The Foxfire 45th Anniversary Book

by Inc. The Foxfire Fund

  Mother never worked outside the home until Daddy was diagnosed with black lung in ’67. Mother started working over at the Rabun Gap Craft Shop as a weaver. That was the first job Mother ever had. That was the year that Jack graduated from high school. Daddy always provided for us the best he could. We didn’t have nothing, but that was all right; nobody else had anything either! They wudn’t but about three people in our class that had over three pair of breeches [pants]. We couldn’t wear breeches except on the days when it got really, really cold [fifteen degrees or below]. Then we had to wear skirts over the top of them. We definitely had to go to school dressed up all the time.

  Every single one of us graduated from high school, and that might not have happened if we hadn’t been able to move here. Mother said, “All of you will graduate from high school no matter what!” Now, Daddy did not graduate from high school, but he was a very intelligent man, very smart. Daddy quit school at the age of fourteen and had to get out and work. Mother did graduate from high school. When she said, “My kids are going to graduate high school,” we knew she meant business. When Mother spoke, you listened! We respected her very, very much! We did not want to disappoint our mama! It was just like smoking; she told us girls, “Ladies do not smoke, and if I catch you with a cigarette in your mouth, I will slap it down your throat!” We never smoked! She wanted to raise ladies, and she did. Every one of us actually married while we were on the school farm, and we all married in five years’ time.

  PLATE 124 “Like everybody else back then, we didn’t have nothing.” Emma and Tommy Chastain with two of their four grandchildren

  Daddy was a very rough man, and he was very much a mountain-type person. In his own way, though, he was very loving and giving. He would give stuff away, just like those bean seeds. He would have never thought that the man he gave them to wouldn’t give them back. When we were growing up, he never did go to church, but he made sure us kids did. He’d put us on the back of that logging truck, and we’d go to church. We went ever’ time the doors were open! While we was at church, he would go to the store in Dillard and buy little cakes or a big old washtub full of drinks. He used to cut everybody’s hair. I’ve still got his hand clippers. He’d cut their hair, and there would be big gaps in it. We couldn’t afford haircuts. Poor old Jack, he had a big knot in the back of his hair, and every time Daddy cut his hair, Jack would have the biggest gap back there!

  I have to tell you about poor little old Myrtle Mason. She was a cook at the high school. We walked home from school with her every afternoon. If there was any leftovers from lunch, they didn’t want to leave the leftovers. She would always bring one of them gallon buckets with whatever she had left over from the school for Raz’s supper, so she wouldn’t have to cook. Us kids would eat ever’ bit of it before she could get home. She would bring home fried chicken and say, “Now, don’t you eat that fried chicken! Raz is gonna have fried chicken tonight. I don’t want to have to cook for him.” We would eat it all! We’d leave Rabun Gap School and walk through the field over next to where Lake Stiles lived. We didn’t walk the road; we walked through the field. She would get on to us for eating that every single day. We never did leave nothing for Raz! Myrtle used to make chocolate gravy. It was the wildest-looking stuff you’ve ever seen in your life, but it was different. It was real good. Some of the mischief we used to get into—you’d really have to talk to my brothers about that [laughing]. I didn’t get into as much as they did! They was the ones that was always into something. Now, Tommy got into some stuff; he used to go to the girls’ dormitory and harass Dr. Karl Anderson!

  Tommy: It’s a wonder they let me graduate!

  Emma: Poor old Morris Brown [principal at Rabun Gap–Nacoochee]. Why, Tommy had a seat in his office with his name on it. Poor little Mrs. Oscar Cook [the school secretary], she couldn’t hear. She’d say, “What are you doing in here for?” Tommy would always tell her some yarn. She’d say, “Just sit down over there; Mr. Brown will be in here in a few minutes.” They would take Mr. Brown’s car; he had a Volkswagen, and they’d take it and turn it around one way, and the next day it would be turned around the other way! They might hide it! They’d pick it up and just tote it around. He was probably standing in the office watching them. We had some good times over there at that school! It was fun! There wasn’t the peer pressure there is today.

