Posts by MaryCarol

ROPIN’ A SOW
by
Mary Bursell Maupin

It was late February and the sun was shining brightly after 18 straight days of rain. The dirt pile from the leach line our son and his hired hands had dug was a pile of mud three feet high. The ditch, thirty seven feet long, still had muddy water at least six inches deep.

    But no matter, the day was warm and I could hang clothes on the line and air out the house. The hired hands came, knowing our son would have to be away most of the day and were hard at work doing what he had laid out for them to do.

    I was hanging the last load of clothes on the line when I  caught a glimpse of a sow running toward the front yard and as I turned I saw Neal, one of the hired hands running after her trying to turn her before she got to the road.  


    Neal was a college student majoring in Police Science at the near by University. He looked more like a basketball player with his six foot six inch frame and muscles like a prize fighter. This was the first farm job he had ever had being raised in a big city, but he was willing to learn.

    At the end of the yard, observing the barrier standing before her, the sow stopped and turned back toward the house.  Coming up the driveway she saw the garage door open and started towards it.  But seeing all the stuff inside, she made a choice of going in a different direction around the house.

    In the mean time, Max, the other hired hand, came running towards me with our son’s lariat whirling over his head.

    Startled at the sight, I asked him what he was going to do with the rope.  He yelled back over his shoulder, “I’m gonna’ rope a sow.” I then asked him where was my Australian Shepherd. He said,  “She’s guarding the other two sows at the gate of the pig barn.”

    Max was the grandson of one of our neighbors, just recently discharged from the Marine Corps.  He was about five foot nine also with a muscular build.  The two hands looked like Mutt and Jeff standing side by side.

    He met the sow at the corner of the garage where  the ditch had been dug. The sow was in the middle of the mud pile wiggling herself across while she pushed into the soggy mess with her hind feet. When she finally ejected herself from the mud pile she carried a lot of the mud with her. As if it were just another day, she headed straight for my garden that had been plowed before it started raining.

    I yelled at them to let her walk and try to keep her next to the fence and she would find her way back to the gate on her own.
    But having a mind of her own, she wandered off the fence and towards the cow lot.  There was a little elevation in the ground along that strip of land where all the machinery was parked. Tractors, combines. planters, etc. All that was between us and the barns and she was headed that way. Just as she got even with the machinery, my dog Queenie came bounding through the middle of it and right towards the sow. The sow took off towards the cow lot with Queenie right behind her and all three of us calling Queenie to stop.  Finally Queenie did stop but the sow kept going at a high rate of speed.  She hit the corral fence of four strands of barbed wire and two strands of electrical. I saw the Charger throw off sparks when the wires were severed.   She didn’t stop until he bumped against the wall of the barn on the other side of the corral. It was if the sow didn’t see it coming.  She staggered a bit before   getting her balance.

    By this time all three of us were at the hole she made in the fence. Neal said he would get her if Max let him have the lariat. Max and I stood at the hole in the fence while Neal plowed through the soggy muck of the corral  to stand up next to the hay barn where it was a bit dryer.

    The sow was a little nervous and began pacing around the cow lot in a circle. Several times she came close to Neal but each time she shied away just as he was about to throw the rope over her head. None of us had made any noise and the sow became calmer and slowed her pace around the corral. On about the fifth of sixth try Neal had his chance and slipped the noose over her head.  Neal didn’t realize that her neck and head were almost the same size and when she felt the rope hit her neck, she whipped around 180 degrees and bolted    for the other end of the corral. He had the rope coiled around his hands so it wouldn’t slip off and when that three hundred fifty pound  sow hit the end of the rope, two hundred twenty pound Neal flew off his feet and landed in the middle of the mushy stuff in the corral.  A six foot six inch frame drug a lot of mushy stuff across the corral when the sow stopped.

    Max and I couldn’t help him up because we didn’t want to get it on us too and we couldn’t laugh either. So we let him find his own way to a standing position. When he was up right he saw the little gate that he could let the sow out into her own back yard. In the mean time, Max went to open the gate where the other two were still being guarded by my dog Queenie.

     After the episode was over and the pigs were in their barn, Neal and Max were hosing off at the hose bib that was used to flush out the pig barn.

    I heard Neal ask Max,”Doesn’t this water get any warmer? I’m freezing.”

