UNCA Special Collections ; The Sandy Mush Chronicles Oral History Collection OH-SMC D83 M3

Mabel Duckett

Mabel Duckett

Interview with Mabel Duckett Leicester (Sandy Mush), N.C. Conducted by Stephen Cain Tuesday, Aug. 4, 1998

(Tape 1, Side A)

Cain: Interview with Miss Mabel Duckett, 2 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 4, 1998. How many scrap books do you have now?

Duckett: Forty some.

Cain: And they all have to do with Sandy Mush or what?

Duckett: Anything there and around, Leicester and Sandy Mush.

Cain: And you started doing that when?

Duckett: When I was in third grade.

Cain: Wow! Why?

Duckett: I don't know. I just liked to keep things that I knew about.

Cain: And it's pretty well organized now?

Duckett: I hope.

Cain: And people give you things then?

Duckett: Yeah. I get clippings from all around.

Cain: So you really are the memory of Sandy Much?

Duckett: I try to keep everything. I started that Sandy Mush book of clippings I believe in '89, and about 90 percent of it is newcomers. Us locals calls 'em newcomers.

Cain: Do you ever cease being a newcomer or are you always a foreigner?

Duckett: (laugh) I guess you'd finally get settled in as a local.

Cain: But it takes a while, a few years.

Duckett: Yes it does.

Cain: I spent my childhood in Tennessee but mostly lived in Michigan. I guess I'm a Yankee. People would call me that. Some people are city folks. Some are country folks. Are you a mountain person?

Duckett: Me? Sure I am.

Cain: Something to be proud of?

Duckett: Right! There's a little girl going to N.C. State that was raised in this next house, and she said she was so thankful that she was raised in the country. She said there wasn't nothing to learn in the city, and you can think of that real deep, and it is. They don't know a thing about farm life, where their food and stuff comes from.

Cain: But does that also have to do with the values of the people, the things that are important to people?

Duckett: In ways.

Cain: Your ancestors, to the best of your knowledge, when did they first come to Sandy Mush?

Duckett: I believe it was the 1700s.

Cain: Late 1700s? Were there still Cherokee?

Duckett: My mother's got a little Indian blood, but she never did know.

Cain: But you found out?

Duckett: Yeah.

Cain: What was her family name?

Duckett: Clark. Her name was Perchie. You ever heard of that?

Cain: No, but I'm still new. How do you spell that, P-e-r

Duckett: C-h-i-e.

Cain: And that's the same Clark as Clark's Cove?

Ducket: Uh huh. Her granddaddy owned that up in there and Clark Branch. His children owned most of that on the Madison side.

Cain: And the other side of your family is Duckett. There's still a lot of Ducketts around here:

Duckett: That's right. All of us related.

Cain: Do you have any idea why they came to Sandy Mush?

Duckett: I've often wondered.

Cain: But they were all farmers, started off as farmers.

Duckett: Yeah.

Cain: Are there any of your ancestors that you've heard about that were particularly memorable.

Duckett: Well, my great granddaddy Wesley went to the Civil War on the Confederate side and ended up on the Union side.

Cain: That's kind of unusual. Most of the people I've talked to here who had relatives (in the war) were Confederate. Up in Tennessee, it's kind of one of one and one of the other. Tell me how that happened.

Duckett: I don't know, and his kids don't talk about it.

Cain: But he came back to Sandy Mush all right?

Duckett: Right. He's buried up in our cemetery there by the school house.

Cain: Which side of the family was he on?

Duckett: Duckett.

Cain: That's one. You got some others that are kind of interesting?

Duckett: That's all I can think of right off. (small section omitted at Duckett's request)

Cain: I guess what I'm driving at is, in a lot of other places, you're married, you have kids. The kids scatter across the country. You may see them not all that often. You end up not very close to your cousins or anything else, and family gets scattered.

Duckett: Right.

Cain: And kinship isn't all that important. But I get a sense here that maybe kinship is pretty important.

