I know like Beech Mountain and some of the bigger places used to be, well nothing there and a lot of people feel like it has done more harm than good. I was wondering how you feel about that? BB: Well, of course there are several thoughts on that. The county as a whole felt like tourism was the only way out of growing. Naturally they wanted to grow and they hated to see the population decreased. So they tried to make it as attractive as possible for the tourists. But it was slow coming for the simple reason there were no accommodations and so people didn’t come because of that. And then on the other hand, people are afraid to build accommodations because the tourists aren’t coming. But it made a vicious cycle out of it. These resort areas such as Beech Mountain and Sugar, ski places, some people resent them because for one thing, it has made land go sky-high, and it’s gotten where it’s hard to even buy a piece of land in Avery County unless you pay what I would say, an exorbitant price for it. Really, in that respect it’s (tourist industry) hurt. Of course, there’s not, well, there a few fairly big landholders in the county, but the land isn’t for sale. Meade Corporation owns about 4,500 acres and they sell it sometimes. They are the biggest owners. LH: Who is that? BB: Meade Corporation – they are a paper company of course, and they recently sold 40,000 acres in Jackson County. That’s been a big, well, quite a bit in the paper about that because they didn’t sell it to the Forest Service, but they offered it to the Forest Service and they said they would like to have it but they didn’t have the money. Then Meade was ready to sell and 8 �these developers from Florida bought it and gave them five million (dollars) for it. And now, of course everybody over there’s hollering that they really didn’t give the government a chance to buy it – that’s neither here nor there, I don’t know how much truth there is to it, but I do know from personal experience that the government is tied up in too much red tape when it comes to something that they would like to have, that they don’t do anything about it until it’s too late. I had 500 acres in the middle of crops that they owned all around and they wanted to buy it. They never did buy it, and finally I sold it to another party. So, I expect that’s about what happened to Meade. BB: At the beginning of the Depression, for this area, when the government decided – I don’t know; they had been giving help elsewhere, but the way it was started here, the help situation from the government, they have you a little piece of paper that said that you were entitled to so much food money and you took that to the store. We took it just like it was a five dollar bill. For instance, this allowed you to buy that much food, or whatever it said. And of course the amount was given accordingly to the number in the family. Now this was a monthly thing. LH: Rations? BB: No, it was – I forget what they called it, but anyway – it was the largest amount that I can remember anybody getting was one man that had 13 children, he got $21 per month. He spent half of that for tobacco and snuff, his wife dipped snuff and he chewed tobacco. And he spent the rest of it for essentials that they could not raise. And they existed on it; nobody actually thought they were poor, poverty stricken, or anything else. So it just shows you that really – well, there was no great need for money. That man raised practically everything that they are, with few exceptions, but that $21 helped out with him using half of it for snuff and tobacco! LH: How many were in the family again? BB: Thirteen! He had 11 children plus himself and his wife. Then at a later date, I knew a man that had 19 children and he and his wife, and he was never on welfare and never had a job. He pulled moss, dug herbs, and that sort of stuff for a living and yet he raised 19 children. LH: You said welfare – are you talking about the… BB: I’m talking about a later date, such as when the welfare program started after the war. What we called the welfare program that started after World War Two. And this man was never on welfare, and yet he never had a job working for anybody unless he just wanted to. He made his living out of…well, off the land. Mrs. Brinkley: Did they pick Galax? BB: Yes, Galax and moss and dug ginseng and crabapple roots and so on. Ginseng is a root 9 �that’s very valuable, even to this day. The Chinese use it extensively for medical reasons of some reason or other, but that’s where it was all sent from, but it’s always brought anywhere from $15 to $40 per pound, and of course it’s very scare. But I had known people that found patches of it where they’ve gotten out 800-900 pounds and made themselves quite a bit of money. But that hasn’t happened but very few times. LH: Do you remember the change in the schools or the churches or the country stores around? Do you remember any great changes in those during the Depression? Working in the store (Brinkley Hardware Store), you probably saw some changes in the store there? BB: Well, I don’t quite know what you mean by change. We saw, naturally business get better as people got more money, and as the Depression ended. Of course, the war naturally created – between the WPA and the war – they created many more jobs