Through all the hard times and the fun times, Dad held to his dream of his own farm. The dairy operation enabled Dad to realize that dream. It brought in money—cash money that was saved for a down payment. It bought a new Chevrolet pickup and a used tractor and equipment. Sadly, the mules were sold. In 1955 Dad bought a beautiful farm in Wolffork Valley and built a dairy barn there. When it was ready, we drove the cows three miles to their new home. That night we milked the cows in our own barn, slept in our own house, and awakened the next morning, living the dream that Dad had envisioned. That dream was fulfilled because of the opportunity in the Farm Family Program. Dad continued to live his dream till the end. Several years before he passed, I spent a couple of hours walking the farm with him. I later wrote these words:
Autumn Walk
Autumn leaves spiral down,
Shades of red and gold
Swirling in hued depths.
White-cold clouds harbinger winter’s advent,
Wood-smoke curls low on the land
Bearing odorous memories of
Childhood past.
He leans on his stick to
Survey the hilly pastures and
Dark bottom lands.
A breeze ruffles his white-cold hair, the
Lowering sun shimmers in the grass and
Flames yellow-hot on the
Mountaintops.
Thirty-four autumns have passed with
Him and his land, autumns of
Hard work and satisfaction.
The land remains unchanged,
The body and the buildings
Slump and lean where pushed by time’s
Relentless passage.
A broken arrowhead is unearthed and
Pocketed to join a pot of
Similar treasures.
What primeval hands shaped those edges?
Could it be that this land was
Loved and revered by
Other ancients?
The valley sinks into shadow as
Eastern mountains stand pale
Purple in the gossamer twilight.
Moments become ages as
Quiet stillness pervades.
He calls to his dog and they move
Toward home.
For Dad, August 1998
© J. Harold Thurmond
“Being on the school farm was a wonderful thing!”
~Doug Nix~
Twenty years ago, I was a Foxfire student at Rabun County High School and senior editor of Foxfire’s 25th anniversary edition, which, not by chance, is proudly on display in my office, begging coworkers to ask, “What’s that book about?” I jump at any chance to brag on my experiences with Foxfire and tell them about my heritage in the foothills. Foxfire: 25 Years is a shameless plot device I use to evoke such conversations.
This story marks my second interview with Dad, the first being an article published in the Summer 1991 issue of The Foxfire Magazine (volume 25, number 2) about the closing of Rabun Mills, the impact the textile mill had on the local economy, and the implications of the recession of the early 1990s. Like several hundred families in the area, my family felt the impact deeply. The closing of the plant meant an end to Dad’s thirty-year career built on hard work and sacrifice. The story you are about to read is the prequel to this magazine article.
Dad’s story, here, tells about his family and their start in life in the early 1940s. At the time, the country was recovering from the Great Depression. Unemployment was still rampant, averaging over 15 percent nationwide. The Great Depression, either directly or indirectly, is a very common theme or frequently referenced period of time for Foxfire. The fortitude, resolve, and strength of Appalachians who grew up during this time period are evident in the body of work at Foxfire. The stories of our elders during this time are remarkable, to say the least.
Part of the Foxfire experience as a student is the knowledge that is gained and the learning that occurs about Appalachian heritage. For many students, Foxfire provides a mechanism for learning new things or additional details about their family that would go untold otherwise. Grandparents and great-grandparents make great first-time interviews for new Foxfire students! My grandparents Robert and Edith Cannon were Foxfire regulars throughout my illustrious high school career, and my mother, Judith Nix, was a Foxfire Community Board member. I recall learning many things about my grandparents that I believe would have passed unmentioned had I not had a reason to ask.
Prior to this article, I knew that Dad grew up on the school farm and even recalled some of the stories. However, I didn’t have a clear understanding of the circumstances that brought him and his family there. Like many Foxfire students, I gained a deeper understanding about the school farm and Dad’s upbringing through the production of this article. I’m astonished that his family went from having nothing to being able to purchase property and build a house in a ten-year period, which was no small feat at the time. It’s very clear that Dad and his family worked very hard on the farm, but that was a family trait, and they thrived because of that. I am very thankful to the school farm. I’m sure that my existence and my station in life [a licensed civil and environmental engineer who graduated with a master’s degree from Georgia Tech in 1998] today are due to the opportunity the school farm provided Dad.
—Chris Nix
We moved to the school farm in 1948 when I was six years old. Living on the school farm was an opportunity that my family had heard about, and we wanted to give it a try. Jobs at the time were very scarce, and my daddy didn’t have a trade skill, so we got in with the school farm. My parents were grateful for the opportunity to work and make something out of themselves and provide for the family. The school farm gave me, my brothers, and my sister a chance to make something out of ourselves, too. The main thing about living on the school farm was that we had to work! Living there helped us in several different ways. It helped us to be able to put food on the table. It helped us to be able to buy clothes, and it helped us learn how to do stuff. I learned a lot about farming while doing it over there on the school farm.
