Statue of Liberty

Liberty Enlightening the World
The Statue of Liberty, located on a 12 acre island, was a gift of friendship from the people of France "Enlightening the World." to the people of the United States and is a universal symbol of freedom and democracy.

The Statue of Liberty was dedicated on October 28, 1886, designated as a National Monument in 1924 and restored for her centennial on July 4, 1986.>


After the November 11, 2001 Islamic terrorist attack on America, destroying the World Trade Center Twin Tower buildings in New York and the Pentagon building in washington D.C., the Staue of Liberty was closed to the public until this July 4th 2009 Weekend.

Our Independance Day -Our dependance on God.

When our forefathers declared our independance from England, they declared our dependence on God!

As we walk up the steps to the building which houses the U.S Supreme Court we see near the top of the building a row of the world's law givers and each one is facing one in the middle who is facing forward with a full frontal view of Moses holding the Ten Commandments!

As you enter the Supreme Court courtroom, the Ten Commandments are engraved on the huge oak doors. As you sit inside the courtroom, you can see the wall, right above where the Supreme Court judges sit, a display of the Ten Commandments!

There are Bible verses etched in stone all over the Federal Buildings and Monuments in Washington , D.C.

James Madison, the fourth president, known as "The Father of Our Constitution" made the following statement: "We have staked the whole of all our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government, upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.

Patrick Henry, that patriot and Founding Father of our country said:"It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded not by religionists but by Christians, not on religions but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ".

Every session of Congress begins with a prayer by a paid preacher, whose salary has been paid by the taxpayer since 1777.

July 4th. Our Independance Day!

Some are so quick to point out our faults. Below is a poem I picked up about expressing why some of us are proud to be Americans.

I watched the flag Pass by one day, It fluttered in the breeze.
A young Marine Saluted it, And then he stood at ease...
I looked at Him in uniform So young, so tall, so proud,
With hair cuts quare... And eyes alert... He'd stand out in any crowd.
I thought how many men...Like him Had fallen through the years
How many died on foreign Soil , How many mothers' tears?

How many pilots' planes Shot down? How many died at sea? How many foxholes were soldiers' Graves ? No, freedom isn't free .
I heard the sound of Taps One night, When everything was still,
I listened to the bugler Play, And felt a sudden chill.
I wondered just how many times That Taps had meant 'Amen,'
When a flag had draped a Coffin. Of a brother or a friend.
A graveyard at the bottom of the sea ...width and of unmarked graves in Arlington . No, freedom isn't free. Enjoy Your Freedom & God Bless Our Troops. On this Independenct Day 2009... Pray a Prayer for our Country and all our people especialy our servicemen.

Of all the gifts you could give A US Soldier, prayer is the very best.

Bed and Bath in the 1920's and 30's.

My family keeps asking me to write more about life when I was a child. I would like to hear from BLOGGERS of my generation and their memories of life in the 1920's and thirties. My father died when I was nine, and so I was raised by a widowed mother and my memories may not be typical of everyone in the Southern United States.

I never had a room of my own. Never even a bed of my own. After Papa died, we moved to a smaller house. I slept in the bed with my mother. There was also a single bed in this bedroom and my sister, Mary, slept there. My brothers, Charlie, Tom, and Jack, slept in a room across the hall. My youngest brother, Jack, was five years older than I. My sister, Mary, was ten years older; so I was almost raised alone as far as sibling playmates was concerned. (The picture to the left is Ruth Baird Shaw (about age 8) with her nephew Lavay McCullough, (age 2) who contacted Polio as an infant.)

Although we were poor, it was not "poverty" in the sense of poverty today. It is said that "poor" was proud (not un-Christian pride, of course) in the South after Sherman's successful march through Georgia and all the way to the sea. It left much of the South in ashes and ended the War between the States. At least "poor" meant you were honest and not a "carpetbagger" or a bootlegger.

In a world of class, as well as race divisionisms, my mother told me, "You came from good stock." She was pleased to then tell about her grandmother who traced her lineage back to the Revolution and her maternal grandfather who had been a prosperous land owner and a Methodist preacher.