Duckett: Well, if any of 'em's around. Now Don (Reeves) down here is a cousin, and Robert up there is a cousin on Little Sandy, and I'm here, but the rest of 'em is scattered all over the United States. The war done lots of it.

Cain: Which war?

Duckett: World War II. The boys went off to the war, and then married, and stayed there.

Cain: One of the questions I want to get at later had to do with the economy. You got a modest farm and have four or five boys. They can't all farm it, can they?

Duckett: That's right. Thats one thing, the reason so many newcomers are having a chance to get in here. It all used to be big farms. Waldrup's. My daddy helped run that for several years because it took about three families to run it. It was in the horse and buggy days. And with families, it just got so they couldn't make it. Of course they could have up there.

Cain: But a lot of the farms are kind of small, (small section omitted at Duckett's request)

Cain: For a lot of people, there just weren't jobs, or good jobs.

Duckett: Women, there wasn't such a thing as a job back when I was a child, and kids, now, when you're in school, you can always get a job after school. If you could a got a job when my crowd was coming up, we would have thought we was getting rich. It wasn't to be had.

Cain: Right.

Duckett: Waldrup's store, it was every kind of a store, hardware, anything you was looking for.

Cain: So you didn't have to go into Asheville:

Duckett: No. People come for everything from all over.

Cain: When was that finally shut down? He died, then somebody else ran it for a while.

Duckett: His daughter and his son run it for a few years. I'd have to look and read it off the papers, but it was down I would guess in the '50s, late '50s.

Cain: So when that went, the community lost something that helped hold it together.

Duckett: Right. They kept harnesses for horses, had these big barrels with pinto beans in 'em, loose soda (crackers), everything was loose, and had tobacco cutters,. You'd get a plug of tobacco, something like that, and you'd stick that plug into a tobacco cutter if you wanted a nickel's worth, you know. Money was hard to come by. You'd get a big piece for a nickel, and my granddaddy stayed with us, and we'd go down there, and he'd use the tobacco cutter if he wanted a quarter's worth or whatever.

Cain: Was this for chewing or smoking?

Duckett: Chewing. I've got the tobacco cutter that he had ...

Cain: Keep it sharp?

Duckett: Well, it's just like it was when he left it, and I've got his shoe machine. He made shoes shortly after the Civil War.

Cain: This was your grandfather?

Duckett: No, it was the Waldrups that owned the store, about the leader of Sandy Mush.

Cain: And Bill Duckett has the barn?

Duckett: Yes, and part of the land.

Cain: I was talking a little about family, and I know, reading a story about the reunions at Cataloochie, Catalooch. There'd be members of a dozen families that would come back, but a lot of the younger generation wouldn't know each other, so the great game was, "Who are you?" which means, "Whose kin are you?" Is that part of how you identify somebody here?

Duckett: Right.

Cain: By who they are related to.

Duckett: Our first school, we all had to have name tags. And they say they knew, but if they didn't, they'd be looking at your name tags.

Cain: I get a sense that families pretty much take care of their own, if somebody gets old or hurting or so on, there is usually somebody in the family that they can live with or will look in on them.

Duckett: A lot of times. My mother was 91 when she got sick, never had been sick to amount to anything, and the doctor told me that I couldn't bring her home, so she had to go to a nursing home and I went with her and stayed seven months till she passed away.

(Small section omitted at Duckett's request)

Cain: Do young people today put as much stock in kinship and family as the older generation?

Duckett: No.

Cain: Why is that, do you think?

Duckett: Well, it's a different time. Times have changed, and its totally different that what it was when I was a child.

Cain: And this is a question I will get at later. If we're looking at changes, some are good.

Duckett: Uh huh.

Cain. I was thinking, Bill Duckett was able to have a heart bypass operation last February. If he didn't have that, he would have died. I think that would be good.

Duckett: That's right.

Cain: Something else, where family doesn't mean as much as it used to.