Daddy was working for the school, and my younger brother Ernest and myself took care of the family livestock and garden. We farmed the land down there; me and Daddy took the plow, and we would take it time about, resting, while the other one went to one end of the field or to the other plowing.
To me, being on the school farm was a wonderful thing! It got us off on the right track. I don’t know anybody that didn’t appreciate the school farm. When I went to school, I didn’t have but two pairs of clothes. One pair of clothes were on my back, and the other pair were in the laundry. All the kids on the school farm were like that.
We always had something to do. The people who ran the school farm liked to see you working. They liked to see you keeping your grass cut good, and keeping your creek banks mowed down. Mr. Fry would come around and look and see how everything was going and to see if you were taking care of the house. Sometimes you would have a problem with the house that you lived in. When we first moved there, we didn’t have bathrooms in the house. It wasn’t too long after we moved to the school farm until we got bathrooms. It was a while though because they came and moved the outhouse twice! I’d say we lived there two or three years before we got a bathroom.
When I was in the first grade, I had to walk to school from the house. The school had a bus at the time, but if you lived on the school farm, you didn’t get picked up by the school bus. I walked the railroad track, up the road, and into the school. There was a group of us who walked together. Some kids would pick a fight—there was one group that would just about pick a fight every day. We had to be good friends with those boys!
We were in clubs in school. We started out with the 4-H Club. I was in the sixth grade when I got my first steer for 4-H. From the sixth grade on, I had a steer every year, and, at one time, I had fifty little pigs. People would come to our house, and they’d say, “I want that pig right there,” and they’d just reac
h in the lot and get it. Well, that was ten dollars; that’s what I got per pig—ten dollars. I started saving my money.
The school would let us have all we could make on the farm except for one rule regarding our corn. If we grew corn, we had to give the school a third of it. I was in the FFA [Future Farmers of America], and they wanted us to grow a hundred bushels of corn on one acre of land. Well, the school encouraged us to do it, and FFA challenged the students to do it. The school was set up to enable the families and their children to learn to farm and live off it.
Most of the time, my acre of corn checked out a little better than one hundred bushels because we replanted it. My brother Ernest and I replowed it, took care of it, gathered it, and put the hundred bushels of corn up. Dad was working for the school farm for seventy-five cents an hour. He started out at sixty-five cents an hour; back then small change was big money! I thought, “Now I’ll sell that hundred bushel of corn to Furman Vinson over in Dillard.” It was yellow corn, some of the prettiest corn you ever laid your eyes on. He said he’d buy ever’ bit of it if I would haul it over there to him. Well, my brother Ernest and I did; I hauled the corn over there, and he give me eighty cents a bushel for it. At that time, that was a lot of money! Living on the school farm taught me to raise livestock and farm the land; it also taught me how to make and save money!
I had steers, and my brother helped me with the pigs. I have to say that I did give my brother Ernest some money for helping me with the pigs. Before we went to bed, we’d have to shuck two bushel of corn so that it’d be ready to throw in the hog lot to feed all the hogs in the morning. Also, we had to feed the horses, and we had two cows. My brother would milk one cow, and I’d milk the other one. We took care of the outside.
My daddy got into the chicken business through the school. He had to get permission from the school to do it, and the school allowed him to raise chickens. Daddy would take care of the chickens, and me and my brother would take care of the barn work. My sister and mother would take care of the housework. When it was time to plant the garden, Daddy would plant it, and we’d have to work it. We had to do what it took to keep everything growing. We’d raise chickens and sell them for five cents a head, which was not a lot of money for the amount of work. We got to the point with chickens that we transferred from the grower business to the egg business. There was a company that would buy them, and the eggs would go to a place and be hatched, and they would turn around and either hatch or sell the chickens.
We grew our own potatoes; we had our own eggs; we had our own meat. Chickens! We had chickens by the boochoos [bunches]! Every Sunday they’d be two chickens in the pot for Sunday dinner. We killed hogs. We had plenty to eat! It was because we worked for it! We produced everything you would want to buy at the store really.
We had plenty to eat; I mean, I never did go to bed hungry, and I never did get hungry living on the school farm. We had some of the greatest apple trees over there on the school farm that you could imagine—and we had cherry trees. I believe there were about eight cherry trees that we could pick cherries off of.
Daddy would decide that we needed to kill hogs and make an appointment at the school slaughterhouse. There was one time Daddy had his pickup backed up there loading meat on his truck bed; he’d have shoulders, hams stacked up about three or four feet tall, and two lines of big shoulders and hams stacked in there. Mama really enjoyed the tenderloin. That was the choice of the pig meat. We’d take it and put it in the smokehouse, hang it up, and Daddy would salt it and smoke it. We had to keep a smoker in there to keep flies away. You smoked to keep the greenflies down. If the summer was really hot and you had a lot of meat in there, you’d have to keep it going a couple of weeks.