And we, as well as nearly every Southern family had a story of some brave woman or child facing the soldiers from the North, seemingly bent on burning the South to the ground and thus ending the horrible war. In November, 1997, I read a part of our family history when a woman ancestor faced Northern soldiers, who were about to torch their house. She let the Yankee soldiers know that her husband was also a member of the Masonic lodge. Apparently this was a common ground respected by both North and South .

In our small town , most of the people worked for Bibb Manufacturing Company. Most were hard working and glad to have a job of any kind. It took all the members of the family working to have enough income to survive. They lived on their meager incomes and helped one another in times of emergency. Almost everyone we knew had about the same income and opportunities. If someone was out of work or sick, the neighbors collected money for them or made up a "pantry shower." There was no sick leave and none expected nor other such benefits.

My mother was hardworking and resourseful and we always seemed to have plenty to eat and to share and most of what we needed. I do remember that on many occasions Mama was instrumental in collecting food supplies (pantry showers) for neighbors who had to be out of work because of sickness or other problems. Mama also lent money (without interest) to neighbors between paydays.

I remember that there was one man in the neighborhood who would make loans with interest to his less fortunate neighbors. This was considered unneighborly and un-Christian.

The salary for a full week's work was $9.90 for some and $10.80 for other jobs. I remember people jokingly saying, "If you can't make $10.80, $9.90 will do." We did "make do." To put this in focus. The overseers in the Cotton factories were paid about $100. weekly.

In the bedroom where I slept with my mother and sister, there were a couple of rocking chairs and some "straight" chairs because this was also a sitting room. The parlor or "front room" was across the hall in our house before my mother converted it into a bedroom to accommodate "boarders". This is another story.
Before going to bed, we sat around the heater at the "fireplace" and talked, or in my case, listened. I was a painfully shy child. If one decided to go to bed, it was no problem. One just went over in a corner or behind a door, undressed and put on night clothes. I remember warm flannel gowns.Today we remind our children to go to the bathroom before going to bed. In those days a "slop jar" was brought into the bedroom, and the children were reminded to"go to the slop jar before you go to bed."

Sometimes this vessel was called a "chamber pot" or just a "chamber." It was not my regular job, as I remember, but I was often told to "bring in the slop jar" or sometimes "go bring the chamber in." My mother usually did the more unpleasant job of taking it out, emptying it in the commode which was in a bathroom off the back porch, and washing it out.

The bathroom had a large footed bathtub and a commode. The "out house" in our community was before my time. However, this indoor plumbing had been added to one end of the back porch after the house was built (this smaller house on 45 Hazel Street being one of the older ones we moved into after my father's death).

At one point a gas heater was put in the bathroom, but that may have been in my later childhood. I do remember that sometimes, in cold weather, we brought a large wash tub or a smaller "foot tub" into the warm kitchen or bedroom to take a bath. The bathroom was not as well sealed as the other rooms, so it was not suitable for bathing in very cold weather. We sometimes took sponge baths. This involved bringing a large “washpan” of warm water with cloth, soap, and towel into some private corner of a room. Every part of the body was thoroughly washed and rinsed but not all at the same time. Mama believed "cleanliness was next to Godliness."

My earliest memory of bedding were sheets that were made at home

with seams down the middle. I think that textile looms that would weave cloth 54 or 60 inches wide were developed much later. I remember a few straw mattresses. These were homemade mattresses filled with straw to put on beds. I remember such a mattress on a small odd-sized bed in one of the rooms. Probably there were no mattresses that size on the market. The other mattresses were factory-made, cotton-filled mattresses.

We were fortunate to also have feather bed mattresses to put on top of all the cotton mattresses. Mama was very resourceful. Feather mattresses were made at home. One would buy pillow ticking cloth (pillows were made at home also), sew it the length and width of the bed and fill it with feathers. On a cold winter night it was good to sink down in a bed of feathers and under the weigh of numerous handmade and home-quilted quilts. In the 1930's we called them "feather beds" and put them on top of the cotton mattresses. This added to the bed-making time every morning. One had to fluff up the feathers and smooth it out, often turning it over, and frequently taking it out in the sun to“air the bed out."

When innerspring mattresses were added to the market, most people were glad to retire the feather bed to history.