and there was money around. So, the volume of business gained constantly. Pam: What about the packaging in the store? How has that changed? BB: Well now, that’s changed completely in my day. When I first started working in the store nothing was packaged. Sugar came in 100 pound bags and we poured it in a barrel. People never bought more than five pounds, something like that. Most people bought a quarter’s worth, which was about five cents per pound. You had to weigh it out on a scale and tie it up in a bag. Lard or shortening came in a 100 pound drum. You opened the top of it and there was a little paddle that you took, you put the lard in a tray and sold whatever the amount they wanted from a nickel to 50 cents worth. Flour was not sold in anything less than 25 pound bags. Meal was not sold in anything less than 25 pound bags. Self-rising was unheard of. Peanut butter came in a 25 pound can; you sold it similar to lard, in a little wax tray. Bologna didn’t have to be refrigerated; you had no refrigeration to start with. Rather it came in a white cloth sack and it would keep, we hung it from the ceiling. Bananas we bought by the stalk. Sold two, three, or four – they wouldn’t ask you for pounds. They would say give me five bananas or a half dozen bananas, or whatever. Pam: Do you want to tell him about the time when you stuffed your banana – was it a banana? BB: It was a banana yes, that’s a – I don’t know whether it’ll help his story or not. I was – that was before I was out of school of course, and my daddy had the store and we would go in there in the afternoons and try to steal us a little piece of candy or something. We didn’t have to steal it, he was very liberal – he would let us have it, but you would ask and he’d say how much you could have. So we got in this stalk of bananas, which was very unusually in that day and time. The stalk was as green as a gourd. But we wanted one so badly, he finally let us have one and I decided that I’d get me another one, and I didn’t ask for it. About that time I got it about half eaten, my daddy came around the counter. I just stuck all of it in my mouth and swallowed it, 10 �and that night I nearly died of a stomach ache. But, we finally had oranges and that sort of stuff at Christmastime – in the store. There was really nothing packaged. LH: Did you have the pickle barrel and the cracker barrel? BB: Had a pickle barrel, pigs feet – pickled pigs feet. Sold fish from a big barrel, salted fish that you could keep from now on. People had to take them home and soak them all night, and they usually ate them for breakfast. By the way, the main reason for that is they had to soak that salt out of them before they could eat them. They would soak the fish during the night and it was just a breakfast food to the mountain people at that time. Nuts, we never sold any nuts except at Christmastime. Oranges, tangerines, and all that – just Christmastime. Saw very few toys and we had a tin can for a car – played around with the bank and make a road out of it with a tin can, an empty tin can. Pam: What about buckeyes? BB: Buckeyes were very similar I appearance to a chestnut, except much larger. And a lot of people had the superstition that to carry a buckeye was lucky. This one boy was very superstitious. He carried a buckeye for about 20 years that I know of. But, he got in trouble one time, and he was telling the story later, he said, “I promised the great Lord and this buckeye that if I get out of this, I’ll never do it again!” You were talking about calamities…I guess the biggest calamity that ever hit this section of the country was the blight of the chestnut trees. I don’t know really what extent it was here, but I think the chestnut tree was about the majority of the types of trees all through the Appalachian area, probably and maybe all the way to the West Coast, I don’t know. LH: A lot of barns were built from wormy chestnut weren’t they? BB: That’s right. And now its worth anywhere from 1,000 dollars to 1,200 per thousand board feet. I bought it for $15 a 1,000 board feet, sawed and planed - $15. But the chestnut tree was one of the biggest losses we ever had in many ways. The loss of the timber, the loss of the chestnuts to the animals of course, the squirrel, deer. Practically all of the animals ate chestnuts and by losing the chestnuts, why, it badly affected the wildlife of this area. But, you really didn’t realize how many chestnut trees there were until they all died. I can remember going from here to Blowing Rock on what we call the Yonahlossee Trail, which is still there any is part of the (Blue Ridge) Parkway now. You can see a great distance along that road, up the mountain and below the mountain, and before the leaves would come out, or just when they would begin to come out, you could see all these dead chestnut trees. I’d say ¾ of the trees were chestnut trees. But they would stand out at that period you see, and you could tell that they were dead chestnuts. It was a great loss to the whole country. 