    Max replied with a snicker in his voice,”The pigs don’t object when I spray them.  Why should you?  I’m not letting you ride home in my car smelling like a pig sty.”
—————

A Tale of “White Lightnin” in Weakley County

A tale of “White Lightnin'” in Weakley County
Happenings in and around Austin Springs – Submitted by Mary Bursell Maupin
(As told to her by Ola Maupin, Lillie Westmoreland, Maud Vincent and verified by Jack Maupin)

**Reprinted with permission from the Journal of the Jackson Purchase Historical Society, Vol. XXX, July 2003, pp. 115-119.

Weakley County, Tennessee ’s Austin Springs was a bustling little community in the early 1900s.  Fount Gibson and C.C. McClain owned one of the two general mercantile stores.  The brothers Chap and Clyde Johnson owned the other.  Austin Springs also had a blacksmith shop, a gristmill and a sawmill that employed many of the residents of the community.

Austin Springs also had a three-story hotel that hosted guests from Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati and people from as far away as Philadelphia who came to take advantage of the mineral baths and drink the sparkling water promoted by the hotel.  Miss Lottie Summers was the first switchboard operator at the hotel to take reservations over new long distance lines connecting the health resort to Kentucky ’s main switching system.  Wes Maupin and Leslie Westmoreland often hitched the hotel’s team and drove a surrey into Fulton to pick up guests from the Illinois Central Railroad depot.

Miss Hattie, Fount’s Gibson’s wife, made several trips to St. Louis during the year to purchase dress materials and millinery for the ladies of the community.  Miss Hattie would often ask the ladies whether there was any particular item they desired from St. Louis .  Sometimes she would take with her a sketch of a hat or a pattern for a dress one of the women would ask her to look for.  Often the McClain girls would ask for a certain piece of dress material or a sophisticated hat their mother could bring back from her buying trip.  They were never disappointed in her selections.

Gibson and McClain or the Johnsons sold almost everything that any farmer or his family would need all year.  A big pot-bellied stove sat in the middle of the store to warm the customers while they waited to have their shipping lists filled.

But I have not named all of the businesses in and around the little community of Austin Springs.

Many evening, just at dusk, little streams of smoke could be seen filtering through sycamore and cypress treetops.  It was smoke form the cash crop those who made it call “white lightnin’.”  These ”corn squeezin’s” sold by the keg or the mason jar.  Most area grocers knew who operated stills by the volume of sugar the bootlegger bought.  Home brew could hardly be distilled without the sugar it took to ferment the corn.  To rid themselves of incriminating residues, moonshiners fed hogs the leftover mash.  After indulging themselves, the hogs would squeal and carry on and sidle back to the trough for seconds and thirds.

Bootleg whiskey-making wasn’t a profession talked about in the open.  Strangers dared not ask too many questions and certainly not the directions to one of these “smokestacks.”  Most whiskey-making folks by custom shied away from strangers, fearing revenuers.  It was said that if a revenuer ever found one of the stills, he would never make it back alive.  A few of the older children sometimes made their spending money by keeping a “look-out” for revenuers.  Some were paid as much as ten cents a day for sitting atop a house or barn looking for any alien vehicle or stranger riding horseback down the dusty road.  

But three of the McClain sisters wouldn’t protect their husband’s family business.  Maud, the oldest, married Rube Vincent and live upon the hill east of the family homestead, where she and her sisters had grown up.  Lillie, the third daughter, married Leslie Westmoreland, whose father owned a sawmill in the area.  Leslie learned his trade as a teamster and logger from his father.  Ola McClain, youngest of the three sisters and the twin of Ollie, married Wesley Maupin on Sprout’s Levy.  At age seventeen, Wes turned teamster and logger, too.  Often he and Leslie worked together for their father-in-law, snaking logs out of the swamp with an ox team.  Wesley and Leslie each lived with his family in a two-room house near the edge of the swamp running parallel to Powell Creek.

Early one June morning Maud came to visit these two younger sisters.  The three always had a good time together, laughing at stories each told about different characters in the family.  Lilly and Ola were standing on either side of the iron wash pot out in the yard that morning.  Each was doing family laundry.  They had boiled the first batch of clothes and were hanging their wash on the line.  When Maud walked up, the sisters gave her a hug, and then all three started talking at the same time.  Somehow in their conversation, the unpleasant subject of whisky came up.  All three women were violently opposed to any kind of liquor and especially overindulgence by some members of their large extended family.

