In Hackneyville, Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists all went to the same church and took turns using denominational materials until they were able to build a Baptist church and a Methodist church in the early twentieth century.
Hillabee Campground First United Methodist Church dates back to settlement days when only an arbor was used for meetings. Courtesy of Peggy Jackson Walls.
THE HERSHEL BAKER STORE
Lynwood Baker and her husband, Dan, operated the Baker store, where they got a lot of business from the gold miners. Lynwood’s mother, Daisy Simpson, operated a boarding home for the miners:
On the left are Betty Baker and Dan Baker (standing); on the right, Neil H. Baker sits at the Baker country store in Downtown Hackneyville in the mid-1940s. Courtesy of Betty Baker Hamilton.
I remember in ’32, ’33, ’34, seeing the truck go by with the big cans on it. The truck went by at least twice a day. There would be two layers of cans on the back of the truck. Mama [Daisy Simpson] kept boarders, and sometimes they would stop by. We would go see the stuff in the cans. It looked like dark powder. These are my memories when Mama kept boarders. The mine was two to two and one-half miles from our house. My brother quit school and went to work at the gold mine when he was sixteen.
Alvin Goodwin drove the truck, and this big German shepherd dog rode with him. When the truck passed by, he would be sitting up in the truck. The dog carried messages for them at the mine. It was real smart. They’d put a note on his collar, and they’d tell him where to go. There were a lot of buildings over there. I think Alvin was the one driving when the Sanford Bridge fell in, and the passenger was killed.
MISS DAISY SIMPSON
Miss Daisy kept boarders when the gold mine opened in 1933. Along with taking care of her husband, Ernest Lynwood Simpson, and their three children, she stayed busy with the farm and household responsibilities. Vegetable gardens had to be weeded and cared for, particularly in dry weather, when water was carried from the well or spring to keep the plants from dying. Trips to the garden for fresh peas, okra, corn and tomatoes in season were daily chores. Peas had to be shelled, corn shucked and okra and tomatoes sliced in preparation for a meal. Daily trips were made to the barn to milk the cow and to the henhouse to retrieve eggs for breakfast and to use in cooking. A great deal of work went into preparing meals. Miss Daisy described her daily routine, which included cooking for boarders who worked on different shifts:
Lots of nights I’d get up at eleven or twelve o’clock and cook them something to eat. They’d work their shift and sleep. I’d have to have something for them to eat about two o’clock to go on their job. And it was work all the time.
Life was hard along then. Everybody had to work to live.
FROM ONE -ROOM SCHOOLS TO PUBLIC SCHOOLS
Former governor John M. Patterson, a Goldville native, described the education available in the backwoods of Alabama in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Judge Patterson is the son of Albert Patterson, best remembered for his attempt to clean up Phenix City’s corruption and his assassination by organized crime, an act that catapulted John M. Patterson into state politics. He served as Alabama attorney general (1955–59), governor (1959–63) and federal judge (1984–97). In 2003, he served as chief justice of the special Supreme Court case of then Chief Justice Roy Moore, who was forced to remove the Ten Commandments monument he had placed in the Supreme Court building.
Governor Patterson’s long and distinguished career in public service had its roots in humble beginnings in northeast Tallapoosa County. His great-grandfather John Love Patterson settled near Hillabee Campground, where he operated a gristmill. The governor’s grandfather Delona Patterson, like other people of his day, had little opportunity for an education although they strongly desired one.
John Malcolm Patterson (governor of Alabama from 1959 to 1963) beside the millstone used by his great-grandfather John Love Patterson, a miller and early settler of Tallapoosa County. Courtesy of Peggy Jackson Walls.
People seemed to have a thirst for knowledge in those days, but a formal education was hardly available since there weren’t any public schools. Grandpa Patterson never went to school but just a few days in his whole life…through teaching himself, he became a pretty well-educated man. He and others in the community built a two-room schoolhouse at Goldville. Another was built at Valley Grove and one near Hillabee Creek [Hot Chapel] . There were no public schools at the time. People in the community chipped in and paid the teacher’s salary. The teacher boarded at one of the families’ homes until the end of the school term, which was short. All of the grades were taught in one or two rooms, basics like reading writing, arithmetic, and spelling. My father [Albert Patterson] became a teacher that way and would board in different places. My mother did the same thing and my uncle Lafayette Patterson.
Miss Alice Foshee
“Miss Alice” attended Hot Chapel school, which was within walking distance of her home. At that time students had to live within walking distance of a school or board with someone who did. Her memories of attending school present a picture of a typical one-to-three room building, similar to a sharecropper’s house.
Students of all ages pose at the Hot Springs one-room school near Hillabee Creek on the old Nelson place. Courtesy of David and Karen Daniel.