Duckett: Right.

Cain: That doesn't seem too good.

Duckett: No, it's not.

Cain: I guess, I don't know, people go off and they have jobs. But I really don't know what happens.

Duckett: They just change, for some reason.

Cain: You talked a little bit about, we're getting now a lot of migration into Sandy Mush.

Duckett: Right.

Cain: Of outsiders, foreigners, strangers. But before that, there was a lot of migration out of Sandy Mush, kids basically going off to work, you said World War II.

Duckett: World War II, right.

Cain: And there just weren't good jobs here where they could support a family.

Duckett: Right.

Cain: So, they went elsewhere.

Duckett: A lot of them went to the shipyards, older ones.

Cain: There's been some work, people would pull logs, saw mills around.

Duckett: Yeah. That was mainly the thing.

Cain: For cash money.

Duckett: Uh huh.

Cain: Did many people go down and work in the cotton mills in Asheville?

Duckett: Several.

Cain: Then they shut down.

Duckett: Right.

Cain: I don't know that that was that good a living anyway.

Duckett: Well I had an uncle that went, and he made good money.

Cain: Okay. What did he do?

Ducket: I don't know, but I'd go to his house and he'd come and he'd be fuzzy with cotton all over.

Cain: He lived up in Sandy Mush then.

Duckett: He was raised up here and when he got a job, he moved to town.

Cain: How were his lungs?

Duckett: Well the way he drunk liquor, I guess they was pretty good.

Cain: A lot of people who had to breath that cotton dust ended up with white lung and just like the coal miners who got black lung.

Duckett: Right.

Cain: Tell me about your old homeplace.

Duckett: My granddaddy?

Cain: What do you consider your old homeplace?

Duckett: Well I guess it was my granddaddy.

Cain: That's where you were raised?

Duckett: Up on Little Sandy. I was up there a few years, but mainly up at Waldrups. Well, to tell the truth about it, after my parents married, they moved every four years until they got here. I been here about 60 years. And I said, when our four years is up, where are we going now? But they wouldn't answer me.

Cain: Those were your parents?

Duckett: Yes.

Cain: So you had a couple different houses when you were young.

Duckett: Right, up in Robinson cove. And we moved down to Waldrup farm. And from there, we went to granddaddy's on Little Sandy - Mama's daddy - and then back to Waldrup's, and from Waldrup's here.

Cain: And you've been here 60 years.

Duckett: About 60 years.

Cain: So there isn't any one of those places that you would consider your homeplace for growing up, your childhood and so on.

Duckett: No, I moved too often.

Cain: That's kind of unusual, isn't it?

Duckett: Well no, I had an uncle that moved 30 some times.

Cain: Huh. How come?

Duckett: That's what I wondered. His kids was always laughing at him about it. He'd just take a notion to move.

Cain: But that was always in the area, or did he move around?

Duckett: No, it was around in the Leicester area, a lot of it on Sandy Mush.

Cain: If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?

Duckett: Sandy Mush.

Cain: Why.

Duckett: I don't know. I just love it. It's quiet and peaceful. There have been a few killings. About four, I guess.

Cain: Over how many years?

Duckett: Well, since we moved here.

Cain: I heard from a number of people, there parts and people that were kind of rough.

Duckett: Well last time, it was tobacco grading time and me and a neighbor were over here grading tobacco at that middle barn and somebody come by and said there's two boys killed. Well both of them was my neighbors. One lived right up here and another a little further out.

Cain: What happened?

Duckett: A bunch got to drinking and got too rough with one another the night before. It used to be bad in here for drinkin, but I never do run into none of it any more, but I wouldn't doubt if there ain't some weed.

Cain: I think a little bit less since they've been patrolling so much with the airplanes because you risk your land.

Duckett: But it's not going into the buildings. There's that way, I guess.

Cain: And there is still a little moonshine, not much ... maybe it's more than I think. I think there was probably more earlier than there is now.

Duckett: Oh yeah.