            “We oughta break up ever’ still in this county!”  Lillie bent over to chunk another stick under the wash pot.
            Ola didn’t want this sensitive subject dropped:  “Well,” she said, “if ya’ll will help me, we’ll get the ax and put a end to all this foolishness.”
            “How could just the three of us do such a thing, Oler?” Maud asked.
            “I’ll show you.  Come on, Lil.  We’ll get the axes from the shed.”
            When Ola and Lillie got to the lean-to, Lillie grabbed the ax nearest the door and Ola called to Maud:
            “There’s only two axes here, Maud.  What tool you gonna take?”
            “I reckon that there hoe leanin’ ag’in the tree,” Maud decided.
            Lillie banked the fire under the wash pot, and the three sisters tramped off towards the woods and an opening between oak trees.  They soon stepped along heavy planks of timber laid down for a walkway through the swamp.  The woods were dark, the odors musty.  No one said a word until they reached the high ground where the still was hid.

Finding the site, the women were astonished at the length of the worm’s copper tubing and all of the other whiskey makin’s.  Mash barrels were covered by a cap that had formed over the corn, sugar and yeast while it was fermenting.  But the copper kettle sat cold.  It had been a whiles since a fire had been lit under it.  Copper tubing wormed its way from the cooker to the condenser sitting in the creek.  Many moonshiners called this a “thump keg” because it had to be smacked regularly to make the very hot steam flowing through copper condense into “firewater.”  A short copper pipe curved from the condenser into a huge crockery jug stationed to catch the whiskey dripping from the pipe.  When this container was full, the alcohol was poured into a five or ten-gallon charcoal-lined keg, sealed and then set aside, ready for sale.

Many such kegs were stacked along the tree line.  Others sat empty, their insides burned to a dark char.  These were ready to receive another cook-off of pure “White lightnin’.”  Sometimes late at night, wagons or big trucks would pull up to one of the family farmhouses.  The farmer would light his lantern and lead the drivers to the edge of the woods.  Just about sun-up, the wagon or truckbed with a heavy tarp tied over it headed for other parts of the county or state.

“Lordy me, Oler!” Maud cried.  “Do you think anybody’ll catch us?  This may take a mite longer than we can stay away from the house.” “We’re gonna do what we can today, Maud.  You can take that hoe if you want to and pull the sawdust away from the kegs, and me and Lillie’ll lay our axes to them barrels.  Let’s get started, an’ if’n you have to say someth’, whisper.  You never know who’s in these woods.”

The sisters began to lay waste to the family still and its whiskey makin’s.  Two hours later they raised their hands triumphantly and pronounced the job well done.  Copper tubing lay scattered in foot-length pieces.  The big copper cooker sat cockeyed looking over charcoal kegs with dents knocked all the way around the size of cooking pots.  Fresh spring water flowed over the smashed condense.  Hundred-gallon barrels of mash lay with bungholes smashed.  Broken staves stuck out of the sawdust like fence posts, their hoops twisted like licorice twist.  Spilled alcohol trickled through sawdust, finding its way down the hill finally and into the swamp.  Kegs scattered here and there lay crushed and emptied of clear whiskey.  It would be a long time before the moon would shine on this whiskey still.

On their way back through the woods, smelling like the sour mash they had destroyed, the sisters Maud, Lillie and Ola agreed they would never tell a living soul who could have wreaked such havoc.  The three knew the unspoken law.  At least now, their husbands wouldn’t maim or kill revenuers trying to break up the family cash crop.  The truth about who broke up this busthead business wasn’t supposed to be revealed until the last still-buster died.

Somebody must have talked.

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Sundown ‘Possum
(As told to the author by Ola Maupin, Lillie Westmoreland, Maud Vincent and reiterated by Jack Maupin.)

by
Mary Bursell Maupin

**Reprinted with permission from the Journal of the Jackson Purchase Historical Society, Vol. IXXX, July 2002, pp. 28-29.
On cold winter mornings, the older men of the Austin Springs, Tennessee community hovered around the pot-bellied stove at Johnson Brothers’ General Store.  Depending on who had a radio, they would often discuss current news.  Most it was bad, as these were the days of the Great Depression.  However, while it ranged throughout the United States, the Austin Springs area did not suffer nearly as badly as other parts did.  Even though farm prices had hit rock bottom, there was still food in most of the pantries.  Neighbors helped neighbors.  At hog killing time, neighbors would show up at a farmer’s house and help him butcher enough hogs to feed his family for a year.  The next cold day, they would arrive at another farmer’s house and do the same thing over again until all the families had enough meat for the winter.