  Tommy: We straightened the dorm students out in about the first two weeks of school [laughing]. Some of my best friends was dorm students. My class—there is seven or eight of us that get together every year, and it has been that way since we graduated.

  Emma: We were just as close to some dorm students as we were to our own community students. We all were close. That is just the way it was. There was very few that were snobby, and they were the ones that came from the really rich families. There was some rich families back then, too, but very few. Mostly, we all had a lot of fun. We were starving before we moved here. The way it rains here and all, you don’t log and make no money in the wintertime. We needed a place to come. It was really a blessing for us. We weren’t completely starving, but we didn’t have enough of what we needed. All of us learned work values; Tommy’s family, too. His family had the chicken farm, and if it wasn’t taken care of when Jeff Chastain got home in the afternoon, there was no tomorrow! We learned what it was all about to make a living and how important things are. I am real happy that we were able to do the things we did. Who knows, we might not have been able to get a high school education if we hadn’t moved to Rabun Gap. We have been blessed so much to be able to raise our three children here in Rabun County. Wesley married Rhonda Watts, and they have two boys, Dalton and Cole. Crystal married Stan Baker, and they have two girls, Anna Beth and Bella Grace. Joseph is not married. The Lord is good!

  Cotton Gins and Sawmills

  ~The Jordan Family~

  The stories reflected in the lives of farm families are pretty much the same whether they are told in the mountains of northeast Georgia or in the hills of northwest Georgia and neighboring Alabama. The School Farm Families of Rabun County, Georgia, planted, labored, and reaped the bountiful harvests from the rich soils of the Rabun Gap–Nacoochee School Farm in order to provide food, housing, and an education for their children. Other devoted farm families, like the Jordan family, continue in the family farm tradition today. They have farmed for generations and have experienced the same joy, apprehension, and disappointments that only a farmer can know. Spending the day with the Jordans renewed my sense of appreciation for the modern-day farmer. The equipment has been updated and technology has changed the farming industry, but just like the farmers of past decades, they must depend on faith, nature, and fate to provide for their families in what may become a losing battle. I met the Jordans through their ties to the textile industry in Rabun County. Cotton produced on the Jordan farms was shipped to Rabun Gap and used by Fruit of the Loom, which at one time was one of Rabun County’s largest employers. Jim Nixon, a good friend of Foxfire who was employed there, introduced us to this wonderful family. The mill has now closed, just like textile mills across the South, but the Jordans are true farmers, still loving and clinging to the family farm and the “sometimes good life” it provides.

  —Joyce Green

  Tom Jordan

  My name is Tom Jordan, and I was born in 1919. My great-granddaddy George Washington Jordan and his wife, Emeline, came here and settled on one hundred sixty acres bought for them by her mother and father. They came from Greenville, South Carolina. He married a lady from South Carolina who was filthy rich. There is a creek right here—Cowan Creek—and the Indians were in here. The Jordans brought mules and wagons to South Carolina and had to settle where they were. They made a livin’ with farms. My granddaddy was James Thomas, and his wife’s name was Nobie. That’s what they called her. This land was sorta her gallery when they got married. She had a garden out there, a flower garden. I bet it was a half an acre. She cooked three meals a day, and then she would get out there
with a hoe and dig up dead grass outta that garden; she would even pray in the garden. You could hear her down there by the creek. She would sing about the pains and the heartaches of the world.

  PLATE 125 “Cotton farming was passed down through the family.” Tom and George Jordan, courtesy of the Jordan family

  This land we’re on right now was homesteaded by George Washington Jordan and Emeline. We still have that one hundred and sixty acres of land today. I think they started years ago, using the land for growing cotton. I can remember, in 1928, when we had a steam engine over there in the cotton field. When they came here in 1846, they started using the cotton gin. Cotton farming was passed down through the family.

