But anyway, I went two years there at the junior college, and then I was able to teach. If you were a community student, you could just tell them that you wanted to attend the college. We were on semesters, and we only had to pay thirty-nine dollars per each semester. With other fees, it came out to about ninety-nine dollars for the two semesters, and that was a lot of money back then. I worked during the summer and saved the money. One summer I worked for our neighbor. His wife was sick, and they wanted me to work down there and help her. I worked all that summer, seven days a week. I had to cook, wash dishes, clean, sweep, and work some in the garden, and can food, but I didn’t have to do the wash. They had somebody else to do it, but I had to iron all the clothes and everything else. On Sunday morning, they went to the Methodist church at Dillard, and I got to go home. But I had to get up, cook breakfast, and clean up the kitchen before I left. They ate out for Sunday lunch, so I got to stay at home Sunday night, but I had to get up early enough to go to their house, which was about a mile, and cook breakfast for them on Monday morning. On Sunday when I left, they paid me two dollars and fifty cents for seven days of work. I saved it for college. I helped buy my books and, back then, we couldn’t go to the store and buy ready-made clothes. I bought material, and my mother was a good seamstress. She could take a catalog, look at a dress, sit down, and cut the dress out and sew it. She and I together made all of my dresses. I bought the material, and we made them on an ole treadle sewing machine.
My oldest sister was a schoolteacher, and she helped me, too. She told me, “Now, I’m going to help you all I can so that you can get your two years of college, then you will help our brother, who was younger than me, go to school.” When I finished junior college, I taught school and helped my youngest brother.
Kaye Carver Collins: So in the seventh grade, Morris, you had already made up your mind that you were going to quit when you turned sixteen, and then you decided, when you got to Rabun County, that you were going to be in the medical field. What happened?
Morris: I think I knew I wasn’t going to quit because now I came to a school that I could go in, in the morning, and start school. It was a whole different situation. There were no fights. Nobody hounded anybody. We just come in and went to school, had fun, and hey, I didn’t want to leave that. I think that was the biggest thing. It was just the whole atmosphere. In Gastonia, you had to be in a certain clique. Your mama and daddy had to be bringing in some big bucks. If you chose to participate in something, whether you got to participate was based on what your mama and daddy made. I never saw that at Rabun Gap. It was not how much your mama and daddy could pay to get you into this or that. It wasn’t like that.
There was no difference between community students and dorm students at Rabun Gap–Nacoochee. I guess my class, I graduated in 1962, was one of the closest classes because it didn’t make any difference whether you were community or a dorm student. Let’s say some of the dorm students had more money than we did in our family—that didn’t mean they [the students] had more. They wore blue jeans just like we did.
Marjorie: And the dorm students had to work on the farm along with the other boys.
Morris: They had specific work crews for them to work on. The dorm students were assigned to a work crew. Then somebody like Farmer Jones, he had the dairy over there at the school, was in charge of those boys. Then they had the field crew. They would go out and maybe hoe strawberries and then pick them when they were in season. Then you had the trash team. They went around to all the dorms and all the buildings, picked up the trash, and then carried it out to the dump. There was a certain area out there on the farm that was designated for that. Then they’d meet on a Saturday, go out there, and burn all the trash, so there was no difference in us because we all had to work.
I remember one time, Doc Phillips got his arm hung in a corn picker, and it crushed his arm. He had a son, Clyde, who was in my class, and Betty and an older boy, John, who was in the service. He had a lot of problems with that arm, but there was six weeks there that Doc couldn’t milk. There was our dairy farm, Jay Bird Dills had one, the school had one, and Doc’s. Each milking time, morning or night, one person went from each farm to help milk. We’d go over and help Clyde milk, and we did this until his dad could come back to work and that was about two months. He was so grateful. Doc was so grateful that we came to help him, and all he could say was “Fellas, you just don’t know how much I appreciate this. If there’s anything that I can do, you call me.” It was one of those situations where he could not wait to get back to work. I look at today and there are people out there, if they got hurt like that, they’d never work again, but he didn’t do that. He just could not wait to get back to where he was able to work. He appreciated people going and helping him. He would say, “I might not be able to go and do anything, but I can talk to you.” To me that was just great. It was great to be able to do something to help somebody and know that he appreciated it. He didn’t want to be in that situation and, as soon as he could get out of it, he wanted to go back to work full-time. Everybody worked together and helped each other out. This was the Christian thing to do. You looked out for your neighbor and friends, and they looked out for you. If you had extra produce from the garden, you shared with the other Farm Families.