11 �LH: What was it that caused the… BB: The blight? LH: Yes, the blight. BB: Somebody brought in a chestnut tree either from China or Japan, and it was diseased, and it gave the blight to the chestnuts in North America, and that blight spread. They never found anyway to stop it, and it killed every chestnut tree in the United States. LH: They can’t grow them anymore, can they? BB: Well, they have found one that’s blight-proof, but it’s really, its what they call an English Chestnut. It’s much larger than our chestnuts. You’ve got to plant it and take care of it, like you’re taking care of an apple tree or something. Pam: Well, what kind is it that the Penland’s have? They have one in their yard; we eat chestnuts from it all the time. I think it’s a Japanese kind or something? BB: Well, it probably one of those English Chestnut trees – they call them “Horse Chestnuts” because they’re larger. They are really not a true chestnut as far as the chestnut we had. I’ve never heard of anybody cutting the timber from them, because we don’t have that many of them. The chestnut timber now, if you can find any that were sound, some were found even years afterward, and they were able to cut a lot of the logs found on the ground or still standing and cut the sound wood out of them. It brought big money because it was scarce wood, and everybody like those worm holes. LH: My sister and her husband got a wormy chestnut bookcase for a wedding present and they said that was the best present they got. It’s really beautiful. BB: But, the funny thing about the chestnut tree. If it was cut but not soon enough, it got shaky and a shaky chestnut lumber was worthless and still is even today. If you had it, it would be worthless. In fact, a man offered me 40,000 board feet about five or six years ago. I had a wood working shop and we had a lot of demand for things made of chestnut lumber that was cut, so he offered the 40,000 feet for $35 a thousand feet. I didn’t know that much about it. So, I went to somebody that did and asked, “Out of 40,000 feet, surely to goodness you could cut enough good out of it to get five or six thousand feet,” and he said, “No, if it’s shaky chestnut, you cannot get anything good out of it. If you had ten million feet of it, you couldn’t.” So I didn’t buy it. About all you can use it for is for sheathing for a barn or something like that, but it won’t last anytime you see. Once it’s exposed to the weather, it doesn’t last. 12 �LH: Comparing childhood during the Depression days, when you were growing up – what did you like best about those days? What were some of your best days? What do you like best about living now and what did you not like back then? BB: It would take a long time to answer all than, but quickly: The Depression didn’t bother us because I was too young, and we were in a business where I guess, we made money faster than the common run of people. So I had a car when I was 17 and have had one ever since. The first car I ever bought was the only one I was ever able to pay cash for, I think. I guess that I was better off between 1935-45, than I ever have been since! LH: I guess that’s something you don’t like about now, the way everything cost a lot more. BB: Well, it’s really harder to accumulate anything or make any money this day and time than it was in those days because of high taxes and the high cost of living. Bought insurance back when it was cheap and had the money for it. If you had the money today it would be worth well, what is it worth now? A dollar is worth about 40 cents. I doubt that it’s even worth that. The government’s index claims that stuff has risen so much, that I can remember the first car that I bought in 1935, brand new Deluxe Ford cost 600 dollars. And of course, everything is not that much difference of course, but that is an example – that’s why I said with a little money back in those days, you could really have yourself a ball, because it didn’t cost anything. Go on vacation, I’ve gone to Florida and spent less than $200, now it will cost you that and a little more than that to buy a plane ticket there and back. LH: Or just to stay down there a while in a motel. Forty dollars a day in a motel for practically all of them. What do you like best, if you can pinpoint anything, about today’s lifestyle, the way things are now? BB: Well, I like the improvements man has made, certainly. A lot of people say the “Good old days.” When I say that, I’m talking about the fact that stuff didn’t cost much. But I still appreciate the fact that we have all these “luxuries” like dishwashers that do a lot for the housewife. But the trash-smasher, the dishwasher, the refrigerator, -- that’s one thing we’ve always had, so that doesn’t mean as much to me, but I do – from the fact that until after the war, there was more than 10% of the people outside of the town that had lights. Everywhere now rural districts have lights, and that is to be a very, certainly a luxury for them. Bound to be, and that was the first thing that everybody did after the war that could get them of course, these other things could come in such as washing machines, refrigerators, whatever. But I do like the fact that man has made all the progress he has. I’ve certainly seen more progress made in my lifetime than was made for previous, well, some people say millions of years. Some people say 10,000 years, or whatever. But that’s up to the individual to think what he wants to about it, but I think more progress has been made in the past 25 years than ever 13 �has been made before. And maybe in the next 25 years it will be – it’s hard to imagine, but maybe just as much or more. LH: If you could change something right now, what would you change? BB: Well, that’s hard to keep from thinking of personal matters, and that wouldn’t have anything to do with what you’re asking. 