I think that Rabun Gap School brought us out. What I’ve got now, I picked up from Rabun Gap School—the way I try to live, and do, and work, and all. I worked thirty years for the state, retired from the Agriculture Department of the state—worked all my life, from the time I remember goin’ to the field workin’ to the time I retired, and still try to help here some. Anyway, Rabun Gap School was a blessin’ to us is the main thing that I can say. It was a good life. Always up there we made good, done good, and that’s just about all farmers and workers can ask for.
Farmer’s Daughter
~Jo-Anne Stiles Hubbs~
Jo-Anne Stiles Hubbs’s family moved to Rabun Gap in 1938. Her father and mother, George and Agnes Angel Stiles, moved the family into house number 2 on the school farm. During World War II they moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, but eventually made their way back to Rabun Gap–Nacoochee School.
—Kaye Carver Collins
The first time we lived here, we did those fields over next to Betty’s Creek, down in the bottom, and over the hill to the road. We done all of that. We had a garden right next to the house, and, of course, we had the barn and the chickens. Daddy raised little chicken broilers. When I was twelve, we started making sorghum syrup. Daddy had a pretty good patch of cane, and other people on the school farm raised cane, too. We made it for everybody—six hundred gallons was made that year.
The sorghum mill was down below where the old post office was in that field. Fred Williamson would run the stalks through the grinder. My daddy was real particular. He didn’t want any fodder left on it. He wanted it all picked off, which was pretty hard on the little hands, but we had to pick all of that fodder off. He topped it, and the cane tops were used for feed for cows and chickens. I skimmed the sorghum, and my daddy kept the fire goin’ and run it off. Those days that I worked there, I wore a brown wool skirt. When we got through, my skirt had so much sugar in it, it stood alone. We made sorghum from daylight to dark, along in October. It got dark a little earlier than it did in the summertime.
We lived there in house number two till 1943. It was during World War II because my daddy went to work at Oak Ridge, and we went back to Franklin, North Carolina, a little while and then moved to Knoxville, Tennessee. When he finished his job in Oak Ridge, we came back to the school farm. It was in 1945 just before Christmas. We lived in house number eight when we moved back. It was a big two-story house across from the rock. Paul Williamson lived on the rock at that time. Julius York, the Webbs, and the Holdens were living on the school farm, too.
This time, we tended the bottoms next to the Little Tennessee River down below Hodgsen Hall, the whole bottoms between the highway and the river. I hoed corn all the way across those bottoms, and it was hot. One year, Daddy had cane and something else planted there; I don’t remember what it was, but I do remember hoeing corn in long rows in those bottoms. I know that we got a share, but I don’t remember what the shares were. I think it was one-third, but I’m not sure. I do know that we had a free patch or acre that we didn’t share with the school.
Since I was in the eighth grade when we moved back, I attended school at the old Dillard Community School. In the ninth grade, I came to Hodgsen Hall at Rabun Gap–Nacoochee. We always walked to school. On Sunday Mr. Bleckley would pick everybody up on that road and haul us to church. He had an old black truck, and we all sat in the back. We would sing all the way there and all the way back, just as loud as we could! You couldn’t do that anymore. They would probably lock you up now and not let you out with that many kids in the back of a pickup truck, but he picked us up every Sunday morning to go to church and every Sunday night to go to training union at church.
It really was a great time to grow up. It was a great time! The more things I see away from here, the more I’m convinced that this was one of the greatest blessings in my life. I might not have thought it then, but I do now!
“You just enjoyed living.”
~J. T. Coleman~
J. T. Coleman was four when his parents, Norman and Ruby Coleman, and his sisters Betty, Texas, and Carol moved to the school farm in 1933. They moved everything they had in a school bus. The people in the Wolffork community had built the school bus body on a truck chassis, and Norman Coleman bought it and started the first school buses in that part of the county. Dr. Ritchie had told the people on Wolffork that if they could work out transportation, the children of the community could come to Rabun Gap–Nacoochee School for free. In addition, the Colemans could live on the school farm for ten years.