For a change in the diet, some of the men took to the woods and hunted rabbits or squirrels in the daytime when they were not working.  Those who had dogs, and most did, hunted opossums and raccoons at night after a long day at the saw mill or driving a wagon load of timber to the mill.

Wes Maupin had a couple of ‘possum hounds.  Every night after supper, he and his wife’s twin brother Ollie McClain, who lived across the field, would pick up the lanterns, reach for the rifles and head for the woods, following the dogs. Game was plentiful, and it wasn’t long before the dogs had picked up the scent of a raccoon or opossum.  Next morning, on their way to the mill with a load of logs, Wes and Ollie would stop at Johnson’s Store to get warm and related the events of the previous night.

One such morning, Corbett Rickman, who lived on the hill between the McClain farm and Wes Maupin’s house, said that he and his wife hadn’t had “a ‘possum in quite a spell.”  He asked the young men if they would bring him one.  He would fix a place for it near the chicken coop.

They both agreed to bring him one on the next hunt. The next night Wes’ dogs treed an opossum that weighed about eight pound.  Ollie punched it out of a tree while Wes held his dogs.  They didn’t want the dogs to kill it before Corbett had a chance to feed it out and eat it.  After it landed on the ground, Ollie put it in the tow sack he was carrying just for that purpose.  They headed for the Rickman house.  Finding the lights out, they put it in the pen which Corbett had said he would fix for it, and each went his separate way home.  They felt it had been a good night’s work.

The next morning Corbett was delighted about the eight pounder and told everyone at the store how big it was and how he and his wife were going to eat it one of these days as soon as he had fed it out.

During the next several weeks, he and his wife fed it morning and night.  They took the scraps from the table and all the clabbered milk they could spare.  They figured it would be ready to eat in about two weeks, and Corbett could hardly wait.

A few nights later, Wes’s dogs treed another opossum.  However, this one was not quite as big as the one they had caught before.  Ollie punched him out while Wes held the dogs.  By nine o’clock, the boys were shaking out of their tow sack the opossum they had just caught.  It replaced the cone in Corbett’s pen.

This exchange of critters went on for over a week.  Always the one exchanged was a littler smaller than the one they took from the pen.  During this time the boys didn’t go near the store, even though they would have liked getting warm and visiting with friends.  They were uncertain whether Corbett might confront them about they hunts they were going on.

Over two weeks had passed before that chilly morning Wes and Ollie climbed down off the top of their lumber wagon and sauntered into Johnson’s Store.  They could face any rage Corbett might discharge on them that cold morning.

Surveying the room, they spied Corbett leaning back on two legs of his favorite cane-bottom chair.  Upon seeing Wes and Ollie, he let the chair down on all fours and exchanged pleasantries as the two men crowded in around the stove, shaking hands and greeting everyone.  After all, it had been over two weeks since Wes and Ollie had seen their friends at the store.

After a while it was time for Wes and Ollie to get the loaded lumber wagon on down the road toward the mill.  They pushed back their chairs and bid all good day. But as they started for the door, Ollie turned toward Corbett Rickman and asked, “Corbett, guess you and the Missus is about ready for the ’possum and sweet taters, ain’t ya’?”

Corbett replied, Ya’ know fellers.  That’s thar’s the durndest thing.  The more we fed that critter the littler he got.  This morning he weren’t no bigger than my hand so I set him loose.”
 

Today if you drive through Dresden you will find the city’s water tower over by the old Bay Bee Shoe Company factory site, but the old timers will remember the older water tower that once stood across the tracks from the Dresden train station.  As a youth I lived a short distance from the station and the old tower.

I ran with many of the boys in the neighborhood. We would play touch football, ‘cowboys and indians’, and ‘steal the bacon’. One afternoon, we got around to playing a new game, a game we called ‘I dare you’.  David and Bill (last names withheld to protect the guilty in this story) were a little older than me and as I recall not a couple of the guy I normally ran with. Oh, I don’t mean I never hung with these guys, as I said, they just were a couple of years older and as the kids today would say, they were not my homeboys. The three of us lived pretty close to the depot and on this particular day we found ourselves riding our bikes down Depot Street past the depot and near the base of the water tower. I am not sure which of my two friends made mention that he had already climbed to the top of the old tower and dared me to do the same, but I stand on the fact that one of them dared me.

