Living Jackson Magazine :: The Elders of Jackson County

The Elders of Jackson County

Story by Gail Ellen Daly
Photographs by Amanda Brackett

Native Jackson County residents have seen life change over the years. They all recall the old days with fondness, even while recognizing the hardships; their opinions are mixed on whether times are better or worse today. There are many stories out there. The following are just a sampling.

Ralph and Grace Freeman

Cotton was king, trains came through town four times a day and the thriving City of Hoschton boasted three blacksmith shops, two banks, three cotton gins, a lumber company and sawmill and assorted shops.

Born in 1916, 91-year-old Ralph Freeman remembers how it was. Grandson of Russell Angel Hosch, Freeman’s father, one of the town’s six physicians, married Bertha Naomi Hosch. Although he grew up near town—and still lives in the family homeplace on Pendergrass Road—the entire county was agricultural.

“We had a phone before we had electricity,” Ralph recalled. “The Hoschton exchange had two switchboards.”

The doctor mixed his own medicine, so young Ralph and his brother were paid 1-cent apiece for each bottle they washed.

“During the Depression he charged $20 to deliver a baby at home, but he took what he could get,” Freeman said. “By that time Highway 53 was paved; it was paved in 1928.”

At one time, Dr. Freeman had the only car in town. Although still quite young during the 1918 flu epidemic, Ralph knew his father wore out two Buicks making house calls. As he grew older, he often accompanied his father.

Ralph went to school in the old two-story building on West Broad Street, one of the first graded schools in this part of the state. However, he attended high school in Atlanta, and was a mechanical engineering major at Georgia Tech when his father died suddenly at age 53, cutting short his college years.

Ralph came home and began farming. “The government paid us not to grow cotton,” he said. “That was the beginning of the end of most cotton growing (in this part of the state).”

And then he met Grace Evans, who grew up in the Dry Pond community with three sisters.

The homeplace on Hwy. 82 near the Oconee Baptist Church looks much as it did when she was born in 1914. Her father raised cotton, so she helped plow the fields by driving a team of mules behind her father’s team. At harvest time, he hired people to pick the cotton.

She recalls the days before electricity came and carbide lights, rather than kerosene lamps, lit the house.

“It’s gaslight,” Grace explained, “There was a building in back with two big tanks and water dripped onto crystals.” Pipes led to the lighting fixtures from the building.

“In the 1930s the REA (rural electric authority) brought electricity into the county,” Grace recalled.

Young Grace attended the Porterhouse School through sixth grade, and spent her high school years attending Martin Institute in Jefferson.

“When Dad bought a new car he gave me his old one so I could drive to school,” she said. “I learned to drive sitting on Daddy’s lap.”

Without TV, many evenings were spent singing around the piano as her mother played.

“Young people from all around would come over and sing,” Grace said. “During the day we played hopscotch and marbles.”

She recalled swapping eggs from the family’s chickens for candy at the local store. She also noted that yards were dirt; no one planted grass.

“There were no lawnmowers and it kept down any fire danger, so we swept the yards.”

Grace and her sister went to the movies in Jefferson or Commerce. “We had ‘pound suppers’ where everyone would bring a pound of some dish.”

After graduating from high school in 1933, Grace attended Athens Business College, then worked in the county agent’s office where she met Ralph when he came in. They married in 1939.

Ralph farmed and due to the need for agricultural products, he was exempt from service during World War II. He had 10 acres in cotton and 20 acres in corn, plus peaches and watermelons.

How has life changed since the couple was young?

Sitting in the dining room, surrounded by the family’s history, both Ralph and Grace eagerly talked about how it was and how life has changed.

“Highways made a negative change,” Ralph said. “We lost our sense of community—the days when everyone knew everyone else.”

Caroldene and Robert McEver

Much has changed in Talmo since Robert McEver and his brothers were children.

“We had three stores, a doctor and a dentist’s office,” the 81-year-old native recalled. “It was a good place to grow up.”

He remembers a grocery and a dry goods store, but the grocery store burned sometime in the 1950s.

The train came through the small town on its way to or from Athens and Gainesville, giving residents a chance to travel to either larger city.

Caroldene Blackstock, who grew up in Jefferson, would hop on the caboose to visit an aunt in Pendergrass, but paid 10 cents to ride the streetcar to Gainesville.

“It looked like a trolley car and used the railroad tracks,” she said. “Of course the road wasn’t even paved then.”

The couple, who celebrated their 62nd anniversary on Jan. 20, were busy setting up their Christmas tree in a corner of their sun-drenched sun parlor as they reflected on their early years.

Caroldene’s father was a mechanic at Jefferson Motor Company. The family, which included her brother, sister, grandmother and an uncle with polio, lived in a house north of Jefferson until she was 11.

“We rode the bus to school and after school played with the neighbors,” she said.

But after her father died, and her mother did not drive, the family moved to town.

“We lived across from Jefferson School (now the high school) and my mother took in sewing,” she said, “and later she worked in the school lunchroom.”

It was the Depression and there was not much money. “People had a milk cow and chickens in their yard, even in Jefferson,” Caroldene explained. “After the war things turned around.”

In Talmo, Robert recalled, cotton was the big crop, with farmers waiting in line at the cotton gins.

“Then the boll weevil came and reduced the yield of the crops.” He remembers how farmers put arsenic on a mop to kill the boll weevils, “but it didn’t work great and a lot of families moved to Texas (to raise cotton).”

When McEver’s father started a meat packing business, McEver and his brothers carried the meat—mostly hogs and chickens—to Gainesville in a lard can.

“People ate what they raised in those days,” he said. “Families were self-sufficient.”

Later, after the hard times, McEver’s packing plant turned into a highly successful venture. (See Our Towns feature on Talmo, page 44.)