Homemade quilts? We had large stacks of them, home-pieced and home-quilted by Mama and the women in the neighborhood. In cold weather one was weighted down under warm quilts. In summer, when company came, quilts were folded on the floor to make mattresses for the children and sometimes for adults to sleep on after all the beds were filled.

We children loved these temporary beds. To make the quilts, quilting frames were hung from the four corners of the ceiling of our bedroom and drawn up at night. I have slept many nights with an unfinished quilt suspended above. Neighbors would come to visit and help with the quilting. Any unoccupied house in the village was often put into service for quilting bees. The quilting frames were hung from the ceiling, and six to eight women would take a chair and sit on all sides of the quilt, making fine stitches in a quilt pattern that one of them had drawn.

There was much talk and laughter as these women visited while working on a quilt. The younger children played at their feet, and the older children were in and out of the house.The advantage of the empty room was that the quilt would not have to be lifted up at night and walked around in the daytime. In the evenings Mama would cut and sew various patterns for future quilting. The children would play around and sometimes be allowed to make a few stitches and were complimented if they could manage small stitches. If the stitches were too long, the mother would remove the stitches, often after the child left the room. Everyone took pride in fingers nimble enough to make practically invisible stitches.

I was allowed to make a few stitches occasionally but was not often invited to quilt, so I assume my stitches were far from invisible.

Canning in the Summertime.

In my early childhood (late 1920's) there were no electric refrigerators and, of course, no freezers nor frozen food. In the summertime ice wagons came daily to sell ice for the ice box to keep food cold.The only way to preserve surplus food was canning or drying.

During the summer our large iron stove would have to be fired up with "stove wood" to make fig and pear and peach perserves and apple jelly. Mama would dry apples and peaches for winter pies and make applesause, peach and pear perserves and pickles.

In my early teens we finally got an electric refrigerator. I remember one of our neighbors who was visiting, when the refrigerator was humming, she said in awe, "It's making more ice."
We had a beautiful little peach tree in our back yard near a street where little boys passed by and some of the little boys could not resist the temptation to pick some of the peaches. My mother loved children, including little boys. She had five sons, two of which were grown and married in my early memories. So Mama would go out and kindly tell the little boys to help her watch for the peaches to get ripe and to please let the peaches stay on the trees until they were ripe and she would share with them.

Nevertheless, "boys will be boys" as they say. By the time the peaches were ripe , there were usually few peaches left on the tree. But Mama always found enough, on the yard side of the little tree, to make a few quart jars of some of the best peach pickles I ever ate.

My mother would also make a year's supply of jelly...by taking apple and other fruit and peach or pear peelings to boil and strain the juice. She also canned green beans, tomatoes and vegetable soup in large quantities.

I have seen Mama stand at the stove canning and preserving summer fruits and vegetables with sweat pouring off her face. She would have a towel around her neck like a scarf to wipe her face as she stood at the hot stove.

This would make the whole house hot. So we escaped to the porch or yard as often as possible, as did all the neighbors.

One of the advantages was that with no television and no air conditioning one got acquainted with neighbors. As long a Mama lived, she had neighbors dropping in to visit, even in the television and window fan era in the fifties, sixties, and early seventies. Mama, born March 6, 1885, died December 7, 1973. My father had died in 1932.

The Boll Weevil and Peanut Butter.

Mama always said that the boll weevil ran us off the farm. The farm was in the community of Oak Hill. (Oak Hill is in Newton County near the Henry County line and also near Rockdale County.(about 30 miles Southeast of Atlanta).

Cotton was king in the South, and most farmers made their living by raising cotton. When the boll weevil infested the cotton plants, it wiped out the cotton farmers’ profits. Many farmers lost their whole year's wages. My father got a job in one of the textile mills in Newton County and moved our family into Porterdale,a “model mill town” in the fall of 1922. I was born the next year

One of my older cousins, Aubrey Simms told me a few years ago that he remembered as a boy of about six, hearing my father (his great uncle) tell of his decision to leave the farm and get a job in one of the textile mills at Porterdale. His father Jason Simms's reply was, "Uncle Wilson I will never move my family into a mill town."