14 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Appalachian Oral History Project Interviews Description An account of the resource In 1973, representatives from Appalachian State University (ASU) began the process of collecting interviews from Watauga, Avery, Ashe, and Caldwell county citizens to learn about their respective lives and gather stories. From the outset of the project, the interviewers knew that they were reaching out to the “last generation of Appalachian residents to reach maturity before the advent of radio, the last generation to maintain an oral tradition.” The goal was to create a wealth of data for historians, folklorists, musicians, sociologists, and anthropologists interested in the Appalachian Region. The project was known as the “Appalachian Oral History Project” (AOHP), and developed in a consortium with Alice Lloyd College and Lees Junior College (now Hazard County Community College) both in Kentucky, Emory and Henry College in Virginia, and ASU. Predominately funded through the National Endowment for the Humanities, the four schools by 1977 had amassed approximately 3,000 interviews. Each institution had its own director and staff. Most of the interviewers were students. Outgrowths of the project included the Mountain Memories newsletter that shared the stories collected, an advisory council, a Union Catalog, photographs collected, transcripts on microfilm, and the book Our Appalachia. Out of the 3,000 interviews between the three schools, only 663 transcripts were selected to be microfilmed. In 1978, two reels of microfilm were made available with 96 transcripts contributed by ASU. An annotated index referred to as The Appalachian Oral History Project Union Catalog was created to accompany the microfilm. The catalog is broken down into five sections starting with a subject topic index such as Civilian Conservation Corps, Coal Camps, Churches, etc. The next four sections introduced the interviewees by respective school. There was an attempt to include basic biographic information such as date of birth, location, interviewer name, length of interview, and subjects discussed. However, this information was not always consistent per school. This online project features clips from the interviews, complete transcripts, and photographs. The quality and consistency of the interviews vary due to the fact that they were done largely by students. Most of the photos are missing dates and identifying information. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Collection 111. Appalachian Oral History Project Records, 1965-1989 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1965-1989 Sound A resource whose content is primarily intended to be rendered as audio. Artist Brinkley, Bill (interviewee) Harmon, Lester (interviewer) Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:01, Buckeye luck charm Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Bill C. Brinkley, February 3, 1973 Description An account of the resource Bill Carroll Brinkley was born on July 27, 1917 in Elk Park in Avery County to David Brinkley (b. July 24, 1879 – January 1971) who was from Grassy Creek near Spruce Pine, North Carolina and Carroll Ivey Brinkley who was from Chester, South Carolina, and he had five siblings including a twin brother. He graduated from Cranberry High School in 1934 then started working in the family hardware store and served briefly in the U.S. Army enlisting in February 1945. He died on March 20, 2001 at the age of 83. During the interview he reflects on a happy childhood during the Depression partly because everyone was self­‐sufficient and raised their own food. He provides several anecdotal stories about his education, the family owned Brinkley Hardware Store in Elk Park, religion and local churches, the origin Elk Park, the railroad, the Cranberry mine, and tourism in Avery County. He also discusses collecting herbs and rationing during the Depression and relates stories about panthers and the Brown Mountain Lights. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Brinkley, Bill Carroll Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a title="Appalachian Oral History Project Interviews, 1965-1989" href="https://appstate-speccoll.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/195" target="_blank">Appalachian Oral History Project Interviews, 1965-1989</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 3-Feb-73 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright for the interviews on the Appalachian State University Oral History Collection site is held by Appalachian State University. The interviews are available for free personal, non-commercial, and educational use, provided that proper citation is used (e.g. Appalachian State Collection 111. Appalachian Oral History Project Records, 1965-1989, W.L. Eury Appalachian Collection, Special Collections, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC). Any commercial use of the materials, without the written permission of the Appalachian State University, is strictly prohibited. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource MP3 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 14 pages Language A language of the resource English English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant <kml xmlns="http://earth.google.com/kml/2.0"><Folder><name>OpenLayers export</name><description>Exported on Thu Oct 24 2013 14:11:05 GMT-0400 (Eastern Standard Time)</description></Folder></kml>||||osm Elk Park (N.C.) Avery County (N.C) Subject The topic of the resource Brinkley, Bill Carroll--Interviews Avery County (N.C.)--Social life and customs--20th century Depressions--1929--North Carolina--Avery County--Interviews Farm life--North Carolina--Avery County--Interviews Christian life--North Carolina--Avery County--Interviews almanac Avery County car Depression Education Elk Park farming folklore religion tourism https://omeka-test.library.appstate.edu/files/original/97152d942f5a0d9f9963f14014b0343d.mp3 609256f96d7501078431a09bdec71d14 https://omeka-test.library.appstate.edu/files/original/cb26a23146691a2df3890fb004e59b8c.pdf 6126ffc7836c5502694131982ebedb0b PDF Text Text Oral History Transcript Appalachian State University • Collection 111, Tape 19 Interviewee: Mr. and Mrs. Arlie Moretz Interviewer: Karen Weaver 5 February 1973 KW: Karen Weaver AM: Arlie Moretz MM: Mrs. Moretz KW: This is an interview with Mr. and Mrs. Arlie Moretz for the Appalachian State University Oral History Project by Karen Weaver at Boone on February 5, 1973. First of all we’d like to hear a little bit about your family life, when you were growing up as children. Where were you born? MM: I was born over here at Silverstone. It’s in Watauga County. KW: How many children were in your family? MM: Eight. KW: What about you Mr. Moretz, how many were in your family? AM: Ten, nine grew to maturity. The first one died in infancy. I was born near the Tater Hill Lake on the Meat Camp side. Granddaddy entered the land on which I was born; nobody had lived there except the wild creatures until daddy moved in there and cleared an area. Five of the children were born there. We walked three miles to school each day. I started at five and hiked six miles away round-trip. We went on the Meat Camp side now, not back near the Tater Hill Lake area, but in the other direction east of the Tater Hill. Very, very rugged mountainous terrain and we were poor, very poor. I can remember going with mother to gather roots and herbs so that we might have clothes and most of all (our clothes) were made with needle and thread, she didn’t have a sewing machine, mostly homemade clothes. Little tiny shirts and pants she ordered from a place called Proximity Mercantile Company in Greensboro. I didn’t know where Greensboro was in those days. KW: Did you grow most of your food and have a farm? AM: Yes, it was country. We grew our food practically all of it, everything. MM: We raised our own corn and beans and potatoes, and we raised some sheep and cattle 1 �and had horses, mules, and hogs – had our own meat. We walked to school about a mile. AM: Daddy was known for his hogs, he grew an enormous lot of tem, everybody in the country came to dad to but hogs. Not only did we have meat, we had cane “lasses.” Now, I didn’t say molasses, I said “lasses,” and we grew fields of buckwheat and we had to have pancakes made with the buckwheat. I remember how we cut it with a cradle, that’s a scythe sort of machine; we thrashed it with a flail. I called it a frail, and I remember how daddy made those things with a hickory spout, about as big around as your arm and beat it with a pole axe, the back of it, until it was limber. Wailed the daylight out of it that the grain and separate it from the straw and we didn’t have the windmill with which to clear out the trash and chaff, we borrowed one. We would take it home on a little sled or wagon and use it to clean up the grain. We not only used the buckwheat for pancakes, but it was ground and given to animals to eat too. We called it “chop,” it was ground grain. KW: What about your schooling, how much did you and your parents have? AM: Granddaddy was a highly educated man, he was a minister. Great grandfather came to the county, one of the first to move into the county and he was married twice and had 25 children. I know where he is buried, I helped select it. Myrtle and I together helped pick a gravestone and helped do the inscription on it. It’s near my original home in Green Valley on the Meat Camp. KW: What was his name? AM: His name was Jonathan Moretz. My grandfather was one of his children. He was a welleducated man, but daddy wasn’t. I think he went about to the third grade. I’ve heard him say. Mother was something like a seventh grader. And I don’t know how much education you would say I had. I haven’t done anything for the last 60 years except schoolwork. That’s quite a little while to spend isn’t it? I have a couple of degrees, a B.S. (Bachelor of Science) and a M.A. (Master of Arts), both from ASU (Appalachian State University). And I’m a minister and a schoolteacher with 39 years of experience under my belt. KW: What do you think about the way schools have changed from the way when you went? AM: Well, when I been to go to school, we had two to three, maybe four teacher schools where I went and I’ve taught in the same place for three years. And I’ve always taught in a one-teacher school for three years and we’re back to the one-teacher school concept now. The team teaching, individualized instruction, is practically the same thing that we had in those days in the one-teacher school. It’s the one-to-one “teacher-pupil” relationship. Frankly, I think we’re deteriorating some. I don’t think the concept is worth a “blanket-blank!” I can’t say the word because I am a minister. 