PIONEER DAYS IN EAST BOLIVAR

 

By EVELYN HAMMETT

 

 

 

 

The odds and ends of reminiscences which follow are not intended to represent an exhaustive treatment of any subject. They were gleaned from interviews with these early citizens of East Bolivar County: Mr. and Mrs. R. L. Beevers,1 Mrs. George Rains,2 Mrs. Sparkman3, Mrs. Mary H. Janoush4, Mrs. Dellie Tillman Gresham5, and Mrs. Frank Thomason6. It is hoped that they may give some detail on how the people lived, especially detail as seen by a woman.

 

Work

 

The mere physical work of keeping alive and clearing the woods challenged all the energies of both men and women. Mrs. Beevers' opinion of her first sight of the country, as a bride of seventeen, is typical, "I thought I had come to the jumping off place." Mr. Beevers says of the wilderness, "A good worker could cut one-fourth of an acre a day in the tall cane brakes." He seems to have been the nineteenth century counterpart of our modern cotton picking champions, for he recalls, "Once I needed some cash urgently, I made it by picking four hundred pounds of cotton a day for two weeks, at seventy-five cents a hundred."

 

When the Beevers family came, they report, there were few Negroes in the section. For the first year of their residence, therefore, they had a young white man in their home to help with farm labor. Dr. Meek brought in the first Negroes as farm workers-six families. "A howl went up," says Mr. Beevers. "The white settlers did not want them."

 

Mrs. Rains also reports that her family was usually augmented by three of four white boys who were "the help" as "there were no Negroes at the time."

 

Mrs. Sparkman brought a servant, part Indian, from Winona. She recalls that there were some white servants in Cleveland and that sometimes white women did washing for pay.

 

Woman's work was indeed never done. Mrs. Beevers at one time milked eighteen cows every day and often milked as many as twelve a day. Much of this milk went to feed the hogs, which furnished most of the meat, fresh or salted and dried.

 

      In, this home, butter was preserved. The mother worked out all the moisture, put the remaining butter into clean cloth bags and weighed them down in strong brine. She would then work sweet milk into the butter when it was to be used.

 

 1 Data on Mr. and Mrs. Beevers will be found elsewhere in this volume.

 

 2 Mrs. Rains, born Seals, came from Hinds County with her family at the age of three, settled at Walnut Grove on the edge of Coahoma County. At eight, she moved to Bolivar County, to a place four miles west of Alligator Lake. She married first Mr. Lockman, then George Rains.

 

 3 Mrs. Sparkman came to Cleveland by train in February, 1886, as the wife of Dr. Sparkman. after the couple had lived six months in Leake County.

 

4Mrs. Janoush came to the Wall place near Skene in 1897 from Iowa, having lived in Minnesota and Dakota. Her family bought land from the railroad, uncleared, at six dollars per acre.

 

5 Mrs. Gresham is the daughter of Alex Morgan, who is reputed to have given the name "Pea Vine" to the railroad. She came from Alabama in 1895.

           

 6 Mrs. Thomason, born Hattie Staple at Six Mile Lake came to Merigold before the first train went through. She married in 1885.                                                                       

 


 

 

Every season brought its duties. According to Mrs. Rains, this was their yearly program: Make the crop in the spring, gather it in the fall, pick cotton till Christmas or even spring, go to school in summer.

 

Mrs. Thomason recalls the making of hominy in great quantities in wash pots. Ashes were sifted into a pot of corn, and the whole was boiled. The corn was then taken out and washed twice; then it was put back to "finish," that is, to become tender. At her childhood home also milk was kept in cellars dug in the ground-with shelves around and a movable top1.

 

Mrs. Janoush speaks of cleansing water with lye. The process was simple. Water was pumped into a barrel, lye was poured in, and the mixture was allowed to settle.

 

Houses must have satisfied only the most modest ambition for comfort. It is typical that, as Mrs. Beevers says, the windows had wooden shutters since there were few glass panes in the section. Most houses had chimneys of mud worked up with grass to give body.

 

The first cow of Mrs. Beevers' herd was the gift of Mr. Pearman. He had said to the young bridegroom, "If I like Molly, I'll give her a cow." He sent for her to come for inspection and spend a night with the family. She got the cow. Other presents were a dozen chickens from Mr. Beevers' father and a hog from Mr. Starkey Taylor. She also had the comparative luxury of a stove and kerosene lamps.