However, Porterdale became "home sweet home" to me. It was a great place to grow up with dedicated school teachers, church and community activities. My brothers, Tom and Jack who served in the Armed Forces during World War II, talked with such nostalgia about Porterdale, all their buddies declared they were looking forward to one day visiting Porterdale.

But Mama said she first thought of Porterdale as "the jumping off place," (a Southern expression?), a place where she would not have lived had it not been for the pesty, destructive Boll Weevil. Mama loved the farm and she sure had a "green thumb" in growing flowers in our small plot of ground as well as pots of flowers growing on the front porch.

We are told boll weevils first came to the United States from Mexico eating through Texas all the way East into the cotton fields in Alabama and Georgia.

I grew up hearing the boll weevil blamed for much of the continued povety in the South following the War Between The States. When the Cotton Factory Owners moved South looking for cheap labor, they apparently found plenty of hunger people looking for work, Early on, even children were hired for some of the jobs. It took people out of cotton fields into cotton mills.

So I was amazed to learn that someone actually built a monument to the boll weevil in Enterprise Alabama in 1919.
The 13- and- a -half feet tall Boll Weevil Monument consists of a statue of a lady in a flowing white gown, with arms stretch high above her heard to display a big black boll weevil. It is surrounded by a lighted fountain.

It seems that two enterprising business men (H.H. Sessions, C.W. Baston) in Enterprise Alabama determined that peanuts would make a good crop to plant where cotton had been grown.
Dr. George Carver of Alabama's Tuskegee Institute also did research to find as many products as possible using peanuts. .
Carver did not invent peanut butter but did popularize the use of peanut butter and found hundreds of industrial uses for the peanut plant. It is hard to believe that when cotton was king there was no such thing as peanut butter?

I like the story Gregg Lewis tells about George Washington Carver's conversation with God. In Carver's words: "I said to God, Mr. Creator, I would like to know all about the creation of the world." And God answered, "Little man, your mind is too small to take it in. Ask something more your size. Then I said, Mr. Creator, I would like to know all about the peanut."
Big men like Dr. George Washington Carver are brilliant enough to understand human limitations. Little men like whats-his-name in California who brag about their atheism are too small to ever see more than an inch beyond their nose anything they cannot fully comprehend.

Albert Einstein said, “The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious . It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead.”
Einstein’s view is shared by other great scientists like Niels and Bohr, who concluded there is room in a rational universe for incomprehensible wonders.

Going To School in the 1930's

I started school in January before my sixth birthday in 1929. This was the year of the stock market crash and the Great Depression. I suppose we had "poverty" but not in the sense of poverty today. Most people were in the same boat and helped one another. We were fortunate not to have 24 hour news, so we did not learn until later that people were jumping out of skyscraper windows to kill themselves.

The first five grades in our school were divided into 10 grades. We had low first grade and high first, low second, high second. etc.I contracted measles and missed the last two weeks of school in the Low Fifth.

When my teacher came by to visit a few days after school was out for the summer she brought my report card. (Yes teachers, doctors and pastors were expected to make house calls.) Mama asked her if I was to go back in the fifth grade or skip to the sixth grade. The teacher gave me a test and skipped me to the sixth grade. That is how I happened to be the youngest in my class for the rest of my elementary and high school. Elementary School was called "Grammar School" back then.

School dress:In Grammar School in those days, girls always wore dresses to school with knee stockings and oxford-type shoes or high top shoes. I remember a few of the girls wore high-top stockings. These were dark, thick, stockings, often black, that came above the knee and were held secure by elastic circles. In fact these garters were called "elastics."Incidentally, we had only one pair of shoes that were usually worn until they fell apart. I have worn shoes that had cardboard put in to cover holes in the soles of the shoe. I remember being thankful that my mother did not make me wear those "old fashioned stockings."

Incidentally, a little later when we did wear sheer hose (with a seam down the center of the back that had to be kept straight), we made our own elastics to keep our hosiery up. We just took a piece of elastic and measured around the leg just above the knee and sewed the ends of the elastic together. This was before garter belts were in use.By the time I got to high school, girls were beginning to wear anklets that turned down at the ankle so were more comfortable.