Hot Chapel was located about one-fourth mile southwest of the old covered Sanford Bridge. The building was made of weatherboard pine. There were three rooms. The large room had a fireplace on one end and a heater in the other. [There was] pitiful heating though. People [who] had kids in school furnished the wood. Half the time, they were out. For a blackboard, the teacher used a large square of the wall that had been scrubbed smooth and painted black. Students brought lunch in aluminum buckets and hung them on a nail on the wall. The desks were so constructed that two students could sit in each desk. Hot Chapel [went] from the first grade through the ninth. The building consisted of one large room, divided into two classrooms by a curtain in the center. The boys and girls entered through separate doors to their side of the room. In the winter, the boys’ side was heated by a wood heater, and the girls’ side was heated by a large open fireplace. Students were charged a fee of $2.50 each month. Children who lived close enough would walk home for lunch and then walk back to school. At recess, students played paddlecat or soft ball. The older girls did the batting, and the smaller girls would run for them. The bathroom facilities were located far down the hill from the school.
Mr. C.E.Newman
When I came to Hackneyville in 1926, the school was an old two-story building. There were no electric lights, and the building was heated by old wood stoves. Parents brought in wood by the wagonload to keep the school warm for the children…Since I was at Hackneyville during the Depression years, I remember the highest salary I ever got was $150 a month or $1,800 a year. But during the Depression, I didn’t get a payday for eight months. We were paid in scrip. Merchants would give us fifty cents on the dollar for the scrip money, but they wouldn’t cash it. For the first few months, merchants in the community took teachers on credit and charged them interest, but they didn’t have money to buy items to sell if folks didn’t pay them. I remember some of our high school children dropped out of school and got a job making twice as much as I did teaching.
The high school students would learn and give a different play every two weeks [as a fundraiser for the school] . Admission ran ten to fifteen cents, unless it was a royalty play; then it might be twenty-five or fifty cents. All the money went directly to the school. If it was a hit, we would take it to other schools in Alex City and Rockford. We had basketball games in Alex City in Russell auditorium and charged admission.
COMPANY DOCTOR
The Hog Mountain Mining and Milling Company doctor was Dr. T.H. Street, but it was his assistant, Dr. James E. Cameron, who made most of the calls to the mine. After completing his medical training in 1935, Dr. Cameron worked closely with Dr. T.H. Street, Dr. J.J. Walls and Dr. Wade Lamberth and learne
d quickly how to treat patients without the benefit of antibiotics or other modern medicines.
Between August 1935 and January 1936, Dr. Cameron made many trips to the mine. Occasionally, it was necessary for him to go down into the mine to examine and treat a miner. Dr. Cameron became good friends with Superintendents Neal Johnson and Elmer Alderfer, both of whom were graduates of the Colorado School of Mines. Often they came into town on the weekend and met with Dr. Cameron and John Coley at the Russell Hotel and played bridge.
Dr. Cameron reflected on his experience as Dr. Street’s assistant, as well as Dr. Street’s appearance and personality traits:
Dr. Street was a very large man and a very particular dresser. He bathed and changed clothes twice a day.
If it was raining and wet and Dr. Street thought he might get his shoes dirty around the mine, he would ask me to go up to the mine so he wouldn’t get his clothes dirty. Dr. Street drove a Dodge automobile and bought a new car every year from Wilbanks Motor Company in Alexander City.
I made house calls day and night up there in that area, sometimes when the roads were nearly impassable, and they often got very bad in the winter. The people who lived up there were the “salt of the earth.” They were good, solid people, but they had such a little bit of money with which to pay for anything, not just a doctor, and the care we gave them wasn’t worth a great deal. They would have gotten well just about as well without the medical care they got.
I remember one miner who had his foot caught when some timbers fell down in the mine. I went into the mine and gave him some morphine to alleviate his pain before they pried off the timbers to get his foot loose. The managers were afraid he might lose his foot, so they were very solicitous of his well-being.
EUGENE LESLIE
A number of mining accidents occurred at Hog Mountain in the 1930s. Eugene Leslie, a timberman, shared his experience in a serious accident over two hundred feet down in the mine.
My name is Eugene Leslie. I was born in 1898. I worked at Hog Mountain gold mine for several years and was underground when a fellow took an axe and hit a rock and it hit me in the eye. They sent me to St. Margaret’s hospital in Montgomery. I stayed there a long time. That like to have killed me. They gave me a shot and took the eye out. All I could get was compensation. It wasn’t much. You know, we used to couldn’t get nothing.
Eugene Leslie was a Hog Mountain miner in the 1930s. He lost an eye in mining accident at Hog Mountain in that decade. Courtesy of Peggy Jackson Walls.
Hog Mountain miner Kermit Jackson was head timberman and driller and brother to Benjamin Talmadge Jackson. Courtesy of Peggy Jackson Walls.