—Kaye Carver Collins
The people on Wolffork had been meeting for quite some time to try and get their kids to Rabun Gap School. They were meeting in the Baptist church up on Wolffork. So, anyhow, the deal was that my dad would buy a truck chassis, and the people up on Wolffork built the first bus body. That was the first bus route in 1934. Then, a couple of years later, the people on Kelly’s Creek wanted the same thing, so he bought another bus and hired a fellow by the name of Arthur Norton. He lived with us and helped Dad on the farm and drove a school bus. He got drafted in World War II, and that is when my mother started driving the bus. Over a period of time, he had three buses. He picked up the route on Bald Mountain, Kelly’s Creek, Wolffork, and Betty’s Creek. Those were the bus routes. He operated those until he retired after thirty-five years, when he reached age sixty-five.
Dad’s primary job when we lived on the school farm was that he would drive the bus. That was the agreement. At that time people would come and work on the school farm for five years. Dr. Ritchie said, “If you will buy a bus and start the routes, you can live on the school farm.” Our first house is no longer there. It was a big two-story house across from the “house on the rock” on the Wolffork route. It had no electricity and no indoor plumbing. It did have an outhouse. I remember when electricity came in. We didn’t have a telephone until years after that. We did have pianos and a square radio, but that was long before television. One house had a spigot in the kitchen. We lived in that house five years, and then they built a new house on the hill there across from Rabun Gap Post Office and we moved into that brand-new house as the first family.
Dad also did some farming at the school; in the fall when you gathered your crops, you would take two loads to your barn and one load to the school barn. We did that for eight or ten years. We had a team of mules that we used to cultivate the corn. When I was about ten, I could do that. I could hoe corn when I was nine or ten. We never used any of the school’s equipment.
PLATE 109 “My grandfather was born there and my father was born there, and all of his brothers were born there.” J. T. Coleman’s family home in the Persimmon community
It was a lot of fun because you had families with children of your age. We had an open pasture between our house and the Frys’ house, and that is where we played football games, baseball games, whatever games we wanted to play. We had hoops and would roll the hoops. That was a big thing when we were growing up.
We didn’t get into much mischief, at least none that I want to tell about [laughs]! Playing in the barns and throwing hay down when we wasn’t supposed to—when you are feeding the animals, that is all right, but when you are just throwing hay bales at each other, it isn’t! Stuff like that, if it gets out of place, you are in trouble! The Williamsons were the closest family to us. They lived right across from us in the house we call the house on the rock. Fred and Ned Williamson were close to my age. We had good times together playing. We didn’t get in a whole lot of trouble, come to think about it.
The one thing my daddy believed in was me working—anything that needed to be done from the time I was old enough to plow a mule, eight or ten years of age—me. Arthur Norton, who lived with us, helped Dad, too. My dad bought one of the first tractors in this area about 1938 or ’39, and we—dad, Arthur, and myself—did what everybody else called public plowing, a dollar and a quarter an hour for the tractor and the driver. People would come to Dad and say, “Norman, can you plow this field
?” It happened that the fields were on the same routes as the school bus went on, so I would get on whichever bus route where the tractor was needed and work till it got dark because Arthur and Dad were driving the buses. Then on Saturdays—all day Saturday until midnight Saturday night—we didn’t plow after midnight on Saturdays. You don’t plow on Sunday! At that time I was about twelve. I would ride the bus route to wherever the tractor was and work. It was good times. You just enjoyed living.
At Christmas, the Farm Families met in what was at that time the dining hall, and there would be before Christmas, as I recall, an exchange of names among the families, and you brought your presents for whichever family’s names that you drew to the party and put them under the Christmas tree. We had singing and laughing and we’d tell jokes. It was a lot of fun. The Ritchies gave items like candy, suckers, stick candy, and stuff like that. There was nothing elaborate, just small gifts.
