One crazy thing I done over there on the school farm was a bike stunt. Often I would go to a creek and ride my bike with the other kids. I decided that I was going to show everybody how I could jump that creek on my bicycle. I got up on that hill and down through there I went—fast! I jerked the handlebars up to jump the creek, and that front wheel went right into the bank and just rolled me over!
My aunt moved across the creek from us. They had two girls, my cousins, JoAnn and Mary Ann. My sister, Marie, played with them. One time all of us were up in the pasture playing, and we all got into a fight. We decided that we had had enough of that! We told them to stay across the branch [creek] over there, in their territory, and we’d stay on our side of the branch in our territory. A couple of days went by, and we decided that we would meet down at the branch. We went down there, and nobody said anything. I believe I was the one that suggested that we get a spool and put it on a post and run a string from one side of the creek to the other. I had a Prince Albert tobacco can; we took it and shut the lid on the string, and it would go around the spool and keep right on going. I said, “If you have anything to say to us, you write it down on that paper and send it down to the branch.” We did that for about a week, and then things kind of smoothed over. First thing you knew, all was forgiven, and we were playing again.
There was a swimming hole out in the pasture, and there were three or four good-sized girls who were our neighbors that swam there. They’d have their bathing suits on, and we’d be in there with our blue jeans on. They’d come down and tell us to go on out, and that they wanted to play down there. We’d have to leave the swimming hole until we saw them leave, and then we’d make another dive!
A funny story: I actually went thirteen years to school. You probably don’t want to know about my second grades. The teacher would say, “We are going to have a test tomorrow.” Mrs. Barnard Dillard, she was a great teacher and person, she would hand the papers out for the test. When she finished handing them out, she’d say, “Now start the test.” We just had that one classroom, so the same teacher taught you everything. In the second grade, I didn’t see that what she was teaching had anything to do with growing pigs and plowing a field, so I’d just sit back and rest while everybody else was moaning, groaning, and writing to get through with their tests! I’d just write my name up at the top of the paper, date it, and hand it in. I did that for a year. She never did say anything to Mama. I never did take my report card home! That next year when school started, the teachers would come around and talk to her pupils that she was going have in her class for the next year. So she came over to our house, and she told Mama, said, “Mrs. Nix, I like Doug so well that I am going to have to keep him another year.” Boy, Daddy told me, said, “You’d better get your lessons up every night.” I used to listen to the Lone Ranger on the radio instead of doing my lessons!
Daddy learned to be a plumber and helped a man by the name of Mr. Lake Stiles. They went around from house to house seeing if there was anything that needed to be done, something that needed to be fixed, plumbing to work on, or a door or something, you know. He worked for the school. He did maintenance on the school building, and he also painted. Daddy did whatever they needed done.
Me and Donald Woods got our first Social Security card working for the school farm. They let us help do jobs over there, like digging ditches. We worked with a guy named Tommy Lee Norton. He’d go out with me and Donald and show us stuff to do, and we’d do it. We’d plow or do whatever needed to be done.
Each family had ten years to live on the school farm. When my family’s ten years was up, we were asked to leave the school farm when I was still in the eleventh grade. Mr. Fry said if we wanted to, we could pay rent and stay one more year, so that is what we did. In the meantime, while we were paying rent, my grandpa Harkins told us about some land for sale on Kelly’s Creek. So Daddy went over there and bought four acres. We built a house over there, and then we moved.
I was graduating, and my brother Ernest and sister, Marie, were in the tenth grade. Ed, my youngest brother, was in the seventh grade. Daddy got a job over there at the plant in Rabun Gap [James Lee and Sons—Rabun Mills carpet plant] painting the steel. He was going to be a steel painter. He got into the company that did the construction of that place.