 

Mrs. Rains' memory furnishes details of how her mother, for her family of twelve, cooked on a fireplace, washed, and ironed. Team work was the rule. Mrs. Rains, for example, at the age of seven, stood on a soap box to increase her height and ironed two nights a week till 10 o'clock, only to be up and picking cotton all the next day. She had begun her cotton picking earlier, for she had gone to the field at the age of three, with a bag, made from an indigo sack, that would hold three pounds.

 

All her family, she says, helped to string beans on threads for drying and to spread and turn the okra, which was dried on planks. Popcorn they tied in bundles and hung behind the kitchen stove (after they got a stove).

 

     Her mother kept the household cleanly dressed by primitive but effective methods. Clothes, including very dirty and stained work clothes, were first soaked in warm suds in a half-barrel made into a tub - to loosen the dirt. Then they were lifted to a battling block, I resembling a butcher's block, and pounded with a batler, a wooden stick. Warm water was constantly poured on them, and very little dirt was left. Such as remained was scrubbed away by a washboard in a tub of suds. Fabrics, of course, had to be sturdy to withstand this treatment. Lye soap was made both in liquid form and in hard squares; an "indigo sack" was used for bluing purposes.

 

 

  1 Mrs. Thomason also recalls as " child watching a horsepower gin operated by a treadmill. It was on Sunflower River.

 

 

 

Amusement

 

 

     Amusement? There was not time for much, but life ha_ some play. Friends gathered on Sunday afternoons around Mrs. Beevers' organ to sing such sentimental favorites as "Whisper Softly, Mother's Dying," "Put my Little Shoes Away," and "I Stood on the Bridge at Midnight." Mrs. Beevers found time for embroidery, crochet, and innumerable patch-work quilts. She also delighted in flowers and shrubs. The huge box hedges now in her yard grew from roots brought from her home in Tennessee and planted in 1887 or 1888.

 

     Mrs. Rains' recollection is that amusement, such as it was, was self-made, never artificially stimulated. When, as a child, she had to "mind the gap," she kept herself from being bored by performing on a corn-stalk fiddle. Children also made popguns and wind instruments from cane. A gallop through the woods on a good horse was refreshing recreation. The older children would ride (eight or ten miles to dance all night by a guitar or fiddle played by a Negro at the home of their friends. They would feast at midnight, go home about dawn, and work in the fields all next day. Sometimes amusements were made to be useful. Mrs. Rains, for example, at seven, pieced a quilt from the unfaded back widths of ladies' four-breadth skirts' and lined it with the tails of men's hickory shirts. It never wore out.

 

Mrs. Janoush reports enjoying an occasional Fourth of July fish fry on the river with a barbecue in Cleveland in 1898 to stimulate enlistment for the war with Spain.

 

Mrs. Sparkman was more sophisticated. "We had an embroidery club," she says, "and entertained by turns. Later we played Five Hundred." They also went "away" to circuses.

 

Mrs. Johnnie Davis of Cleveland chuckles over a recollection of the first King's Daughters meeting in Cleveland, which was at the home of Mrs. Sparkman and to which she was invited as a young bride. Mrs. Sparkman owned a very talented parrot, who occupied a small porch as his domain. So many guests arrived that every chair was brought out, even the straight-backed chair from Polly's porch. This was the one occupied by the bride-who had never seen or heard a parrot. As the meeting progressed, she was mystified to hear a raucous voice repeating, "Where is it? Where is it? WHERE IS IT?" Then in strutted the parrot, every feather bristling with rage. He made his way from guest to guest, finally reached his chair, shouted "Here it is," leaped up behind the bride, and made circumstances so unpleasant that she was forced to vacate, and the hostess had to send out and borrow a chair.