Cain: And maybe the last 10 years have been a little bit quieter, but with the young men, there used to be some pretty rowdy parties.

Duckett: That's right. Well up at Waldrup's at the store, you never did know what to expect on a

Saturday evening. They'd gang in and buy a half a gallon of gas, and oh my.

Cain: It's more peaceful now?

Duckett: Oh yeah. To my way of seeing it is. I don't know about what other people think.

Cain: You like the people.

Duckett: Uh huh.

Cain: You said this is a place where people help each other out. We'll talk about that in a little while, about the barn raisings and stuff like that. There's not that much any more of that.

Duckett: No.

Cain: But if you had a need and one of your neighbors knew about it, they would help?

Duckett: Right. Sure. This family would. And this 'un out here, every time they'd call, they'd say, if you need me, call.

Cain: And they'd mean it, not just being polite?

Duckett: Right. They're just on the job, and I don't bother them. And that's the way this family is down here next door. They're all on the job.

Cain: You like the mountains too?

Duckett: Uh huh. Bald Mountain is my favorite. I go through the cut to the old school house and it just opens up. I don't think there's ever been a much prettier place than up there.

Cain: Where is this again?

Duckett: Bald Mountain.

Cain: Okay, and how do you get to Bald Mountain?

Duckett: Well, when you go up by the Waldrup farm, it's facing it.

Cain: Well, okay, and that would be on the far side of the road, across the valley.

Duckett: Straight up from the main road. You know, the mountain goes this way.

Cain: The Smoky Mountains are full of what's called the grassy balds, grass on top. My father used to write scientific papers about those. I haven't read those in a long time. You're still single, but I wanted to ask a little bit about mountain families. In the myth, people write about the patriarch who just is the absolute boss and tells everyone what to do, and I'm sure that's the way with some people, but I didn't know how much of that was myth and how much was myth and how much tended to be kind partnership.

Duckett: My mom and dad was 50-50, and they expected me to do my share too.

Cain: So you may have worked in the kitchen with your mom. And you may have worked in the field ...

Duckett: Everywhere.

Cain: Tell me a little bit about growing up and some of the things you did? (pause) You went to school, which not everyone did.

Duckett: Right.

Cain: Were you a good student?

Duckett: No, not too good.

Cain: Kind of a cut-up?

Duckett: Aggravating.

Cain: Okay.

(Small section omitted at Duckett's request)

Cain: Are you still Methodist?

Duckett: Uh huh. What's your faith?

Cain: My family is Catholic.

Duckett: Oh really? The Geigers are, too, right? No, they're regular Methodist.

Cain: Yes they do. They go to Methodist. I was talking with Bobbie some time ago. My wife is very active in the church. I kind of help out. Payne's Chapel: When did they stop holding services there, '51 or so?

Duckett: Somewhere in the '50s, I think. It's 109 years old, was. I believe it was the 4th of April.

Cain. Is that still owned by the Methodist Church?

Duckett: Yes, the Methodist conference.

Cain: Could be scraped and use a coat of paint on it now.

Duckett: You know, that was painted last spring.

Cain: They must not have scraped it then because it's pealed pretty bad.

Duckett: Well, it's just like this. See how that done. It's two different kinds of paint.

Cain: It's too bad. It's a nice building.

Duckett: It sure is. Now, it stood the 77 flood.

Cain: That's amazing.

Duckett: Sure is.

Cain: Now it took the Jones Valley Church.

Duckett: Have you seen them pictures?

Cain: I saw one picture of what was left, the door.

Duckett: Right. Now that was out of (stone) blocks. The rest was out of wood. I made a scrap book out of that.

Cain: How far down the river did the wood go?

Duckett: We found song books and pews in that tobacco patch down there.

Cain: That could have been a couple miles, mile-and-a-half, two miles.

Duckett: I guess. It lacked about six inches, some of 'em said that walked the road that night, of being up into the highway here.