Marjorie: We always got a big box of stuff—just different kinds of things given to us at Christmas.
Morris: I remember that. I guess the one big thing that I remember was our times at Christmas. You didn’t expect a whole lot at Christmas. Kids today would laugh at what we expected. What did I expect? I knew what we’d have. We’d have coconut cake, a chocolate cake, and a couple of different kinds of pies, especially pumpkin and apple. Mama makes those old-fashioned, stacked pumpkin pies, and she still does it today.
I know that there’s one thing that I probably never even told Mama that I really appreciated. There’s one thing that I knew I would always get—a long-sleeved shirt. They wasn’t the ones that you went to town and bought. She could get scraps of cloth from Clayburne Manufacturing, and sometimes there would be pieces in there that would make two or three shirts. Well, if it did, Gary got one, I got one, and Daddy got one. They were the flannel shirts, long sleeves for the wintertime. Mama would sew those while we were in school so we never saw them until Christmas; then we got our shirts. I have to say I looked forward to seeing them. I think today that that’s neater than anything. The fact that she could make ’em and keep ’em hid, and we never found them; never saw them. But I do remember the Christmases with the Farm Families all gathered together.
Marjorie: And, at that time, there was about fifteen Farm Families living there, I think.
Morris: Yeah, they had the dairy farms, the corn crops, and the hog farms where they raised and sold hogs and, of course, that provided meat for the school. Some of the families there were the Grover Webb family and Lester Cody’s family. He was in my class in school.
Let me tell you this: On the first day of school, I went in and they introduced me and my brother to Dennis Spruell and Lester Cody. Well, me and Dennis have kept in touch all of these years. Dennis was married twice and, during his second marriage, they had two children, Denise and Andy. Denise got married in March, and we went to her wedding. Me and Darlene [my wife] are Denise and Andy’s godparents. They come to our house on a regular basis. I talked to him this week. I mean, it is just something. For the first five years, we had sort of lost touch because he went into school and then into service. Of course I went to school. We came back for our five-year reunion, and he was there. I met up with him, and we got started talking, and we’ve just kept in touch ever since. He calls me and I call him. His kids call and say, “Hey, Uncle Mo. How are you doing?” I say, “I’m doing fine.”
They say, “We just thought we’d call and check on ya and make sure you were doing okay.” Friendships like that are not unheard of for Rabun Gap. It would be in most schools, but not here. If you are back to any of the reunions, you see these from Mama’
s class on down.
Work, worship, and study—lessons we learned at Rabun Gap got us through the hard times in our lives. We knew we were blessed with what we received. I can say that with the hard work of my family, I never went to bed hungry at night—not even one night. Education prepared us to choose and succeed with a career. That prepared us for the future. I hope that I can pass these lessons in life on to my children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren:
Be thankful for the many blessings God grants you, serve the Lord, and strive to advance his Kingdom.
Be alert to the needs of your fellow man and strive to help him achieve his accomplishments.
Live every day that others will see Jesus Christ through you and your actions and reactions to life.
“It was really a blessing for us.”
~Tommy and Emma Chastain~
Tommy Chastain’s family lived on the school farm about a year and a half, raising corn “on the halves” with the school. Emma and her family moved to Rabun Gap from Waynesville, North Carolina. Her father traveled for work, and according to Emma, they lived “all over everywhere, in Arizona, California, and different places.” Emma’s dad finally settled in Rabun County, and they, too, became part of the RGNS Farm Family Program. Emma and Tommy met and fell in love while attending Rabun Gap–Nacoochee School.
—Kaye Carver Collins
Emma: The Chastains actually lived over next to the rock quarry when Tommy was little. They lived so close to the quarry that rocks would actually come through the roof of their house. Boulders would come through the house where they lived. Claude Kelly was so scared for them to stay in the house any longer that he found them a school farm house. Tommy’s daddy worked at the rock quarry. When they moved to the school farm, he worked at Dillard Builders’ Supply and sharecropped. Tommy’s mama stayed home a short period of time when her children were small. She worked at the shirt factory for years and years and years. She worked there before Highway 441 was built.