 

 

Education

 

 For formal education, opportunities seem to have been almost nil. Mrs. Rains reports that when she was twelve years old, a school was established, "centrally located," though it was four miles from her home in the settlement on Alligator Lake. She, however, knew how to read and spell before she started this formal training, having had a blue-backed speller and a McGuffey's Reader of her own. This school "kept" three months in summer and was directed by a teacher who boarded from house to house with patrons. During the overflow, children went to school in a dug-out, with a smudge-pot burning at the stern and bow to keep away the buffalo gnats. When the water receded, the second state was worse than the first, for then they had to walk through the tenacious mud. Mrs. Rains remembers that once in the mud her shoe sole pulled from the upper; consequently, she was barefoot for the rest of the year. (The heavy, coarse leather shoes with a gusset in each side, high tops, and brass-reinforced toes, were bought only once a year for each child).

 

 For lunch, the school children had baskets nicely divided into compartments, the result of "ordering off." Within these were always pieces of fried chicken, home-cured ham, or sausage, baked sweet potatoes, cake or pie, or buttered biscuit to go with an ever-present bottle of molasses. They kept bottles of milk cool in a boxed-in spring on the school ground. At recesses they hunted pecans on an island but were afraid of the wild hogs which also wanted the nuts.

 

       Mrs. Beevers, though she came to the county as a bride and did not attend school here, reports a four-month school held at a church where the old Cleveland Cemetery now is.

 

      Outside of formal schooling, children got what they could from the meager bookshelves at home. Mrs. Rains recalls that the first newspaper she saw was the Louisville Courier Journal. Someone rode four miles to the post office twice a week after the boat had made its landing on Tuesday and Friday.

 

  Mr. Beevers as a young man "carried the mail," making a weekly two-day trip to Carson's Landing. Previously all mail for Jones' Bayou had been put in a box at Concordia and whoever happened to be passing brought it back.

 

     "Few books" is the lament of Mrs. Beevers. She brought a few treasured volumes from Tennessee, and the family had a Bible and an almanac. They took the weekly Atlanta Constitution and admired the editorship of Henry W. Grady.

 

      Mrs. Janoush recalls that her family took a Chicago newspaper for awhile. Mrs. Thomason says, "We never saw a newspaper. Sometimes with our groceries from Rosedale would come a bundle of old Commercial Appeals.

 

Religion

 

Actual church services were real events. Mrs. Rains remembers that, when she was twelve, a minister came to their community once a month for two services. Members went in mule-drawn wagons and had dinner on the grounds.

 

 Mrs. Beevers, in riding skirt and on a sidesaddle, attended church services once a month in Cleveland. Progress in riding was muleback, horseback, wagon, buggy. (Mrs. Coleman and Mr. Boss Beevers eventually acquired a surrey each).

 

      Mrs. Sparkman was impressed with the religious unity which the comparative isolation promoted. Methodists and Baptists alternated their service in the same church building, though the women's societies of the two denominations functioned separately.

 

Mrs. Janoush, a Roman Catholic, gives an account of early Baptist and Methodist services held alternately at the schoolhouse in Skene. On special days in the religious calendar, or whenever circumstances permitted, she and her family boarded the Pea Vine and went to the Catholic Church in Greenville. Later they were ministered to by a priest from Shelby.

 

Insects

 

 Insects presented an insistent and annoying problem. Buffalo gnats, for example, were savage enough to kill a mule. Mrs. Rains tells of protecting mules by a tight roll of woolen rags fastened under the hames and gradually burning with thick smoke.

 

 Screens were unknown, though Mrs. Sparkman remembers that her mother in Winona effectively screened her windows with mosquito netting. Bars were used on beds; "very hot" is the universal verdict concerning them.

 

 Flies were frequently combated by a punkah, a device suspended over the dining table, which could be pulled by a string and thus at least keep the flies in motion by a rhythmic fanning. Failing that, there might be a long cane with newspaper strips stitched on, gently swayed by hand. Mrs. Sparkman grows reminiscent about a machine that was set on the dinner table. It was wound up like a clock and had a miniature windmill on the side. "But," she says, "it didn't disturb the flies; they rode around on it."

 

      Though Bolivar suffered in the great yellow fever epidemic of 1878, the natives successfully escaped the disease in the epidemics of the early part of the twentieth century. Trains were not allowed to stop at Cleveland in times of such danger. Mrs. Gresham relates that she and her husband had been back to their old home in Alabama while the county was quarantined. They slipped off the train several stations away, hid out in the woods several days, and made their way circuitously to their home in the Skene neighborhood. Their consciences were clear, since they knew they had not been near the fever.