I was an adventurous 9-year old and I figured that climbing up to the walkway might just be a very cool thing to do; and besides, I had never seen the city of Dresden from the height of 200’ …so off I went.

I grabbed onto the ladder on one of the legs of the tower and before I knew it I was on the walkway skirting the belly of the tank and was taking in a view extraordinaire! I could look up and down the railroad track toward Martin looking north and toward Gleason to the south. I could see Dresden Elementary and the old high school and past the schools I could see the square and the courthouse. Looking back toward Cedar Street I could even see my house and my Father’s veterinarian clinic.

As I recall I was a pudgy, awkward child, a fact that would be borne out over the next couple of years. Between the ages of 9-15, I went on to break both collarbones, my wrist, my ankle; I cut a deep gash in my arm with one of my Granddaddy’s carpenter tools, I stuck my finger in the blade of a table saw, and as a glorious finale; I caught my foot in a rear bicycle sprocket and cut off my heel while being doubled on a bike driven by my sister. A kid with a track record like that really had no business climbing to the top of ladders and water towers.

But, let me get back to my story. I had been atop the tower a few minutes admiring the vistas before me. I was so entrenched in the view I had paid no attention the swelling number of people gathering near the base of the tower. When I did finally looked down, of a sudden it seemed that I had become the star of my own one-boy aerial performance. There I was on stage some 200 feet in the air and I was gathering a number of folks in my audience as the moments ticked away. I am not sure who all was in the crowd but I can assume they were the locals from the area establishments plus some other that happened by. There was Mr. Capps and Charlie Woods both of whom had a grocery along Depot Street. Sam Butts the station agent came out of the depot. Mr. Jack Jolly and some of the others who worked at the stockyard would surely have poked their heads out of the office door to see the hullabaloo as well.

Some 30 years later I would meet some of the old timers on the square and time after time they would comment to me that they remembered the day I climbed the water tower. I am not sure how many of them were actually there and how many just heard the story second hand. Nonetheless, there was a pretty good crowd awaiting me when I did come down.

My youngest sister Jennifer was born in October 1959. This story takes place in late August or the first weeks of September of that year so you can do the math to see where I am coming from when I relate the next part of this saga. The one person I did not see franticly running through the crowd was my 8 1/2-month pregnant mother. Some one on the ground must have made a call to her and since we only lived about one and a half blocks from the water tower she had gotten to the scene pretty quickly. By the time I spotted her, she had grabbed the bottom rungs of the tower ladder and she along with my soon to be born little sister were climbing upward toward me.

Even at a young age I realized that a very pregnant woman has no business climbing a ladder toward her wayward son. Mother had made her way up about twenty feet before I called to her and told her to stop her ascent. I told her to reverse her course and that I was very capable of getting down on my own. I made my way down to the safety of the ground and the drama ended.

And my two friends … gone by the time I hit terra firma. Loyalty wanes somewhat when you are 12 and some kid has just climbed to the heights of danger on a dare you had made.

I do not remember this part, but years later when my mother would recount the story, she says that she marched me home and as soon as I entered the house I slipped on a loose rug and fell to the floor. As memory does not serve, I will have to defer to Mother’s version for that part of the story.

I sometimes wonder how some of us Baby Boomers made it to adulthood.

Our mothers smoked and dank while they were pregnant with us. Medicine bottles did not have safety caps, our cars did not have seatbelts, and we rode all over town in heaven forbid, the back of a pickup truck. All the boys carried pocketknives and still we have all ten fingers. We drank from creeks and did not die from dysentery. We did not need a policeman on hand in our schools and we were never afraid to run the streets. We did not have cell phones to check in with our mothers every 15 minutes but somehow they knew we were safe. We went out to play in the mornings and as long as we made it home for supper or sundown depending on which came first, we were OK.

I guess it was a different world then.