Tommy: We bought a tractor in 1953. We were living where the rock crusher was then, about where the shop is now. We moved from the quarry in late ’55 or early ’56. We farmed and sharecropped with the school. I can’t remember if it was a year and a half or two years that we stayed there. We put in one crop there, I know. Then we bought the Keener place. I am sure that being a part of the school farm helped my family some. We was used to working! We had chickens when we lived on Kelly’s Creek. We had about four or five thousand. When we moved to the Keener place, we built a house in ’58 that would hold ten thousand chickens. Daddy growed chickens for T. F. Vinson. On the school farm, we didn’t have chickens; we just grew corn.
PLATE 123 Tommy with his father’s tractor, still stored in his barn just off the RGNS campus
Well, I don’t know if I was old enough to work, but I got involved in it! I was five or six years old. Age didn’t matter back then. There was no corn pickers [machinery that picks corn]. The only corn pickers you had was your two hands. There was no front-end loaders, so we had to shovel to clean the chicken houses out. I was just big enough to get into something when we lived on Kelly’s Creek. When we got over here on the school farm, I was big enough to work.
Emma: We moved here in ’59 and lived on the school farm from ’59 to ’70. We moved from North Carolina. Daddy found out about the school farm. We were very, very poor. Like everybody else back then, we didn’t have nothing. He found out that you could come live on the school farm and work and be able to raise your kids and educate us there, too. Joe, Jack, and myself are the only three that went to school at Rabun Gap. I was the youngest, and I was in the sixth grade. I was about eleven.
Daddy logged with horses and mules. He had his mules or horses so well trained that he would actually take the boys to the woods. They would hook the mule to the log, and it would take it down. They would unhook the log, and the mule would go right back up to where Daddy was working. We used those horses to plow with, too—all fifteen acres. We lived up right across the mountain here, up where they have their water facility. The house is gone now. A hog farm was down below us. Raz and Myrtle Mason lived on the hog farm, and we were in the house above them. I don’t know who lived in that house before we did. Since then, that house caught on fire and burnt after we moved from there. When we lived over there, law, we did peppers, cabbage, onions, beans, a lot of different things. At that time, we were toward the end of the School Farm Program; we paid rent and we did not have to divide our stuff. The school farm was phasing out, and they would rent out some of the houses. Some of the school farm people were still there, but anybody new that came in, like us, paid rent. Of course, before we came to the school, some of the houses we lived in, they didn’t have running water and didn’t have bathrooms. The water was just a-runnin’ from a spigot there all the time. The school farm house had just one bathroom, and it was a small little thing. I don’t think they was even a tub in there, just a shower.
Leroy Carpenter used to come to the house. He was from Scaly Mountain. He used to come ’cause he was a friend of Joe’s. Leroy made this little thing that looked like your finger and your thumb [stuck out like your index finger and your thumb]. He would put his thumb on that thing and push it down in the ground and plant pepper like you would not believe, or plant onions. It made an indention and was just long enough to put the root down in the ground. Leroy probably still has it. They’d get on their hands and knees and crawl through that field. They had them rows of pepper plants or whatever planted in just no time flat! We planted everything you could possibly plow over in there. We did onions one year—that was a sight! We had to wash the onions and wrap five or six onions in a rubber band. We had to take the dirt off of them with running water. Lord! We did that for days and days. We just did edible corn; we didn’t have farm animals. Daddy would take it to the farmers’ market and sell it.
One year Daddy decided that he would rent all the ground behind where the Rabun Gap Post Office is now. It was a five-acre tract. Now, this is before they bottomed out the creek and got out all that silt and stuff out. It flooded ever’ single year. He decided that we would take that field and plant it full of tomatoes. We planted tomatoes and strung them up. We had a tomato crop like you would not believe. They were about ready to take to market—five acres of tomatoes. It started raining and that creek went up, and it went up, and it went up. We had big old thirty-gallon barrels that we used to spray them by hand. The next morning when we got up, we rode by it in the old logging truck; Daddy logged on the side in the wintertime. He got all of us in the truck to drive down here and see the tomato patch. It was completely underwater! Them big barrels were floating! We lost the whole entire crop of tomatoes after we had worked and worked and worked. He didn’t lease that piece of property from the school anymore! That one season got him!