I saved money working on the school farm while I was in school. I had saved enough money to buy my first car. It was one hundred twenty-nine dollars for my first car, a ’49 Chevrolet. When we left the school farm as a family, we had a home to go to on Kelly’s Creek and a few dollars in our pocket and clothes on our back. We were ninety-nine percent better off than we were eleven years prior when we moved onto the school farm. We didn’t have anything when we went to the school farm. Afterward, we had a truck; we had a television, which was unusual for people. We had a living room suite. We had three bedroom suites. We had a stove, refrigerator, and a kitchen table, which was very unusual. People couldn’t afford that stuff. The school farm was something that was really, really helpful to our family. Daddy was able to work and provide us clothes and everything for us to go to school. It was an opportunity that you couldn’t turn down! You got a chance! You had to be people that would work the farm, and you would work! That’s what we did. We worked!
To me, what the school farm did was one of the greatest things that could happen to a family that didn’t have anything to start with. To be where we are today, really, it is because of the opportunity provided to my family by the school farm! It gave us a good start. It gave me an education, not only me, but my brothers and sister. It gave us an education and gave me an idea of how to farm.
“I knowed there wasn’t nobody else for me.”
~Lucy Webb and her daughter Mary Webb Kitchens~
Lucy and Grover Webb fell in love and married young. When they moved to the school farm, they had a young family of five boys and two girls. Grover worked with maintenance and supervised dormitory students working on the farm. He, Lucy, and the children also farmed a plot of land. Lucy stayed home, cooking, cleaning, canning, and providing support for her husband and children. Her niece, Ann Henslee Moore [Foxfire’s president and executive director], would often visit and has warmhearted memories of having chocolate gravy and biscuits for breakfast at the Webbs’ home and playing with her cousins on the hillside above the current-day Indian Lake.
—Kaye Carver Collins
Lucy: I was born October 19, 1925, to Will and Dealia Henslee, and was raised in Rabun Gap, Georgia, near the York House and over there on Kelly’s Creek Road where the slaughter pen [Blalock Meats] is now. Daddy moved us over here to Dillard, Georgia, and that’s where we lived.
Grover and me started goin’ together when I was about thirteen. I knowed there wasn’t nobody else for me. I went with him, and we got married when I was nearly sixteen. Right after we got married, Welborn Garrison came down from Horse Cove in Highlands, North Carolina, to get Grover. They needed him to work, and he was gone for two weeks [laughs]. He never came back until he got enough money to buy a cookstove, then he come by and picked me up. We stayed in Highlands until Junior [Grover Webb Jr.], my oldest son, was about a year old, and then we left and came back down to Dillard.
Mary: We moved to the school farm when I was six; that was around 1960. Mr. Fry and Farmer Jones offered Daddy a job and he got it. I think it was Fred Kelly that helped him get on with the RGNS School Farm Program.
Lucy: It was. He worked with them men putting in bathtubs and all of that. Tommy Lee Norton and them would be settin’ out there a-talkin’, and you could see Fred Kelly comin’ down the road. They’d go in that house then and get to work. I loved Tommy Lee and L. D. Hopper. They was good people, but, yeah, Fred Kelly helped Grover get the job with the school.
Mary: Daddy worked the schoolboys that were dorm students. He did the farming there and was over the dormitory students doing the farming; they planted the cornfields, done the plowing, and raised strawberries, all for the school farm. He was paid by a straigh
t check from the school. He got so much money from the school, and the house we lived in was part of it. They furnished our home and the place around it for us. He probably didn’t get but thirty or forty dollars a month for the work he did.
PLATE 116 “Grover and I started going together when I was about thirteen.” Grover and Lucy at home on Betty’s Creek, many years ago
We lived in two different houses on the farm. We lived there in that house right by the three-way stop where the turn to Indian Lake is now and then around there by Esco Pitts on Wolffork Road. Our second house had three bedrooms, and they were on the back side of the house. They were big, old, huge bedrooms. The bedroom that Mama and Daddy slept in had a fireplace in it. Me and Clara, my sister, always roomed with Mama and Daddy. Then four of them [the boys—Jimmy, Calvin, Freddie, and Ronnie] would sleep in the middle room, where Mama had two beds, and two would sleep in each bed. Then Junior had the end room ’cause he was the oldest. Then when Junior was gone [grown up and moved out], Calvin and Jimmy got it, and then one time Clara and I finally got our own room. In the front was the living room, the dining room, and the kitchen. The living room had a fireplace in it, too. The bathroom was kind of on the side between the back bedroom and the kitchen. You could go in it from the house. I loved that school farm house. I wish I had a house there now.