We seldom killed livestock in the summertime; most of the time it was fall of the year. That was because of having to deal with the flies. It was just ever’ once in a while we’d slaughter in the summertime. We had to put the smoker out there to keep the meat from ruining and turning green. You had to put salt on it to keep it purified. That was the biggest reasons. You have to keep a close watch on it.
When we killed three or four hogs at a time, we’d have hot biscuits, tenderloin, and gravy for days and days. You know, believe it or not, we didn’t eat eggs even though we raised them. We just didn’t care for eggs. We got to where we didn’t care for chickens. We just got to where we got tired of it and ham, too! We eat mostly soup beans [pinto beans] and potatoes.
A man named Edward Pitts had a dairy. His family was similar to ours. He moved on the school farm just like us—just like my family, the Pitts came to the farm with nothing. That is a harsh way to look at it, but that’s how it was with both our families! The Pitts were our best friends and the Woods family, too. Our families would work together and help with the gardening. Once all the beans came in, the women would get together, and they’d come to your house and get about four or five bushels of beans picked. Then they would break beans, and I mean a lot of beans. Mama would rinse them clean and put them in jars. Then we would take them over to the cannery on the school farm. The cannery was ran by Mr. Jim Burden. We’d can a hundred and fifty cans at one time at the cannery. As you can imagine, we didn’t go hungry while we were on the school farm.
My mother would do most of the planting in our garden. The tools Mama had was her apron—with her bean seed in her apron, she’d drop them, just by hand. Daddy would cover up the seed by using a plow called a gee-whiz. Then after the beans grew up tall, we’d plow the corn with a plow called a five-foot. It had five feet on it that would just go through there and leave the corn standing. That was the hardest thing I done on the school farm, was to learn to plow with a five-foot. It was hard to learn!
The school farm encouraged us to grow livestock! The agricultural teacher, John Anderson, was the 4-H Club teacher, and we had Mr. Patrick and Mr. Burden in FFA. If you were in the FFA, you had to have a project. Some of the guys had pigs. A pig is a stupid animal! They would try to lead that pig through town, and I’m not making fun of them because they had pigs, but they’d have a walking stick, and they’d tap that pig there on its side to try and get it going in a certain direction. It just didn’t work good sometimes! Some of the boys learned to raise high-quality pigs. As I said, we were encouraged to have a project in FFA and also in 4-H.
PLATE 114 Doug standing on the location of the old slaughterhouse. The old red barn behind him used to house the Clothes Closet (this page) talked about by Lucy Webb in her Farm Family interview.
PLATE 115 “It was just the corn they wanted a third of, and we grew a lot of it.” Doug pointing to the field where he grew his one hundred bushels of corn.
Every year from when I first joined 4-H to the twelfth grade in high school, I showed steer. Only one time did I have a case where I couldn’t take a steer to Atlanta to the show. This particular steer went crazy, and we couldn’t do anything with it. I had several steers to choose from. I led them through Clayton; we had livestock judging down there under the gym, and we’d have to take our steers up there and bring them down Main Street in Clayton when we showed them off. Then we’d take them to Atlanta, and our teacher, which was the agricultural teacher, said, “Now, don’t let your calf have any water, not until we get down there.” I couldn’t understand why he didn’t want us to give them any water, so I asked him. The teacher said, “Because if you do, your steer will drink a tub full of water, and it’ll weigh a hundred fifty [or] more pounds.” I never did get a ribbon for any of my steer until my senior year. However, I did get ten dollars every time I went to Atlanta. The last time I went during my senior year, I had a pretty steer, and this steer would mind you like nobody’s business! Mr. Burden told me, he said, “You’re going be lucky if you get choice out of that steer.” I took him out and started leading him around; the judges were all up there, and that steer stopped with his front feet just right and his back feet were just right. For some reason, the steer slowly turned his neck, and you could just see the tenderloin flexing
on the back; it was a perfect sight! I got twenty dollars that year and, finally, a ribbon. That was my last steer.
Our parents didn’t mind our projects as long as we did our work and chores; we all had chores to do. Me and my brother Ernest’s deal was to milk two cows and shuck two bushel of corn every night. We would have to milk the two cows the next morning and then just throw the corn over into the pen. Now, this was all before you went to school. After Daddy got into the chicken business, it changed my school projects. I didn’t have a whole lot of time to fool with my steer. I took my own corn, my yellow corn, and I’d take it to the crusher mill. I fed my steer a special grade of corn that they taught us there in FFA how to do. It was a mixture of cottonseed meal, yellow corn, syrup, and stuff. I’d take it over to the crusher and have it mixed. Then, at the last, I started feeding them shelled corn. Daddy bought me a sheller, or somebody give him one. I’d shell corn with it. Our projects didn’t interfere with any of our work over on the school farm. As a family, my projects didn’t interfere with my chores or the school farm.
The Foxfire 45th Anniversary Book Page 47