Animals

 

 Before the wilderness began to blossom as the rose, the original denizens, the wild animals, were both blessing and bane. They were blessing in that they furnished both food and sport. Many shared Mrs. Thomason's opinion that "Bear makes good roast and hash." She adds that bear grease, which does not harden, makes good shortening for biscuit. She could not eat coon, however, until a young boy advised her to try the forelegs and ribs with pepper sauce. "Possums," she says, "were skinned off with ashes and scraped like a hog, and looked pretty when dressed."

 

      Hunting was both sport and necessity. "Kill and divide" was the rule. One "Red" Taylor, uncle of Starkey Taylor, with his twenty-five hounds was the most assiduous Nimrod.

 

At the Sears home, Messrs. Bob Bobo, Felix Payne, Sam Dunn, and others with about seventy-five dogs would gather for a week of bear hunting. Sometimes the kill would be eight in a day. Choice cuts were roasted and eaten, the rest boiled in huge outdoor pots for the dogs. Hunting brought its hazards. Once during a hunt one of the boys with a bear at bay shot a gun which failed to fire. While the dogs held off the bear, he cut a big cane and sharpened it. At first he aimed poorly and struck the bear's side, breaking at once both the bear's rib and the cane. While dogs and wounded bear fought, he resharpened the cane and thrust again-this time at the bear's heart-fatally. Mrs. Rains is the authority for this tale.

 

 Animals were natural trespassers in what had been their paradise. Mrs. Rains' recollection is that at Walnut Grove they could not have a corn crop for several years on account of the bears. The corn was pulled by the bears, carried by them as they walked on their hind legs, thrown over the fence, picked up, and carried to a certain spot - always the same - and eaten. At the end of the season the heap of ears would be as big as a cotton house. Farmers trapped a few bears and watched many nights from a scaffold erected in the fields, but they could never catch the canny marauders. Bear cubs, says Mrs. Rains, cried with a sound like that of a crying Negro baby, and a bear track in mud was hardly distinguishable from that of a grown Negro.

 

      Bears were a constant threat to hogs. Mrs. Rains remembers that one day at noon she heard a vehement squealing from the hogs that rested under the black locust bushes about seventy-five yards from the house. A bear had caught a 150-pound hog. The bear, seated on its hunkers," held a hog under its left arm, secured by a firm grip of the jaws at the back of the neck, and was pommeling him with a strong right paw. One of the boys shot. The bear staggered away on its hind feet and grasped the wound in its side with its paw. The second shot, aimed at its mouth, finished off the bear. The hog went to the house, where he was treated with a salve of elder bark and leaves and put into a pen with a good wallowing hole. He recovered and made good pork that winter.

 

     Bears were not the only enemies of the swine. Mrs. Gresham relates that she saw five wolves killing and eating a hog, about 1897.

 

     Though Mrs. Rains tells many good stories, the following is her best, as she gives it:

 

After the 1882 overflow the cane had been swept into drifts. On these drifts my brother and I stood to pick blackberries. We heard a rattle.

Brother kicked at the snake; the snake struck and barely grazed his shin. We started for home, but Brother gave out. Iran home and gave the alarm.

The other brothers ran to him and carried him to the house, where they laid him on the porch. Mother split down the back of a three-pound live

chicken and placed  the warm, bleeding flesh of one half on the wound. The chicken's flesh turned green and the eyes popped out of the head.

The other half was used likewise and turned green and yellow. After an emetic, the boy vomited green matter. Plasters of lard and salt were applied. The boy recovered.

 

Even the friendly animals were sometimes a problem. When the Sparkmans got their first automobile (many years, of course, after the preceding story), they did not use it at night since it had no lights. Once, however, being belated, Dr. and Mrs. Sparkman and a friend were caught on the road. Mrs. Sparkman and the friend took turns walking ahead of the car and shooing out of the road the many cows that were contentedly sleeping on it. Needless to say, this was in the summer. In winter, even the streets in Cleveland, innocent of gravel, were so muddy that they could not be traversed by wagon.

 

      Obviously life was real and earnest for early Bolivar Countians.

 

 

 

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