Cain: Well, it went into the basement of the green house. Mrs. Black said left the house.

Duckett: I guess she did, was glad to get away.

Cain: How important is religion, how important is church to people of Sandy Mush?

Duckett: It's very important. To the locals, I don't know about the newcomers. We've got some newcomers that comes to our church that are very active. And they are just such nice people.

Cain: And others that don't mix at all?

Duckett: Newcomers?

Cain: Yeah.

Duckett: Yeah. That's one thing. Usually they all have big dogs, and they can get in your stuff. Most locals maybe have sheep or cattle. I've got guineas and chickens, and somebody's dog got a guinea the other day. That don't work too good. And they don't want you on their land. I don't know how you feel about that.

Cain: I ...

Duckett: They'll tread on you, but they don't want you a treadin' on them.

Cain: I've heard that from a number of people.

Duckett: Really? I guess that's the situation.

Cain: Yeah.

Duckett: And you know us locals, we've always been, everybody knows everybody years ago, and just go on across and look or anything, or help. You wanted a walnut or apple, pick it up and go on with it, but these, most of these newcomers, urn, it don't set well.

Cain: I pretty easy myself. I guess I'd ask somebody before I'd go on their place unless I knew 'em real well. I don't expect I'd mind anyone coming around my place. I'd probably be a little sensitive about hunting because.

Duckett: Yeah. We don't like that. One thing. You know that little house over there, that little log house up on the mountain right there. I was trying to put antiques in it like it was at my grandfather's, and I had them over there. Well a neighbor was setting there on the steps one day and said, I see somebody over at the old house. It wasn't growed up then as it is now. And I got the binoculars, and I could see a ways, and it was a man and a woman, newcomers, and was trying to get in there. And we caught them over there a couple of times and I had to move the stuff back over here.

Cain: That's awful.

Duckett: It is awful. They were renters then, and I told the owner of the property, and they give me the lie. And one night I had the scanner on, and I never heard such a tear down, and I called the owner of the property, and I said, what's going on up there? Well they was fast asleep. And his wife said I don't know why. And I said, the law is headed to your house. He was ashamed to call it his house. He was sending it up there. He knowed they would find them. They had a tear down right.

Cain: Oh boy.

Duckett: That is one thing that don't set too well with the locals. And the young folks, they like the people that's moving in here, most of them, but they say we're getting crowded. They say, I want elbow room.

Cain: These are new people or the old people?

Duckett: No, the young people, local young people, and I see their point, but I've got nothing agin newcomers, but I don't find.

Cain: If they respect your ways.

Duckett: Right.

Cain: Part of what attracted me to Sandy Mush was the people, the mountains, the fact that it wasn't too crowded.

Duckett: Right.

Cain: I guess I would be kind of unhappy if there were people

Duckett: Right in your face.

Cain: Right, because I like the openness. In my case, there is a cove across the river, and I own the cove.

Duckett: That's like it is here - nobody can see or hear me.

Cain: So you could carry on and no one would know.

Duckett: Me and Tippy, when she could hear, we did, too.

Cain: Talk a little bid about attitudes. If someone were referred to you or described you as a good liver, what would that mean to you?

Duckett: I don't know.

Cain: Okay. What's important to you in a person? How do you measure the worth of a person?

Duckett: Their kindness, thoughtfulness, and their faith.

Cain: We talked a little about corn shucking and barn raising.

Duckett: Right.

Cain: Tell me about that.

Duckett: Well, when I was a kid, the men would get their logs and then all the neighbors would come in on a certain day, and they'd put them logs in the barn and cover it with boards, hand-made boards, and the women would cook a big dinner for 'em. And there wasn't such a thing as a screen door. When I was 10, and I can just see one woman standing over the table keeping the flies off the table while the men eat.

Cain: How many people would help in a barn raising?

Duckett: Gee, sometimes there would be 20, way up there. And workin', you know, like say that hill there, if Dad was wantin' to raise corn there this next year, well, he'd have a workin' and everybody'd come and help dig them trees out so you could plow come spring.