Discipline: As I was writing this, a long time friends called. He asked if I had written about "whippings in school." I told him that was a "boy thing". After we joked around a bit, we both agreed that in his school in South Carolina and mine in Georgia, the teachers had 12 inch rulers that were used for something besides measuring distance. The disobedient child held his/her hand out with palm up to be smacked with a ruler. For major misbehavior, a razor strop or a hickory switch was used on the child's bottom. Parents typically told children that if they "got a whipping" at school, they would "get another one" at home. Litigation against teachers and/or schools was not even considered.

Social Class:The word egalitarian had never been spoken. I remember clearly sitting in class while the teacher told us there were three classes of people: the upper, the middle and the lower class. We did not, for the most part, question this custom. Socially, people associated with their own class as well as their own race.

Transportation:How did we get to school? Two words. We walked! In our school, most of the teachers also walked. Many were single women who lived in town. There were no parking lots at the schoolhouse.

Report Cards:In our small-town Georgia school, we were graded A, B, C, D or F. I do not remember anything about the grading system or how I scored in First and Second grades. I do know that I never received a D or an F and do not remember many A's. I was generally a B student. I usually sat quietly and went unnoticed in class, speaking only when spoken to.

Miscellaneous Thoughts:We were then taught that the atom was the smallest particle. It was not until 1945 that we learned that that microscopic atom could be split and inside was power beyond comprehension.

One of my readers asked about “school dinners.” There was not a cafeteria in the Elementary school I attended, nor High Schools I attended. In our “Grammar School”, we could “take milk” for three cents a day. It consisted of a small bottle of milk and peanut butter spread on two very thin slices of white bread. Most of the children brought a lunch from home (a biscuit and sausage or fried meat or jelly

The group picture above is the Ninth Grade graduation class. The Ninth Grade was the last grade offered in our community in the 1930's. It was in the 40's that Porterdale High School was established. Yours truly (Ruth Baird) was fourth girl on the left, front row

If one desired to attend school after Ninth Grade Graduation, he/she had to pay tuition and find transportation to Covington, our Newton County seat, to finish tenth and eleventh grade and receive a High School Diploma. Ninth Grade was the end of school for most students in the thirties. I ended up attending three different high schools.
My widowed mother somehow managed the tuition cost for me to attend Covington high School and another small transportation fee to Louise Walton, a girl in my class who had managed to get a car. I rode with Louise to Covington every school day for a full semester. Alas, she flunked out. (Perhaps High school students then as now may have spent more time with their cars than their books!)


With no transportation to Covington after the first semester in the tenth grade, I then transferred to Livingston High School, a county High School. I walked with 2 other girls and a boy the mile or so every morning to the far end of our community to catch the school bus to ride to the country school where I finished the tenth grade with only two units left to graduate. (Porterdale established a High School in 1940. Older students were allowed to attend, so my husband went back to classes and graduated in 1942 and I in 1943. We had two precious little girls at the time I graduated. But I needed only two units so it required little of my time.)

One of the things I remember about Covington High School in the semester I attended was an assignment to write a story of fiction. I remember working on the story but do not remember anything about it. It was basically a rearrangement of something I had read (which is probably why I do not remember anything about the story.) When we take short cuts or cheat on anything, we only cheat ourselves.

Another day while I was a student at Covington High, we went to Chapel where someone introduced a blind and deaf lady and illustrated how she communicated. This memory is too vague for me to be sure of details. I keep thinking it must have been Helen Keller and her teacher? Did Keller and her teacher visit High Schools in Georgia in 1938? Who else could it me? I believe that the famed Annie Sullivan, Helen's first teacher died in 1936. Polly Thomson assisted Sullivan later and became Helen's teacher after Annie Sullivan’s death. Another chapel experience I remember is being chosen to walk up on the large stage in the school auditorium to tell a Bible story.

Teachers:I especially remember one of the teachers at Livingston High School, (the school where I transferred after my friend with a car left Covington High). One unforgettable teacher at Livingston was a widow in perpetual black dress. She was always openly counting the days until the end of the school year. I do not know how long she had been a widow, but this thin and sad looking lady in her "widow's weeds" each day would tell us how she was counting the days until the end of her days as a teacher. Then she would remind us how many days were left in the school year. She called herself the "walking calendar."