PLATE 117 “Mama and Daddy raised everything we had.” Photo courtesy of Rabun Gap–Nacoochee School Archives
Lucy: I tended the kids, kept house, canned, and cooked.
Mary: Mama worked the garden right down below the house, too.
Lucy: I guess there was an acre there between the house and the barn.
Mary: We had one garden below the house, and then we had one out there between us and where Reverend Jack Beaver lived. Jimmy raised hogs out there, too. Mama and Daddy raised everything we had. Daddy planted corn and sugar cane because they made cane syrup. The cane syrup mill was located on Wolffork just past the house on the rock. The school grew and collected their own cane and then made syrup out of it. Farm Families could use the mill if they wanted to, but Mama and Daddy raised everything we ate.
Lucy: We had to live. I couldn’t work on a job because I had to feed seven of ’em [her children].
Mary: We raised raspberries on the school farm and carried them to the farmers’ market in Dillard to sell. We also raised rhubarb. Daddy would crate it and carry it to Atlanta to sell at the state farmers’ market. Then we would help Jimmy. He was in FFA [Future Farmers of America], and he raised tomatoes and bell peppers, and we helped plant ’em. He raised prizewinning hogs, too. Daddy would buy the bell peppers and tomato plants. They would be wrapped in a little brown paper bag. There would be hundreds of those tomato plants and bell peppers.
Lucy: We sold taters to Miss Louise McKinney, too.
Mary: Yeah, that was for the Dillard Community School to use. Mama was a home person. She stayed at home. She raised us, washed our clothes, fed us, and bathed us. She wudn’t one for going out into the community to work. She was a home person. She worked the garden and canned.
Lucy: I did help Mrs. Vivian Tatum up there in the Clothes Closet [an old chicken house on the school farm that was used to sort and house used clothing donated by community folks for local schoolchildren] and bought my kids’ clothes from there. The girls had beautiful clothes from there. People would give Mrs. Tatum the clothes.
Ann Henslee Moore: Though my family wasn’t a School Farm Family, we could buy ’em for like a dollar apiece. It was full of clothes, and that old chicken house is still standing.
Mary: They was cheap, too.
Lucy: I worked for her, and she would give me clothes for the girls. People would come in there, and then you would see them out dressed so fine, and you’d think they wore thousand-dollar dresses. They’d bought ’em at the Clothes Closet for fifty cents a dress! The money made from sales was for the school.
Mary: It was to help the campus. Dormitory kids shopped there, too. I loved it there, the school and all. They had some good teachers. They were strict, but caring, too. I loved Mr. Billy Joe Stiles. I did.
Lucy: And Mr. Brown.
Mary: Yes, and Mr. Morris Brown, the principal, too, and there was no difference shown in the kids [community or dormitory]. Mr. Stiles would get on to Donnie Anderson [community student] just like he would anybody else. They treated you right. Mr. Brown, you couldn’t ask for a better principal. We were all friends, dormitory and community students, and some of ’em our best friends; they still are. If the boarding students done something that they weren’t supposed to do, they had to go. They didn’t keep ’em. They would send them back to their homes around the country. I can still remember when they brought the first African American student to Rabun Gap–Nacoochee. He played basketball, and we got along with no problems, not a bit.
Lucy: When I was growing up, me and Cecil [her brother and Ann’s dad], I remember the school would come and pick blackberries back up there in the mountains on Kelly’s Creek and carry ’em out in big washtubs. The schoolkids, or the boarders, as they called ’em, would pick the berries. They had to work to go to school there back then like pickin’ those berries and makin’ a garden.