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Life in and around Greenfield, Tennessee

Blondie

Characters of Greenfield

Bicycles & Strawberries

D. Aaron

Dead Stick Landing

Dr. Nitro

Firecrackers & a Flashlight

Flying Solo

Grease on the Bacon

Hiccups & Miss Nanny Campbell

Hypnotism at Greenfield High School

Leon

No More Wild West

Protests & Listerine

Republicans & Democrats

Rowlett & her Rhythm Rascals

Roy Whicker

Silent John

Stealin’ Watermelons & the ole Swimmin’ Hole

Termite Nelson

Tom Grooms’ Pasture

Joe Stout

A Little about the Marksmanship of Ulus Holt

By John Holt

It seems that Ulus Holt was acclaimed the best marksman with a .22 cal. Rifle that ever existed in southern Weakley County.  It all began when he was 12 years old, picking cotton and saving for a hunting gun.  His very first gun was a single-shot .28 gauge, muzzle loader.  He bought most of his powder and shot from Pope’s Store and Overton’s Store.  Eventually he swapped the old muzzle loading shotgun for a Stephens .22 cal. Rifle and began to hunt every day with it.  He hunted every season, even as he fished, he hunted.

Holt began to burn out a new .22 rifle every year because he had shot it so much with the black powder ammunition used back then.  It was always easy for him to sell his old rifle, since most people thought good marksmanship was not only in the individual, but in the rifle itself.  The thought was, “if it will kill game for Holt, it will kill game for me.”  He tried them all, Stephens, Mossberg, Marlin, Winchester, Remington – You name it, Holt had burned one out.  He killed birds on the wing, bursted coins and pocket knives thrown in the air with a .22 Rifle.  He lined sights on almost every .22 rifle in and around the area of Greenfield.

Ulus was one of the best quail hunters in the entire community.  His speed and proficiency with a 12 gauge shotgun was unexcelled.  Holt, was often asked if he ever quail hunted with his .22.  This was the story he told: “It was a drizzly afternoon and I had been hunting when my dog pointed a covey of birds on a little rise.  I never would shoot a .22 on the level, unless I knew the terrain in that direction.  The dog was eager and so was I, so I decided to take a chance that the birds would fly more to the wooded area, therefore the bullets would be imbedded in trees and not harm anyone.  Sure enough, the birds flew as expected and I shot three times and saw three birds fall….. Then I heard a fellow yell out in the same direction that I had been shooting, my heart stopped beating for a moment.  It was Talma and Lyndell Mitchell cutting firewood.  I rushed to them and saw that they were not shot, but only shaken from the incident.  Never again did I shoot quail with my .22 rifle.”

During the summer months he would sit outside in the shade and shoot blue jays flying across the field to teach his bird dogs to retrieve them.  Holt always had a good dog and sometimes trained bird dogs for other people.Once he had a black and tan hound that he had trained from a pup.  He named him “Buck”.  Buck seemed to know what to hunt since he squirrel, rabbit, bird hunted with him during the day then ‘possum and ‘coon hunted him at night.  Once Dr. L.E. Taylor and his son Bill came to go hunting with dad and Taylor Dinwiddie on opening day.  Dinwiddie and “Ole Bob”, an extra large liver spotted pointer had already walked across the fields to our house in the Holt’s community.  Dr. Taylor and Bill arrived, unloaded their fine dogs and paid their respects to Mom and myself.  Dad, asked if it would be alright for Buck to tag along since he didn’t have a breaded bird dog. They were hesitant at first, but Holt finally convinced them that Buck would not be a nuisance.  As they left the house, Buck was given the command to heel and that he did.  The weather was delightful as the excitement began in a little pea patch not far from where Florence and Lacey Galey lived.  The dogs pointed there, as the Taylors and Dinwiddie aligned themselves for the covey shoot.  Holt and Buck stood back well out of the way as the birds soared into the air and shots were fired.  After the dead birds were retrieved they made their way to the grass field to hunt “singles”.  Holt had not fired a shot at this point and the Taylors were such good friends of Holt, may have thought they had offended him by hurting his feelings, because of the hound dog.  After working the “singles”  in the grass field they moved down the bank of Cane Creek.  As they hunted the creek bank with no success and moved on off, Holt and Buck followed along behind.  Buck was pointing the “singles” that the bird dogs had missed and Holt was killing them.  The Taylors and Dinwiddie stood on the hillside and watched Buck retrieve the dead and point more singles.  Dad stopped to tie his boot laces before returning to his friends and D. Taylor said “I’ve never seen a Hound Bird Dog before”.  I have on file a letter written to dad by Dr. L.E. Taylor after the hunt where Dr. Taylor sent Dad, a new pair of shoe laces and complimented him on his fine Hound Bird Dog.