Cain: And also corn shucking?

Duckett: Uh huh. They'd gather the corn and pile it up and everybody would gather in and shuck a while and a little of everything else for a while.

Cain: What's a little of everything else?

Ducket: (Laugh) They'd dance. They'd a might have felt pretty good sometimes.

Cain: Would the women shuck as well as the men?

Duckett: Yeh.

Cain: And you had a good party, so it was a social event?

Duckett: Right.

Cain: And would they time it so that every day or two there would be another one to go to?

Duckett: Right. Just keep a moving on till everybody got their corn shucked, and that was the entertainment back then.

Cain: Music?

Duckett: Sometimes. And that was another thing. On Saturday night, people that made music would go to somebody's house and make music this Saturday night. And next Saturday night they'd go to another one. And when the radios come, that's the way they'd do. Listen to the radio.

Cain: The people that would make music, what did they play, what instruments did they play?

Duckett: Banjo, guitar.

Cain: Any violin?

Duckett: Fiddle.

Cain: I know up in Laurel Country in Madison County, famous for all the old folk songs.

Duckett: Right.

Cain: All the collectors would come and make it famous. You had a lot of folks that played music around here, too?

Duckett: Well there was several. It was a small thing.

Cain: Is there any of that still going on, or was that sort of given up?

Duckett: It's been given up as far as I know. Now there is one girl raised here, she's about 76, and she lives up in Washington now, and her and I believe three more has got a little band, and they go to nursing homes. She plays the guitar, and somebody else plays the banjo. And she says them folks really enjoyed it, and they go to church once in a while and do something like that

Cain: She doesn't live here any more?

Duckett: No. She was a principal of the school there in Washington, but she comes every Fourth of July and stays several days with me.

Cain: What's her name?

Duckett: Edith R. Bartas.

Cain: Washington being?

Duckett: Right now she's moved up to Annapolis to retirement.

Cain: The barn raising for Gillespie, the reverend whose barn burned three or four years ago. Other than that, can you think of one that's been around?

Duckett: Not for years and years. That's a thing of the past, I guess.

Cain: Do you know why it just sort of died out? Because they built houses that way too.

Duckett: Uh huh. Maybe just got other interests and just no interest in helping the other members.

Cain: You got people working for wages;

Duckett: Uh huh.

Cain: You pay somebody to do it.

Duckett: And you can't get anybody in town any more. You use Mexicans here. That's the only thing down there.

Cain: Is that just for the crops, or is it for other things too?

Duckett: Crops.

Cain: Are there ways in which mountain folk are different from other people?

Duckett: They say so, and I think so.

Cain: What would be some of the ways in which they might be different?

Duckett: Well, we're set in our ways, naturally. And we just do the mountain way.

Cain: And the mountain way, that's my natural next question.

Duckett: (Laugh)

Cain: What would be some of the things that would be part of the mountain way?

Duckett: I don't know how to answer that. We all believe in gardens.

Cain: Yeah, sure, that's one of the things.

Duckett: And we all think of doing all we can ourselves. Can everything we can and freeze everything we can.

Cain: I was talking to Rev. Gillespie who, on that point, he was really worried because the young people don't do that any more. What happens if there is a big crisis?

Duckett: That's right.

Cain: The next Depression or who knows what. People won't be able to feed themselves.

Duckett: They wouldn't, and there would be more killing than you could bury. I was the only child and the only grandchild during the Depression, and I wasn't too old anyway, and I didn't notice it too bad, naturally. But the old folks, Mom and Dad, lost all their money and everything. And we lived up at the Waldrup place, up above Bill Duckett's barn, and, you know, in the mountains - you don't have this in the city - when you're little, people give you a penny or a nickel or a dime or something like that, a quarter. Back then people would give me what would amount to a whole lot back then that what it would now. And one day Dad asked me if I didn't want him to put my money in the bank. I didn't know nothing about it, so I said I'd put my money in the bank over behind the spring house. A bank like that one there. But he took his own. I finally give in, and I lost it all. It was the Leicester Bank. I guess you heard about that.