Ann: That’s how the boarding students paid tuition. They had to work just like we did at home. It was a whole community. It was like a big huge family.
Lucy: All of us!
Mary: We really were a big family because we were all friends. We walked to their houses and played with each other. The dorm students were our people, too.
Ann: Andrew Ritchie started the school and the Farm Family Program for the local families because he wanted to help folks like Aunt Lucy and all of the folks in Rabun County. He started it to help the mountain children get an education.
PLATE 118 Lucy on her birthday in 2009, in Alto, Georgia, where she lives with her daughters, Mary and Clara
Lucy: And my grandpa went to school in a little ole house ’cross from the present post office up there at Rabun Gap with Andy Ritchie.
Mary: That was my great-grandpa, Dock Henslee.
Lucy: Yeah, it was a good time. It was a lot of hard work, but it was good having them kids all home. I wouldn’t mind going back either if I was able. It would be nice.
“Raise ’em, feed ’em, and kill ’em.”
~Doris Carpenter and her son Jim Carpenter~
Fred and Doris Carpenter, along with their two girls and two boys, moved to the school farm in 1961. By that time, factories had started production in our county, and many people, including Fred and Doris, worked outside the home at paying jobs. The school allowed them to live on its land and divide any crops grown with the school, providing them with better housing and a better living with which to raise their children.
—Kaye Carver Collins
Doris: We moved there to Rabun Gap–Nacoochee School in 1961. Dorothy is my oldest child, Marie is next, then Jim, then Thurman, and he is the baby. We stayed there seven and one-half years. We was supposed to have been there just five years, so they let us stay overtime because they didn’t have nobody to move in. When they had somebody else to move into the house, they asked us to leave, and we left. While we were livin’ there, I was workin’ at the shirt factory.
Jim: Dad was workin’ at the A.I.D. Corporation for Mr. Leslie. I’ll start with where we lived then. We lived in the house over across the field from the Green Frog Pond. Dad farmed sixteen acres, grew corn, sharecroppin’. That’s the way he paid for livin’ there—he’d get half and the school would get half. He’d make cornmeal out of part of it, used some feedin’ the hogs and cows, and he sold part of it to other people for feed or whatever [laughs]. Some of ’em he sold to, it was probably “whatever” [moonshining]!
Doris: The house I moved into at Rabun Gap was better. It was bigger and in better shape. The one we owned out there in Clayton wasn’t very good. We had runnin’ water at the school farm house. I enjoyed it myself. It was out of town, and I just enjoyed bein’ there.
> Jim: The one we lived in down on Highway 76 didn’t have runnin’ water; we toted water from the branch out beside it to fill up the washin’ machine and do the laundry. Gallon glass jars, candy jars, ’em candy jugs—we used to get them from Gordon Lane’s store. After he’d sell out of candy, he’d give Dad the jugs and we used ’em to carry water. We wadn’t [wasn’t] big enough to carry the five-gallon buckets. Thurman, he fell one time and broke one of ’em and laid [cut] his hand open. Mama grabbed a washcloth and held pressure on it. We had a ’47 Chevrolet, I think, at that time. She put pressure on it, drove that car, and it was a straight shift, to town to the doctor’s office. She drove and held that pressure on there with the other hand.
Doris: I made it to town in five minutes, too!
Jim: They sewed it up, fixed it. That same place, I got cut one day; Mama and Daddy was at work and Grandma, Mother’s mother, was there with us. I was out in the yard and stepped on a piece of glass and sliced my foot open. I went a hobblin’ in the house and told ’em what I’d done. Grandma said, “Yap, you’ve sliced it a little bit,” said, “hold it up behind ya and let me wash the blood off of it.” She come in there with the washrag in one hand and the other hand kind of behind her. I didn’t think nothin’ about it, and I was a-holdin’ that foot up. She come out with a bottle of alcohol and turned that thing upside down and just poured it! You talk about doin’ some hoppin’, one-legged hoppin’! It fixed it! They had a way of curin’ stuff!
The Foxfire 45th Anniversary Book Page 48