I have heard my Dad say the very best shot he ever made happened at Crawley’s Store one Saturday afternoon.  Jack Cantrell came up to Holt and asked if he had his rifle with him.  Holt went to his car, a 1932 Chevrolet coupe, and returned with his Remington model 12 pump rifle that he was so proficient with.  Cantrell said, “I hear you can hit my knife flying through the air with your rifle.”  Holt said, “I have been lucky enough at times to do such things.  He handed his new knife, just bought at E.N.J. Brock Hardware a few hours earlier that day and said “do it.” and pitched the knife in the air and shot, doing no harm to the knife.  Cantrell laughed and said, “I knew it wasn’t true, nobody is that good a shot.”   As Holt stood with the rifle cradled in his arms facing Cantrell, he said, “You wouldn’t want to throw it (the knife) in the air and take the chance on me hitting it, would you?”  At that instant Cantrell with all his might, threw the knife over Holt’s left shoulder and into the big oak tree that stood in front of Crawley’s Store.  Holt spun around and fired, not even seeing the knife in the tree leaves, but at the crack of the gun he heard the knife disintegrate in the branches of that old oak tree. Cantrell, swore profusely and said I just paid over $2.00 for that knife.

Another interesting story happened at Galey’s Store, at Flytown, one Saturday afternoon, when the Remington Ammunition man arrived in an old Ford model A.  It was a nice sunny day as most of the men were sitting out on the front porch and in the shed on the south side of the store building.  The little short, red headed, pot bellied man removed himself from the car, put on his shooting jacket, reaching in the back floorboard of the model A filling his pocket with huge pecans from a large tote bag, then pulled out a new Remington automatic .22 cal. Rifle.  He pitched this huge pecan in the air and as it stopped rising to start falling, it came to a perfect stop and he smashed it to smitherines with his trusty .22.  He performed this act a half-dozen times without missing a single pecan. Several of us kids were gathered around mostly to see if there was something free.  He said, “how’s that for shooting?”  And Ellis Smith said, “that ain’t nothing, Mr. Ulus Holt can beat that.”  But the Remington man had a reply, he said, “You know everywhere I shoot there is always someone that can beat me, but they never produce this marksman.”   Then someone said, “Well, he’s sitting up there on the porch.”  Edgar Galey, a life-long friend of Holt saw an opportunity for a practical joke.  Galey was the best at pulling practical jokes on people.  He walked up to the Remington man and introduced himself as the store owner and asked if there was someway he could help. Well, the Remington man said, these here kids say that there is a man up on the porch that can out shoot me.  Galey replied, “don’t pay and ‘tention to what they say, Holt couldn’t shoot through the hall of a barn”, and then had to laugh. Galey said, “let me give you a little advice, if you can get Holt to shoot with you, and I doubt if you can ’cause he likes to blow off about what he can do….sometimes he’s pretty good, but easily rattled.”  And with those words Galey returned to the store as the Remington man walked up to the porch and challenged Holt to a shooting match.  Holt sent me to the car to get the old Remington, protected by a homemade canvas pouch.  He removed the rifle from the pouch and I returned the pouch to the car as directed.

The Remington man and Holt exchanged introductions and he complimented my dad on having a good brand of rifle.  The Remington man stood out front of his Model A and began to pitch the huge pecans in the air, bursting them one after the other with his company’s new semi-automatic.  This went on for some time, then the Remington man stood there almost out of breath and said “it’s your turn!”  Clyde Smith was now standing in front of Dad with a pouch of glass marbles in a bright yellow bag as he slit the corner off with his sharp pocket knife and poured the marbles in Dad’s hand.  There was 12 of them for a dime, and since Dad didn’t have any pecans, he used these marbles
for his targets.  The Remington man stood patiently and inquisitive as Dad loaded the magazine of the old Remington pump with 16 cheap short cartridges, then took ten of the marbles in his left hand and threw them all in the air with one giant motion and bursted nine in the air as fast as he could work the pump gun.  He caught the tenth marble in his left hand and thumped it back in the air and holding the rifle with one hand like shooting a pistol he bursted that marble.  The Remington man, amazed and embarrassed, said,”My God…..Mr. Holt, I have never seen anything like it.”

I only saw my dad, repeat that performance once since then, with rocks rather than marbles.  He had picked up certain rocks all day while walking down a gravel road and late that afternoon when we were on the Shades Bridge levy, he bombarded those rocks without missing any.  Dad, told me the trick of that performance was to pick the marble that would fall in his hand and burst all the others.  However, when I was a kid I had seen him practice that performance for time on end.