  The gin workers that would do the ginnin’ come from south Texas. They would get through there before we started here. They weren’t like migrant workers or anything because they’d go back home and have their checks mailed back there. Not many people were required to live on the farm. One time here on the farm in Centre, Alabama, we probably had three thousand acres—not the hundred and sixty acres, but the other land. Most times on a farm we shared as sharecroppers. Sharecropping is a system of agriculture where a landowner allows a sharecropper to use the land in return for a share of the crop produced on the land. Another change in operations was how we accumulated more land. A lot of land we had was for our sawmill. When we got done farmin’ in the fall, we started with the sawmill to make and sell lumber. The crop was so-called laid by. From about the first of July till cotton-pickin’ time, we sawmilled, made lumber, and sold lumber. The people that farmed also worked for us at the sawmillin’ operation. We hauled truckloads of lumber to Rome, Georgia, from Alabama. We made some money; they were paid a dollar a day. You got ten or fifteen dollars for a load of lumber. Today, it would cost you about four or five thousand. We did that for years and years. Many times we would buy the land, cut the timber off of it, keep the land, go buy more land, cut the timber off of it, and keep the land. Our way of life and a major part of our income was the farming and milling. Income didn’t have anything to do with cotton bales or anything like that. We grow the cotton, we gin it, send it to warehouses, and then we send out a bid on who will give us the most for the quantity and quality of cotton we have. That’s how we have the connection with Jim Nixon, because a lot of it was sold to Fruit of the Loom, which was one of the mills in Rabun Gap, Georgia. We’ve had a store here forever, a store and a filling station. We got Standard Oil in 1908. It wasn’t for engines back then; it was for lamps to see by. That was the beauty of it. They called the kerosene lamp oil.

  The price of cotton is a hundred and fifty years old. Cotton is sold in approximately five-hundred-pound bales. There are several thousand bales. Cotton had usually been handpicked until about 1960, the beginning of mechanical cotton pickin’. A few years before, there was probably one or two scattered around. It probably took about fifteen to twenty years to get away from all handpicked to all machine picked. This was just a typical farmland county out here in Cherokee County, Alabama. There were people that lived on the farm and worked a few acres of cotton and corn. The corn was mostly used for livestock feed, and mule power was used to till the soil with. There wasn’t much corn, but they knew it was for the cattle and hogs. A lot of work went into growin’ the corn; the corn was used to feed the horses and mules that pulled the plows to cultivate and till the soil to grow the cotton.

  Jamie Jordan

  I’m Jamie Jordan, and I’m from Coosa, Georgia—River Bend Farm. Actually, my family’s from Centre, Alabama, which is about eight miles from where we live now, down the river. I was born in 1953 at the main headquarters of our farm, which is where my dad and uncle live now; it is also where our cotton gin is. I went to school in Centre, Alabama, and when I was a kid, they didn’t have mechanical cotton pickers. Everybody used to pick cotton by hand back then; everybody from six to eight years old, all the way up, if they were able to pick, they picked. I remember that going on until probably junior high, which would have been about 1963 or so, and that’s when the mechanical pickers came out—slowly it started phasing out the handpicking days.

  Back then, when everybody did the handpickin’ before the mechanical pickers, we used to start school a little early, say the middle of August, and we would go to school for three or four weeks, and then the schools in the county would let out for three weeks. It was called Cotton Pickin’. Really, back then I was so young that I didn’t do a lot; I helped them around the gin a little bit. Probably when I was about twelve or fourteen, mechanical pickers came in, and then at that age I started helping at the cotton gin there on the farm, when I wasn’t in school and when I wasn’t playin’ football or basketball or something. So the older I got, the more responsibility I had.

  When I was in high school, that’s when my dad and uncle started working the land and getting more equipment, and the people working on their farm were down to maybe six or eight. I guess my family was probably working six hundred acres or so. Cotton pickers and tractors were still slow. Thinking back, we thought it was fast, but compared to now, it was real slow and small. The work still took a fair amount of people, but now over the years—I can remember when I was a kid—we started farming with two-row planter, one-row picker. Then it got to be four-row planter, two-row pickers. Then a lot of people went to six, but when I started cotton I went with eight rows, and the first picker I had was a two-row. When I was a senior in high school, I was working a lot, and then, when I finished high school, my dad wanted me to stay and help out on the farm in the summer and in the cotton gin in the fall. So that’s what I would do, and it took me seven years to get through college.