Few people had cars during the Depression “and we ran out of the house if a car came by.”

Talmo did not have electricity until 1935, so light came from kerosene lamps. But there were telephones. “I remember our first phone,” Caroldene said, “we had a bunch of people on the party line.”

Robert sadly noted that the days when everyone knew everyone else are gone; that children often move away.

“And I often wonder how people would cope if something happened today and for some reason families had to become self-sufficient.”

Woodrow Murphy

The oldest of 11 brothers and sisters, Woodrow Murphy’s family was self-sufficient out of necessity.

His father, a sharecropper, went from farm to farm in the Pendergrass area sharing the farm’s profits with the landowner. He never did own any land.

At 92, Woodrow still recalls his family moving and how hard he worked plowing fields when he was 10.

“Cotton was still good then,” he said.

He remembers traveling by mule and wagon as well as using the animals to plow. He also remembers as old Model T Ford that could barely make it up Higgins Hill while the mules had no trouble.

School for young Woodrow was a sometime thing. Not only was he needed for plowing and harvest, in the winter his father would pick him up at recess to help cut down trees and chop wood for the stove.

He never went back to school after eighth grade. But it wasn’t all work. When they had free time Woodrow, his brothers and friends played basketball and baseball.

“I played second base,” he said. “One time I was asked to come to Atlanta and try out for a team.”

He didn’t go. Baseball, however, remained a passion and at age 51 Woodrow was still playing organized ball in an old-timers league.

By 1932, the Murphys had lived on nine different farms in Pendergrass, Talmo, Mountain Creek, Walnut Fork and Fairview communities.

It was the Depression, with little work available off the farm. “Only digging ditches or cutting wood for 50 cents, a day,” Woodrow said.

However, there was the CCC; the Civilian Conservation Corps formed by the government under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Corps would not only give young men a salary, these men would rebuild the country’s infrastructure.

At 17, Woodrow joined the CCC. As a member of the forestry unit in Blue Ridge, he helped build dams and roads, learning to use dynamite.

“We put the dynamite in a hole 14-inches deep to break up rocks,” he explained. “We also worked with heavy equipment.”

He admitted it was dangerous work.

Returning home in 1936, Woodrow began a job with the Gainesville Midland Railroad. A year later, he married Irene Cooper—a neighbor he had known since childhood.

He stayed with the railroad, working on a line crew between Athens and Gainesville, until he retired 40 years later.

He bought his first car—a Chevrolet pickup—for $15 shortly after he got the railroad job. “The man I bought it from hauled chickens in it, so the seats were worn,” Woodrow said.

The former owner of his second Chevrolet pickup ran moonshine and needed something better. That also cost $15.

“In 1939 I only made $1.49 a day,” he said. “When I made $2 I thought I was rich.”

At first, the Murphys and their growing family lived in rental houses up and down the railroad. When the war came he went to enlist, but since he was past 30 and had four children, the Army rejected him.

By saving and banking his salary, Woodrow bought his Pendergrass farm in 1946, moving his family into the four-room farmhouse. Although he didn’t farm, they grew vegetables and fruit and butchered meat.

“We didn’t get electricity out there until 1948,” he recalled.

He still lives on his own land, and several of his children have built homes on the property.

Still tall and erect at 92, Woodrow does not believe he has done anything special. But he loves to talk about the old days and how it was.

Elizabeth Smith

Although farms surrounded her Apple Valley home, young Elizabeth Colquitt did not grow up on a farm.

“My father raised peaches in his orchard,” 81-year-old Elizabeth explained. “Trucks came and took the peaches to the railroad in Commerce where they were shipped to New York.”

Her father hired packers, but the peaches were picked by machine.

“It was hard to get help during the war (World War II),” Elizabeth said.

Eventually, when help was available to run the orchard, her father found work with the Southern Railroad.

“He was a brakeman and rode between Atlanta and Greenville (South Carolina),” she continued. “My mother watched him jump across the top of the train from one car to another—it’s a wonder he didn’t get killed.”

Elizabeth’s mother taught school at the one-room Apple Valley School where young Elizabeth went through sixth grade.

“There were a lot of people my age around here and in the afternoons we played outside,” she said. There was no TV, so in the evenings she and her parents listened to the radio.

“They really liked “Amos and Andy,” Smith recalled. “But we had one of the first televisions when they came out.”

The only paved road in those days was the main road to Commerce and Jefferson.

After sixth grade, she went to school in Commerce for a short time, but transferred to Martin Institute in Jefferson.

“When the school burned down we went to school in either the Methodist or Baptist Church and wrote on a clipboard as there were no desks.”

Although her mother wanted Elizabeth to attend college in Dalonega and become a teacher, she had no intention of leaving home and did not want to be a teacher.

“I took a bus every day to a business college in Athens,” she said. “It was wartime and with rationing, no gas for the cars. The bus was so crowded people were standing.”

Elizabeth worked for a time at Commerce Manufacturing, then at the Delco Plant.

“At one time during the war there was a rumor that women were going to be drafted,” she said, seriously. “I was really scared about that.”

Elizabeth met husband Quillian through a cousin just after the war. They married in 1947 and lived with her parents until they built their own brick ranch house on family land on South Apple Valley Road, not far from the homeplace.

Quillian died in 1997, but she still lives in her house with her dog Buddy for company.

Elizabeth grew up in a large house at the corner of South Apple Valley Road and Commerce Road—a house Smith fondly recalls. She also sadly recalls the night it burned down.

“I was renting the house and one night there was a bad storm,” Elizabeth recalled. “She was scared to be alone in that big house, she came here to spend the night.”

Apparently lightening struck the old house; it caught on fire and was a total loss.

“Times were different when I was growing up,” she said, “I think they are better now.”