I was fourteen when I started driving the bus. My birthday is September eighteenth. At that time you could get a driver’s license at fifteen. The highway patrolmen came to the Rabun County Courthouse once a month to give driving tests. We went out there in August; I was one month short of being fifteen. My dad talked to the patrolman, and he said, “No, sorry, we can’t do that, give a license ahead of time, especially to drive a bus!” My dad kept talking and talking and finally he said, “Why don’t you take him and give him a test and, if he can’t pass it, then I will understand why you won’t give it to him.” So finally they said, “All right!” The highway patrolman got in the bus with me, and we left the courthouse there and went out toward Germany Mountain and got there, and the patrolman said, “Take this road.” So we went up it almost all the way to the top, and he put me through ever’ turn and twist you can think of, turn here, back up here, this and that. We got back to the courthouse, and he stepped down and looked back at me and said, “Boy, you can drive the h——out of this thing, can’t you!” So I got my license. It was just kind of a technicality. I think school started on the fourth or fifth of September, and I was going to be fifteen in just a few weeks. No big deal!
PLATE 110 “Those were the best years of my life, of my growing up, you know.”
I think going to RGNS made a difference in who I am. It was a combination of living on the school farm, associating with the people who lived on the school farm, and having teachers who stressed that you work hard in your schoolwork, specifically Miss McKinney, Mrs. Hackney, and Mr. Fry, who taught agriculture. Mr. Fry, whose job was connected to the school, taught agriculture to the students in school. I don’t remember him teaching the farm men, but that could have been something my dad was doing that I wasn’t aware of.
Those were the best years of my life, of my growing up, you know. I have had a good wife for fifty-five years—family and children is better—but it was my best years of growing up. Overall, it was good times and a good upbringing. It was just the basic things that I feel like I was a-taught. All my teachers stressed being a good student and working hard to get the best grade you could and working extra hard to do that. They stressed going on and getting a higher education and, of course, my dad was always stressing that, too. He said all his children would have a college education. That was one thing that he regretted. He left Rabun Gap School and didn’t go on to a higher level. A better education was just a day-by-day thing in my family. You didn’t give a lot of thought to it. You knew what was expected. After I graduated from Rabun Gap, I went to North Georgia College; at that time it was a compulsory military college. You had to get your commission after four years and serve two years in the military after graduation. It just so happened that I graduated from college in ’51, and the Korean War had started in ’50.
“Mama ordered one hundred little biddy chickens.”
~William Thurmond~
William Thurmond, my dad, was a third-generation Farm Family member whose family moved here from White County, Georgia, where my great-grandfather Thurmond worked some for Nacoochee School before it burned down. My grandmother was also part of the Farm Family Program, having moved with her family to the school farm from nearby Otto, North Carolina. She graduated from RGNS in 1932 as class valedictorian. Granddad Thurmond was two units short of graduating when he went into the service. Upon his return from World War II, his family moved to Rabun Gap–Nacoochee School and became part of the Farm Family Program, learning the dairy industry and creating a family business from the skills he obtained. It is there on the school farm where my grandparents also met. Being a former Foxfire student, as were my sisters, Teresa and Sandra, it is with great pleasure that I share a part of my family history with you here in this 45th anniversary edition.
—Sheri Thurmond
In February 1946, we moved to Rabun Gap–Nacoochee School on the Rickman Creek boundary, and became part of the School Farm Program. I was five or six years old when we moved. Carl Vinson moved us from Dillard over there one day in a truck; the house we moved into was just a boxed-up house. It had two bedrooms plus the upstairs. It was not painted inside or out, no electricity, and no running water. We had the well out back of the house, and we had a stone trough there next to the well where Mama put her milk and butter and kept it cold. The kitchen end of it had been added onto the house. That room was sealed on the inside but didn’t have no insulation in it. It had a fireplace on the north end of it and a fireplace on the east side of it.