  PLATE 126 “We called it lay-by when we’d lay the crops by, when we got through plowing … about the Fourth of July.” Hardy Naugher and Jamie Jordan

  I finished college here at Berry College in Rome, Georgia. It took me seven years, and I was taking big loads because I wasn’t going but half a year out of a year. So I’d work on the farm for my dad and uncle in the summer, and then we called it lay-by when we’d lay the crops by, when we got through plowing them. Usually, it would be about the Fourth of July.

  Then there would be about three or four of us off the farm go into the gin, and we’d start greasin’ all the grease fittings and adjusting the belts and repairing parts that needed repairin’ from the season before. We’d do that in July, roughly the first of July until about mid-September, and then that’s when the cotton would start coming in, and then we’d start ginnin’. Then we would usually gin, a lot of time depending on how good the crop was, on up until close to Thanksgiving or Christmas. Then I would go back to school after the first of the year. I did that until I finished college, roughly by age twenty-four.

  Berry used to have a major for agriculture, and then people got away from agriculture, so then they didn’t have a major for it. So, during that seven-year period, they came back with a major, and I had a dual major in animal science and science, and I minored in industrial technology. When people around the country ask me where I went to college, I tell ’em, and they say, “We never heard of it; is it a private school?” They say, “Where is it?” I say, “Rome. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of it; it’s the largest campus in the world.” They say, “The largest campus in the world and we haven’t heard of it?” They only had eleven hundred students when I was there, but the size of the campus was thirty-three thousand acres. I think it’s down to twenty-eight thousand acres now. You know, college teaches you about your majors, but it also teaches you how to do research and be persistent and to work hard and not give up. I don’t know, I never really thought about it a lot—about what might have happened if I didn’t go on to college. I know in our area most farmers are in their fifties or up, but very few farmers went to college. Most of them grew up on the farm, and they just usually continued working for their dad. Then, as their dad retires, they just gradually take over and continue farming. Most of them have been successful. Anybody who has stayed in it th
is long has had to be pretty successful, or they wouldn’t have stayed in it because the margin of profits have plummeted down. I don’t care how hard a worker you are, how smart you are, how you learn, what year-to-year signs you look for, when to do this, and when to do that—you can have years like we had this year and, no matter what you do, you can’t prevent a loss. One more year of full-time on the farm and the gin, and I had growing pains, and my dad and uncle didn’t. So I sorta split off. I really asked them, I said, “Will y’all give me the responsibility of either the gin or the farm?” They talked it over, and they said that they really wanted me to stay and help them, but they had it about the size they wanted it. I respect ’em for that, and they didn’t want to get any bigger, so that’s when I broke off and started farming on my own. Even though I continued to work with them, we would swap out work and all. That was 1978, and then in the summer of ’80 I hired my first farmhand, which happens to be sitting across the table from me. [The interview was in the dining room, and his wife, Kelly, was sitting on the opposite side of the table.] That would be the summer I fell in love with her. It was seven years later that we got married; I can’t believe it took us seven. I wanted to make sure she wouldn’t quit on me, I guess. On the farm she would go with me and help me keep the trucks pulled around. Now, as time goes on, she really works a lot more now than back then. Back then she was more or less a companion and a helper and helped me move equipment around; now she actually does a lot of tractor driving in the spring. She picks up chemicals, seed, and parts for us. Y’all don’t get me wrong, she doesn’t go out there every day and sweat and labor and get greasy, like an old farmhand. I know she’s got a lot of responsibility with Jesse, our son, and with her mom and dad and my mom and dad. Kelly probably works three weeks in the spring and three weeks in the fall, driving the tractor for me, and the rest of the year as a housewife and mother.