Another teacher I remember more fondly was Miss Willie Hayne Hunt. She tried to encourage me by telling me I was probably the “best mathematician that ever walked in the school door." This kind of remark from a teacher made a big difference in the way I saw myself as a student. I began to find algebra and geometry problems not just easy but fun to do.

Sports:
Schools in the thirties had "field days" with competition between classes and between schools. This included relay races, 100-yard dashes, high jumps, broad jumps, etc. My brothers, Charlie, Tom, and Jack, excelled in all the races. I was also a very fast runner and played basketball, but did not broad jump or high jump.My brother, Tom, was one of the fastest runners in the school. He would run in his regular pants with the shirttail flying rather than putting on the shorts and sleeveless tee shirt that was the usual attire.

One of our family stories is about my brother, Tom winning the race for the school and winning a great deal of local fame running the race in his regular school clothes.

One day just a few years before he died, I asked Tom why he ran the race that Field Day in his regular clothes. He said he had to rush home to lift Papa out of bed and had hurried back to school because they expected him to run in the race. Apparently, he appeared on the school grounds just in time to run the race. Tom was stronger than Jack or Charlie, so it fell his lot to lift Papa out of bed and back into bed after Papa became disabled. Tom told me he would go to school every morning and answer the roll call. Soon after, he would leave school and go home to lift Papa out of bed and into a chair and later he could go home again to lift Papa back into bed.

Sew and Sew

SEWING IN THE 1920'S
Among my early memories of the late 1920's, is my mother sitting at her old Singer sewing machine, peddling away! Sewing was a vital part of her daily chores. She made her clothes, (dresses as well as cotton slips).

Mama also made most, if not all of the dresses and slips my sister Mary and I wore. And early on she has sewed dresses for my two older sisters as well as shirts for my five brothers.

But Mama did not consider herself an accomplished seamstress as was Aunt Cora. It was said that Aunt Cora (Mama's older sister) could go into a dress shop, look at a dress, then come home and make a duplicate.

Mama always said she did just "plain sewing." However,I remember the younger women in the neighborhood would often come to get Mama's help with their sewing.

Mama told me she learned to sew, like Penelope , by "sewing all day and picking out stitches all night." She said she just "kept dabbling with it until I got it right." She did "get it right." The finished dress was well done.

I did not realize this until later in life, but my mother never thought of herself as a pretty woman because her eyes did not focus properly. She was embarrassed that her eyes were "crossed." She always wore glasses, but she had a good figure even into old age.

One of the stories I remember from childhood is that of a neighbor lady who came over one day to borrow a pattern to make a dress like Mama had made for herself. After the lady left with the pattern, my father turned to Mama and said, "She need not think when she finishes her dress like yours, she will look as good in the dress as you do."

Perhaps this helps to explain why Mama never found any fault with Papa! I told this story in a sermon one Father's Day in East Point United Methodist Church to illustrate the fact that Christian men usually know how to love and treat a woman. A few compliments go a long way! Following the Golden Rule would solve many of our interpersonal relationships. My late sister, Vera, told me Mama and Papa were in love all their lives. Mama was only 47 when my father died.

Cotton print dresses were the usual daily attire for women in our small town. These outfits had to be washed, starched,and ironed. No drip-dries nor wrinkle-proof material in those days.

I especially remember Mama working against a deadline to get my Girl Reserve Camp dresses finished. Every year, we made a long train trip to Savanah.

The first time I saw the ocean was on one such trip. The first time I ate in a resturant was on a Girl Reserve trip to Savanah. This was an event that required preparation.

Mama was always working with some of the other mothers in the neighborhood to get us girls ready for camp. In my memory I see Mama sitting at the old sewing machine and peddling away with Blanche Fincher and other young mothers in the room consulting with one another about how the Girl Reserve dresses and scarves needed to be fashioned just right for the event. Each little girl was to pack two white dresses with blue scarfs and two blue dresses with white scarfs to wear for the trip

School in the Southland in the 1890's.