2 �I don’t like teamwork. If the thing that we have done prior to this was good enough to develop the best technology on the face of the earth, and good enough to put a man on the moon and bring him back safely, I can’t see throwing it away. KW: When you were little, what did you hear about elections and politics? AM: Well, in those days we weren’t told much about why we held elections and in the schools… there was very little said about why we were voting. Frankly, I don’t think that we knew what it was all about in those days. I honestly can’t remember before the seventh or eighth (grade), know much about why an election was held. We may have learned a little bit in a casual sort of way, but I can’t remember anything. KW: What kind of transportation did you have when you were growing up? AM: The horse and the wagon. We rode horseback to church or in the wagon or we walked. Walking was the biggest thing. There were no automobiles when we were little. KW: Do you remember when you saw your first automobile? AM: Yes. KW: Do you remember what year it was? AM: No, I don’t. It was somewhere in the area of 1918, near the terminal point of World War One. I don’t remember seeing one before 1918. KW: What did you think about it? AM: We were fascinated by it. We hitched a ride on it if we got a chance. And the first airplane was just as fascinating. KW: Could you tell us some of the things about the “Potters” and the other bad men? AM: Booney Potter was one of the meaner ones and John O..J. was pretty bad to get drunk. I knew him personally. He told me one time that he was so drunk that he passed out and they thought that he was dead. They laid him out on a cooling board and dug his grave. He said that they had made his casket and put him in it. When he came to, he sat up and asked them what was going on, to those who were there, if it was some kind of joke. The people gathered told him that he would have been buried in another few hours, buried alive! John O..J. told me that he hadn’t been drunk any since then. I can remember him sending me to preach in his truck down in Bulldog, Tennessee. Quite an interesting deal, his grandson took me and we spent the night and the only time I ever caught the itch in my life was sleeping with him. 3 �KW: Do you remember any of the stories about the people killing each other? AM: I can tell you about an actual murder that occurred over there in Pottertown. I could tell you two. Let me tell you the one. Brown was his last name. I shouldn’t put the first name of the “Brown” in the story because I think he’s still living. He wanted to borrow his cousin’s truck to buy some more “white lightening” as they say. His cousin wouldn’t let him have his keys to the truck. They quarreled a little bit about it. The incident culminated in the death of one of the boys, the first cousin to the one who killed him. I was in the church preaching when that happened. The other incident involved a merchant whose last name was “Ellison.” He had operated a sawmill, a country, store and post office. He was practically an illiterate man, but he had a great deal of business acumen. Everything that he touched like King Midas “turned to gold.” I remember he went into a business transaction with a fellow named “Smith,” to manufacture little pins for the insulators of the telephone wire to be wound around, little pins about six or eight inches long. Mr. Smith didn’t live up to his end of the bargain and Mr. Ellison ran an attachment on some of the pins, some sort of legal transaction so that the workmen could be paid and Smith hopped onto Mr. Ellison with a knife and was about to whack him a little bit and Ellison shot and killed him. He came on to Boone himself and told the sheriff that he’s killed a man and he sent for me to come to the jail and talk to him about it. Later in the flood of 1940, he died and I went to do his funeral, had to wade the water up to Meat Camp Creek and across to Pottertown where he lived. I helped put him away. KW: You mentioned the flood, what can you tell us about that? AM: It was rather terrible. There were several people killed down in the Stony Fork area. I did a double funeral of two who were drowned in it up in the Howard’s Creek country on the rich mountains near the Tater Hill Lake. 4 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Appalachian Oral History Project Interviews Description An account of the resource In 1973, representatives from Appalachian State University (ASU) began the process of collecting interviews from Watauga, Avery, Ashe, and Caldwell county citizens to learn about their respective lives and gather stories. From the outset of the project, the interviewers knew that they were reaching out to the “last generation of Appalachian residents to reach maturity before the advent of