I timbered with Kermit Jackson and old Buck Patterson. They was so stout, they would say, “Hold it a minute, let us get this.” They sure were good workers. Kermit and Buck would cut big hickory trees on the mountain. They’d put the timber on the elevator themselves. That elevator went down 200 to 225 feet. Then sometimes, I worked with Marion Bowens to build stopes to catch the rock they’d shoot down. We’d set charges off every day. They’d shoot for thirty minutes, one right after another you could hear them. They sounded like they’d shake that mountain down. Didn’t nobody stay in there when they lit them; they got back out of the way. After the charges were set off, in the evening, you wouldn’t go back I ’til morning. You had to have the alphabet to know where you were going: “A right A, A right E, and A right B. A left E, A left A, and A left B.” The veins came out of the main stoke.
Mr. Brown, the general superintendent, said at the time the mine was shutting down there was money set aside there, and I ought to have got more for the loss of my eye, but I would have had to sue them to get it. If I had, I couldn’t get a job with a company anywhere. I had to make me a job, so I started painting. But when Mr. Brown come back, he came on down and hired me to be a rigger.
Mr. Brown was a fine man. The best man I ever worked for. He was an electrical engineer, a gold mine graduate from New York. The government gave him his authority. Whatever he said went. There’s gold there now. I’m gonna tell you the reason they shut it down. You’d have get rid of this waste rock to get to the gold, and it costs money to do that. The stockholders made money, and they’d hold the money. That’s what shut it down. They wouldn’t take any more chances. I had more confidence about what was in there than anybody. I got that straight from George. “Someday Hog Mountain will open up,” he said. “There’s still gold down there. It’d run $37 a ton.” I also helped at the graphite plant in Millerville. That was during the war [World War II]. We had to have graphite to crucify steel. After the graphite plant, we went north to Henderson, North Carolina, at Thompson’s Steel, to build a plant to get tin, gold and zinc out. When we got started, General Electric bought them out. When I come home, and Mr. Brown come back down here, he wanted me to go to Colorado with him and work at the mines up there. But I stayed home this time to be near my family.
THE BUCK PATTERSON STORY
Buck was in a fight somewhere, and the sheriff come to get him. He run and jumped in the elevator and went down in the mine. Well, they just kept it going ’til there wasn’t no way to get Buck out. Kermit talked to him; I did, too. Told him, “Buck, they’ll starve you out. They’ll stay right there and can’t nobody bring you food. The best thing to do is give up and go on.” They arrested him, but he finally got out of whatever it was. He come back over there and worked awhile, then left after that and was deputy sheriff somewhere for a while. He got in trouble again, and when the law come to get him, this time he killed three men. They give him a lifetime sentence for killing them.
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Notable People and Events
Although many residents in the Goldville/Hog Mountain area have a interesting stories to recount about their lives and those of family members and neighbors, a few are well known in Alabama’s politics, such as Governor Patterson; his uncle Lafayette; and his father, Albert Patterson. Judge John Patterson fits both categories. He grew up on Patterson property that was purchased in the 1800s by his grandfather.
Around Goldville…was what was known as the Goldville Field. The mining commenced here about 1840, and by 1843, there was quite a large settlement at Goldville. In fact, there was over three thousand people there at that time. The post office there did more business than the post office in Montgomery. There were, I think, twelve stores, a hotel, a sort of a tent city, and a race track. There was quite a lot of gold mining activity going on around here at that time. There were no records on that. In those days, there were no tax laws, and no regulations. People traded in gold bullion. Really, you don’t know what they found here. Only the experts can estimate as to what they might have found here.
Now I never saw any mining here myself. The only mining I ever observed here was when I was in high school in Phenix City. I’d come up here and spend the summers with my grandparents in Goldville. In 1935, ’36 or as early as 1934, there was a mining operation going on here where they were hauling the old tailings from the mine over at Hog Mountain. The tailings were the ore that had been originally worked, and there was a lot of stuff left in it. They were hauling it over here at Goldville and putting it in concrete vats and reworking it with a new process. Apparently, they found that to be profitable. I went over there one day with my uncle James Harry in a wagon to see it. I was fascinated by what was going on, and that’s the only actual mining operation I ever saw here at Goldville.
There is an area here at Goldville, on my place, called the Houston Mines. And these are mining shafts that go straight down, then tunneling out following the ore, and you can still observe these. Some of them are very deep and almost out of sight. Some of them are slanted. Some of them are approximately twelve feet square. It is my understanding that some Welsh miners came in here after the initial mining. It was their technique to build these twelve-foot-square shafts. You can go and observe these and see that there was an extensive mining operation. You can hardly go a hundred yds. around Goldville without finding some dig
gings where people were trying to find gold, apparently working claims. Right near my gate where you come in here, if you step off the road about twenty feet and start walking up in the woods, you’ll see extensive diggings, which reflects that a great deal was going on here. It is my understanding though that they struck gold in California along about 1849, and most of the people here that were interested in gold mining packed up and moved west, where it was a richer strike. And Goldville began to fade away as a city.
My uncle Lafayette Patterson, at ninety-nine years old remembered Goldville as a thriving place with businesses. He remembered a circus coming to Goldville and setting up in the streets of Goldville with performers and animals. Goldville had a great day at one time, but I think today there’s something like fifty people now, counting the children.
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