My mother was only 18 months old when her father, Charles Dick, died - leaving a pregnant wife and seven little children. As a child, Ieula Ann Dick never knew her paternal relatives, but she was told her Grandfather Dick had been the "first sheriff of Clay County, Alabama." I am told her Grandfather Dick's picture is still on the wall of the Clay County Courthouse.

Mama's young father had gone hunting late on a cold Christmas Day. He became very ill with a cold that turned into pneumonia and proved fatal for Charles and for many others in that year.

Soon after her father's untimely death, her maternal grandfather, Bogan Mask, moved his daughter, Elizabeth, and her children from Clay County Alabama to a small house on his large farm in Inman, Georgia. Inman was a farming community in Fayette County, Georgia, where the grieving widow, Elizabeth, gave birth to her eight child, a son. I do not know how Charles Dick in Clay County Alabama met Elixabeth Mask in Inman Georgia? But apparently Bogan Mask thought Charles Dick worthy to marry his oldest daughter?

Mama loved her Grandfather Mask who apparently tried to be a father to his oldest daughter's fatherless children. He was hard working and prosperous for the times - a farmer and a Methodist preacher. Bogan Mask also is credited with beginning Ebenezer Methodist Church in Fayette County and Friendship Methodist Church in Clayton County.

Aunt Cora, Eula's (my mother) older sister thought Elizabeth and her eight little children were overlooked often by their more prosperous relatives. But Mama said her mother was aware of her dependance and was timid about making her father aware of their needs.

My mother said she remembered the first pair of shoes she ever had. She told me how one time when her mother mentioned her feet were cold, she got down at the foot of the bed to rub her mother's feet until they were warm. Apparently the younger children were sleeping with their mother.

(My mother, whose IQ was at least as high as mine had to stop her schooling after about ninth grade. She revered her mother and the remembrance of he last time she saw her mother was a tramatic event in her life. Her mother had visited my parents and their children on their farm in Rockdale county. When Grandma Dick left, Mama stood in the road and watched Grandma as she drove her "Horse and Buggy" down the long dusty road out of her sight. A few months later Mama got word her mother was dying. Mama took a train to go to her mother in Griffin, Georgia but when she got there her mother had already died. Never again would Mama watch anyone out of sight. She would kiss us goodbye at the door and go back inside before we left in our car.)

Mama grew up to marry Wilson Baird when she was 18. Wilson was , according to Eula , "a young over 40. " Mama adored him and resented any inference that she married an "old man." I remember once visiting on our front porch with a neighbor lady gossip who told about a girl marrying an older man, she turned to Mama and said, "did you marry and old man?" Mama said quicky, "No, I did not." Mama was not a gossip. She talked about ideas (politics and religion and family history) and not people.

Wilson was the youngest son of William and Mary Baird. William had served as an officer in the Confederate Army and was wounded in the Battle of the Wilderness. His older sister's husband had been killed while serving in the Confederate Army, leaving his wife with a child to raise.

My understanding it that Wilson Baird, my Papa stayed on the farm to help his mother and widowed sister take care of his niece, and so waited until after age of 40 to marry.

I am the youngest of Wilson and Ieula's 11 children, nine of whom survived into adulthood.

Mama told me a little about the school she attended. As was typical in the South, this bright little girl went to school only too briefly in the war-torn South where many of the schools and houses had been torched as General Sherman and his Army moved through the Southland "all the way to the Sea."



Mama told me about Professor Culpepper who taught her though all the arithmetic books and into much of algebra in the little one room schoolhouse near Inman before, all too soon, she had to leave school to work in the fields and on the farm.

School was a luxury few in the South could afford.

When I asked Mama what grade she completed, she told me they did not have grade levels then (1890's) as we then had when i was in school (early 1930's). However, her formal education was probably somewhat equal to a ninth grade education.

Strangely, this was more education than many of the women in our neighborhood had at the time.
Mama revered Professor Culpepper and told me how he took time to teach algebra to her in that one room schoolhouse. Mama was also glad to tell me, in a world divided by class as well as race and gender, her father and her mother's family "came from good stock." They valued education for the girls as well as the boys.
My cousin S.J. Overstreet recently sent me this 1904 picture of the one room Inman Schoolhouse in Fayette County Georgia. Dr. Culpepper is shown on the back row. My mother was 19 in 1904 and had long since had to drop out of school and had married.