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Down Home Country Stories, of Days gone by – to feed your Southern Roots Soul

This section under construction

Stories by MaryCarol

• The Old BUTTER DISH – Amazing – 150 yr life of this butter dish. Used, abused, thrown away, found and treasured.

Stories by John Holt

• The MARKMANSHIP of Ulus Holt – Guns, guns, guns and Marksmanship

Stories by Terry Coats

• Growing up in DRESDEN – On the Ole NC&St. Louis Railway
• A DISTANT GRAVE – A story of bravery and courage as told by the ghost of Sgt. William Thomas
• The day I climbed the DRESDEN WATER TOWER – A boyhood tale from Dresden, 1959
• Photo of Terry Coats

Stories by Mary Bursell Maupin

• In the Hills above Austin Springs, Weakley County, TN
• YEARS AGO
• SUNDOWN ‘POSSUM
• WHITE LIGHTNIN
• ROPIN’ a SOW
• Reelfoot Lake POEM

Stories by Lloyd Foster

• Son of a Tennessee sharecropper….
• The EARLY YEARS
• Joe Drewry teaches me to SHOOT my RIFLE
• Finding OLD FRIENDS from Greenfield

Stories by pj Lamb

• Old time ways on the farm….
• HOG KILLING TIME
• WOOD STOVES & Old Time RECIPES
• LAYING of a CORPSE
• The PAULA and PATSY SAGA
• Ms Jennie and Ms Allie FEED pj

22 Stories by Joe Stout

• Life in and around Greenfield, Tennessee
• CLICK HERE to see all of Joe’s stories

46 Stories by Jeannie Travis

• Folksy tales, life on the farm
• CLICK HERE to see all of Jeannie’s stories – a work in progress

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The Story of my 150 year old Butter Dish

This is the story about the life of a butter dish. Used, abused, thrown away, found and treasured. by MaryCarol

This old pressed glass butter dish is thought to be about 150 years old, belonging to the Drewry family of Southampton Co., Virginia who moved to Nashville, Tennessee in 1799. They lived there for 24 years, then in 1823, they moved to Henry Co., Tennessee. This was the year that many of the western Tennessee counties were formed from hunting lands of the Chickasaw Nation, which they ceded in 1818. In 1824 the Drewry families settled in the newly formed Gibson, Co., Tennessee.

The Patriarch, Richard Drewry, Rev War Soldier, bought over 700 acres of land backing up to the South Fork of the Obion River from Adam Huntsman, the peg legged Attorney who later beat out Davy Crockett for political office and Davy left for Texas and the Alamo. Back during those times, they all were neighbors and friends. The Crockett family lived in Weakley Co., TN and the Drewry family in Gibson. But in 1836, there was a land swap to make it easier to take care of business so neither county folk had to cross the South Fork of the Obion River to get to their courthouse. From 1836 on, the Crockett’s land was in Gibson, County and the Drewry’s land was in Weakley, County. Seven more generations have been born on that land.  

Pressed glass period was from 1850-1910. This butter dish would have had a prominent spot on the family dining table. At some point in time, I guess one of the woman folk decided she didn’t want the butter dish, as it had a small chip. It was thrown out into the trash pit. Many years went by, more and more land was claimed for farming. Eventually riding tractors were used to plow the fields.

One day, while plowing on his tractor, the light caught something shiny in the dirt. When the farmer checked it out, he found it to be the bottom of the butter dish. He kept it. A few years later, plowing his field again, he unearthed the top which was in perfect condition. Now he had both pieces. Eventually the butter dish was given to Cousin Wylodean. She kept the butter dish as a keepsake of earlier Drewry women kinfolk. When I first met her in 1983, she wanted me to have something that had been in the Drewry family. She went in a back room, brought out something wrapped up in a cloth. As she was unwrapping it, she asked me if I would like to have this old butter dish. “Oh, my!, yes, please”! I fell instantly in love with it. Today, the butter dish sits on my table, reminding me of my Drewry women kinfolk. They had to churn the butter, I just have to buy it.

Because of the high dome lid, you can put a lot of butter in it, which is handy during the holidays. My Grandmother taught me, as long as you eat it within 10 days, butter will not go bad if you leave it covered, out on the table. Never lasts 10 days at our house. And who doesn’t prefer soft butter over cold hard butter? Submitted by MaryCarol

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