After we moved, Mama ordered one hundred little biddy chickens from Sears and Roebuck. We raised them up. She sold some of the roosters and some of ’em she killed and canned the meat. She sold part of the pullets, but the rest she would raise out and would get ’em started laying first, so that she would have extra eggs. Dad would take them to the store and sell ’em or swap ’em for goods that she needed. She made a lot of our shirts by buying cloth with the money she made from selling eggs. Mama would make some of ’em, and Grandma Thurmond would make some. Grandma was a real good seamstress herself. We usually got one pair of shoes a year. We got them about the first of November, or it might have been a little bit later. When they wore out that next spring, we went barefooted from then up until shoe time that next fall. I remember one time Harold, my brother, and I were playing around the front of the fireplace. Dad had built up a big fire, and I mean, it was a good fire. That fireplace was the only heat we had besides the cookstove, and that’s where our beds were. Well, Harold had pulled his shoes off, and me and him was a-playin’. I had done something or another, and he didn’t like it. Well, he picked up one of his shoes and throwed it at me. Well, I dodged that shoe, and it went right straight in the fireplace. By the time Dad raked it out, it was done charred—I mean good and charred [laughs]. He did get two new pairs of shoes that year.
PLATE 111 The Clarence Thurmond family when they first arrived at Rabun Gap–Nacoochee School
When we moved to the school, Dad didn’t have any work stock to work the farm with, so he went down to Franklin, North Carolina, there at the Stamey boys and bought a pair of mules. I don’t remember what he gave for them, but he worked them up until he bought his first tractor in the fall of ’52 or ’53. Now, at that time, the dairy farm was not there. We farmed to pay rent. We planted corn in the upper and lower bottoms. The rent down on the bottomland was half of what you made. If you had an acre of corn, half of that acre went to the school as rent. Now, on the upper land, the rent was three-quarters to one-fourth. So if you had four wagonloads, one would go to the school, and the other three was kept by the farmer to do with as he pleased. We mainly raised hay and corn in our fields. The school had a stationary baler that you used to bale their share of the hay. When the school farm crews slowed down, they would come to the fields and bale the hay. A gasoline motor ran the baler, but you did not move it like these here balers are nowadays. You pulled it up to the stack of hay, fed the hay in it by hand or pitchfork, and this arm pushed it down in the baler. Then a plunger pushed it back in there. Dad’s part of the hay was left loose in the field. We h
auled it into the barn on a wagon and fed it to the livestock loose. His part was not baled.
Our first garden was up there behind the old house. In that garden we had onions, carrots, radishes, cabbage, beans, squash, pumpkins, and cucumbers. What we raised, Mom canned. Dad also had a big syrup cane patch. He hired Mr. and Mrs. Lon Dover to make the syrup. She was good at making syrup. Dad had raised up about an acre to an acre and a half of the syrup cane. He stripped that fodder off of the cane and hauled it with his wagon over there to the syrup mill, which was right across the branch from where the house was on the rock. The syrup mill was right along beside Wolffork Road. He hauled the cane over there, and he got Fred Williams to feed the cane mill. By that, I mean the cane mill mashed the cane stalks flat, and that mashed the juice out of it. It run from the cane mill down to the shed where they had the furnace set up, and that was where the syrup was cooked. Mrs. Dover didn’t use a thermometer either. As the juice was cooked, it had an ole green skimming on it, and they skimmed that off. They would put that in a container, then you could take you a biscuit or a piece of corn bread, rake down through it, and eat that [laughs]. I think, if I remember right, that the acre to two acres of cane made three hundred gallons of syrup. The school charged so much for Dad using their syrup mill, but I don’t know how much that was. It was a certain percent of the syrup. Then Mr. and Mrs. Dover charged so much or got so many gallons of the syrup for the making of it. In the end, Dad had something like one hundred fifty gallons of syrup left that he sold or swapped. A lot of it he took to the store at Dillard and swapped it for stuff that we needed, like coffee, flour, salt, and spices.
We hadn’t been on Rickman Creek too long before Dad ended up with three cows. Then he started buying calves and letting ’em nurse on that third cow. When the calf got up to weighing about two hundred to two hundred fifty pounds, he would take ’em to the sale. Since he was selling them as veal calves, he got more money than he would have if he had raised them up.
The Foxfire 45th Anniversary Book Page 45