radio, the last generation to maintain an oral tradition.” The goal was to create a wealth of data for historians, folklorists, musicians, sociologists, and anthropologists interested in the Appalachian Region. The project was known as the “Appalachian Oral History Project” (AOHP), and developed in a consortium with Alice Lloyd College and Lees Junior College (now Hazard County Community College) both in Kentucky, Emory and Henry College in Virginia, and ASU. Predominately funded through the National Endowment for the Humanities, the four schools by 1977 had amassed approximately 3,000 interviews. Each institution had its own director and staff. Most of the interviewers were students. Outgrowths of the project included the Mountain Memories newsletter that shared the stories collected, an advisory council, a Union Catalog, photographs collected, transcripts on microfilm, and the book Our Appalachia. Out of the 3,000 interviews between the three schools, only 663 transcripts were selected to be microfilmed. In 1978, two reels of microfilm were made available with 96 transcripts contributed by ASU. An annotated index referred to as The Appalachian Oral History Project Union Catalog was created to accompany the microfilm. The catalog is broken down into five sections starting with a subject topic index such as Civilian Conservation Corps, Coal Camps, Churches, etc. The next four sections introduced the interviewees by respective school. There was an attempt to include basic biographic information such as date of birth, location, interviewer name, length of interview, and subjects discussed. However, this information was not always consistent per school. This online project features clips from the interviews, complete transcripts, and photographs. The quality and consistency of the interviews vary due to the fact that they were done largely by students. Most of the photos are missing dates and identifying information. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Collection 111. Appalachian Oral History Project Records, 1965-1989 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1965-1989 Sound A resource whose content is primarily intended to be rendered as audio. Artist Mortez, Arlie (interviewee) Weaver, Karen (interviewer) Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:13, Drunk man almost burined alive Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Alie Mortez, February 5, 1973 Description An account of the resource Arlie Earl Moretz was born on June 30, 1908 to Sion Gideon Moretz (b. January 16, 1880 d. October 29, 1950) and Virginia Dare Stanberry (b. March 16, 1883 d. February 2, 1970). He married Alice Myers Moretz (b. May 12, 1912 d. January 25, 1965) who was born in Crossville, Tennessee to the parents of Thomas Myers and Olive Dougherty. His great grandfather was one of the first settlers in Watauga County, having married twice he had 25 children. The Arlie Moretz family lived in the Meat Camp area of Watauga County. Arlie Moretz died on September 7, 1997 at the age of 89. Mr. Moretz earned B.S. and M.A. degrees from Appalachian State, and professionally was both a minister and schoolteacher with 39 years of experience. During the interview he reflects on how education has changed from the time when he was a youth through his career as an educator, talks about attending and teaching in a one-room schoolhouse, personal reflection on education, and local politics. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Moretz, Alie Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a title="Appalachian Oral History Project Interviews, 1965-1989" href="https://appstate-speccoll.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/195" target="_blank">Appalachian Oral History Project Interviews, 1965-1989</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 5-Feb-73 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright for the interviews on the Appalachian State University Oral History Collection site is held by Appalachian State University. The interviews are available for free personal, non-commercial, and educational use, provided that proper citation is used (e.g. Appalachian State Collection 111. Appalachian Oral History Project Records, 1965-1989, W.L. Eury Appalachian Collection, Special Collections, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC). Any commercial use of the materials, without the written permission of the Appalachian State University, is strictly prohibited. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource MP3 Extent The size or duration of the resource. 4 pages Language A language of the resource English English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant <kml xmlns="http://earth.google.com/kml/2.0"><Folder><name>OpenLayers export</name><description>Exported on Thu Oct 24 2013 14:14:31 GMT-0400 (Eastern Standard Time)</description></Folder></kml>||||osm Watauga County (N.C.) Subject The topic of the resource Moretz, Arlie Earl--Interviews Teachers--North Carolina--Watauga County--Interviews Clergy--North Carolina--Watauga County--Interviews Watauga County (N.C.)--Social life and customs--20th century Appalachian State University car Depression Education herbs and roots Meat Camp moonshine New Deal Pottertown Tennessee Wake Forest Watauga County N.C.