When I think of how valuable family history is to me, I know the need for all of America's children to hear the unique history of America at a time of world wide slavery and later illiteracy, class divisions and racial segregation.

We need to see how we did overcome many of these problems and not continue down the road to bitterness and political division of class and ethnicity and also not continue the destruction of our hard won life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Family History: Typhoid and Kudzu

My cousin, Sara Jane Overstreet, sent me the above picture of Dr. Joseph Chambers' house and hospital at Inman in Fayette County, Georgia in early 1900's.

As I related in another post, my mother's father, Charles Dick, died when she was a baby and while her mother was pregnant with her youngest brother. So she and her seven siblings were raised in a house on the farm of their maternal grandparents, Bogan and Mary Chambers Mask. (More details are on my Blog about school in the 1890s).

I think I told in one of the family stories that my mother (as a poor widow struggling to raise a family by working as a weaver in a Textile Mill) used to tell us children that we came "from good stock." That was at a time when the word "egalitarian" was yet to be spoken.

I grew up learning in school ( and it was written in our school books ...early 1930's ) there were three classes of people: (1) The Upper Class, (2) The Middle Class and (3) The Lower Class. People socialized with their own class as well as their own race.

When the segment about "Classes of People" was taught in our Civics school class, one little boy said to the teacher, "We are middle class, aren’t we?” The teacher looked uncomfortable. I remember realizing the teacher thought we (most of us in the class were children of unskilled laborers) were not middle class but part of the lower class.

While many of the workers have little opportunity for education or learning skills actually the work my intelligent mother did as a weaver in the Cord Weave Shop was far from unskilled.

As I told in another story, long after my mother retired, officials in the mill would send a car to her home to ask her to come back into Ospry Mill to teach others how to thread the looms for the various widths of cloth, a skill that apparently few other had learned. The cord weave department, as the name implies wove heavy material of various widths for tents or to reiforce tank and airplane tires.

The accomplished Chambers family included the "good stock" ancestors of which Mama was proud. Even though the Mask family, the Dick family and the Bairds were "good stock" also. Or so we thought!

Unfortunately, Southern families had kept going downhill in educational and financial opportunities after the destruction of the Civil War. It has only been since World War II that we started in another direction.

Mama's Chambers great grandparents had died before she was old enough to know them but she grew up knowing and revering Uncle Daniel and Aunt Rebekah McLucus as well as Grandpa and Grandma (Bogan Mask and Mary). They were hard working farmers, managing large farms and leaders in church and community. Bogan Mask was also a Methodist preacher who did not "own" slaves but was said to have bought one slave in order to gain his freedom.

Mama said that on Sunday afternoons she and her siblings, as young children, would watch any young couple riding in a horse and buggy and dressed like were on their way to get married. She said many Sunday afternoons she and her sibings and other children would run to Grandpa's house and take turns peeping in the widow and excitedly watching as Bogan Mask performed weddings.

Mama told me that her Grandma Mary Chambers Mask was a small slim woman who always wore a neat little bonnet on her head and a long dress and long clean apron.

Dr. Joseph Chambers was said to be a top graduate of Emory Medical School in 1899. He was remembered by Sara Jane’s Grandmother Overstreet as a very kind man. She said he had two professional claims to fame. One is his work with typhoid. He figured out that human waste needed to be buried at least 18 inches down in order not to spread typhoid. That was a big deal at the time.

His other claim to fame might not be considered a good thing by Kudzu haters. It is said Dr. Chambers was the first to have Kudzu imported from the Orient in the 1930s after farmers had lost about a couple of feet of topsoil. Kudzu would (and does) grow fast and hold the dirt on the land. It was very necessary. Unfortunately, it got out of hand with no natural enemies in this area. But in the 1890's the topsoil didn't blow away either. Dr. Chambers was a doctor by profession and a farmer by interest and necessity.

Kudzu...Love It Or Hate It... It Grows On You!