We paid thirty-five dollars a month rent. That was a lot of money back then! Other places to rent was about the same. After they had to move, they lived in the sawmill houses [a row of workers’ houses near the old sawmill north of Mountain City, Georgia], and they were thirty-five dollars a month also, but at Rabun Gap we also got all the land up around the house to farm. We probably farmed at least fifteen acres. It was a very interesting experience. Earl got married first; he was the oldest. He married Shelby Jean Browning, who was Benny Browning’s daughter. They had the Browning Sisters; they sang and were a very popular group. Shelby Jean played the piano for the Browning Sisters. Earl met her through Carolyn. Carolyn and her were in the same class. When they got married, there was a little tiny red house out beside our big house; it was just one room. Mother and Daddy fixed that up for them. They didn’t have a stove to cook or a bathroom or anything, but they were just as happy as they could be. They had just a little living area and bed, all in just one room. That way they didn’t have to actually live in the house with us. After that, Carolyn married Phillip Roberson. We all got married just right in a line, and then Joe got married. He married Laura Chastain the first time. He
is married to Wanda Ledford now. Jack married Lou Ledford, and then I married Tommy. Every one of us got married in a five-year span. We are ten years apart. Mother had all of us in that ten years. Jack is the only one who has passed away.
After I graduated from high school in 1970, the school wouldn’t even let you rent from them. That’s when my folks moved to the sawmill house. There was still a few people on the school farm. We were there, the Lanichs were there, the Carpenters, the Arrowoods, and the Jenkinses were still there. Lake Stiles was still there. The Burdens lived in the house where they now have the Alumni House. Seems like Pope Bass lived on the “rock.” We had a little tiny post office over there. At that time most of them was paying rent.
There is one thing I have kept through the years, and this is very important to me. Every year we would plant greasy-back cornfield bean seed. That bean seed was Daddy’s bean seed that we brought from Waynesville, North Carolina, over to here. We have given bean seeds to everybody—I don’t know how many people in Rabun County. I have kept the bean seed all these years. There were no greasy-back beans in the county until Daddy came. One time I lost the seed, and this is what I had to do to get my seed back: We gave a man seed who was one of our neighbors. We lost our seed because what you have to do is let it dry. If you don’t let it dry good, it will mold, and it won’t come back up. Apparently that year, we didn’t let it dry enough. We had give this man some seed. We never charged for the seed. We always just give it away. I went back to this man and said, “I have lost my seed.” He said, “Well, that is tough!” He said, “I’ve got ’em, and I’m not givin’ you none!” I said, “Okay, one way or another, I will get me some seed!” This particular man brought some of his beans to Darnell’s Grocery Store in Dillard, Georgia. Hubert and Butch would buy local produce. I am sure the good Lord just sent me over there to the store that morning. Here come in two bushels of the greasy-back cornfield beans. I said, “Hubert, can I pour those beans out and get the yellow ones out of it?” I said, “I’ll pay you for them. I have got to have them yellow beans.” He said, “Emma, what are you gonna do with the yellow beans?” I said, “I’ve lost my bean seed, and I can get my seed back if you will let me get them yellow beans out of there.” He said, “You just go right back there and pour them out on the floor and do whatever you want to with them beans.” So I got back there and got me some paper bags. I poured them two bushels of beans out on the floor and picked out every yellow bean I could find. I brought them up to the counter, and I paid for them yellow bean seeds. I brought them home, and we dried them bean seeds, and we kept our beans! If I had not been in the store that particular morning, I would have lost them seeds forever. Those beans came from that man that would not let me have the seed. He brought two bushel in there that morning and sold them to Hubert. I got ’em back! I was determined to get my beans back! The Lord has blessed us, and we have never lost our seed again. That is one thing I have still got that belongs to the family.
The Foxfire 45th Anniversary Book Page 51