Cain: I haven't.

Duckett: Well, there was, and it went broke, and Mr. Waldrup worked something with it, and Gay Green, he was a man out of Asheville at that time, and there was a Hawkins boy in there, and it seems like there was an Osmond (?), and I don't know what happened.

Cain: What happened with a lot of banks is they lend money on land.

Duckett: Right.

Cain: And people couldn't pay, and even if you foreclosed, you couldn't sell it.

Duckett: Right.

Cain: Did people lose their land in the Depression, do you know?

Duckett: Well, I don't know. All I can tell you about that is that my granddaddy found it so hard. This old fellow, he had a pretty good farm, and his daughter was marrying a man that he thought was high class, you know what I mean?

Cain: Yup.

Duckett: And he borrowed money from my granddaddy to put on this big wedding supper, and he never could pay it back, and he give my granddaddy a tract of land as big as half of this whole place for that supper.

Cain: Made out pretty well, then, but you can't eat land.

Duckett: It was good pasture.

Cain: One of the things that people coming out have done is that they are paying more money for the land.

Duckett: Yeah, and that sure has hurt. That's what the tax people say. This place here is 68 to 70

acres, and it was $120,000, and this year it was $226,200 valued.

Cain: It jumped over one period?

Duckett: Right, four-year period, and they say it's newcomers coming in here and paying so much for this land up in here that's caused it..

Cain: So then your taxes go up a lot, too.

Duckett: Oh, yes.

Cain: For someone who wanted to sell their land, it's a good deal.

Duckett: Right.

Cain: For someone who wants to stay on the old place, it's hard.

Duckett: That's right. Now, Dad bought this in 1939, paid $1,500 for it. Now, can you imagine the value of it now? $226,000.

Cain: A quarter million dollars.

Duckett: And I was talking to this lady in the high school, and I said, can you imagine a little place like that and the barns all down and I said not even house sites up to where I'm at. She said, "Well gosh Mabel, you aint got nothing but house sites." I said, "Well, I may have, but look on over there on that side." I said, "I may have, but who's going to buy one over there with no bridge. It washed out." She said, "Well, there's people coming in here buying wouldn't mind that."

Cain: That's partly true. If you look at what's happened to land values elsewhere ..

Duckett: It's everywhere.

Cain: And, I studied land values before I bought here. South of Asheville, down toward Hendersonville, paid two-three-four times as much, so if you come up here and its 35 minutes from town. I understand it. It doesn't make it good for the people that are here. Does the county give senior citizens a break on their taxes?

Duckett: Uh huh. Have been. Don't know what they'll do after this. And land use.

(Note: In separate interviews, Sandy Mush farmers said there is a substantial tax break for land used for farming that has allowed them to keep their land).

Cain: We started to talk a little about change, the good things and the bad things. The bad things: The people who come who aren't part of the community who drive up the land prices so your taxes hurt you.

Duckett: Yeah.

Cain: The fact that there aren't good jobs for the young people, so a lot of them have to move away.

Duckett: Right.

Cain: And some of the old values. People don't make the time to help other people as much as they used to.

Duckett: No, they don't.

Cain: But you still feel they maybe help more than, maybe, elsewhere, because you do know your neighbors?

Duckett: I'm sure.

Cain: What do you hold on to? What are your best memories of the way things are and ought to be in Sandy Mush?

Duckett: Well, I'd like to see it back some like it used to be. Everybody was happy and kind to one another back then, didn't have much.

Cain: Except when they were drinking.

Duckett: Yeah. That's right.

Cain: It isn't all roses.

Duckett: No.

Cain: But a lot of good.

Duckett: Uh huh.

Cain: I guess what you are talking about is a sense of community, the value of the community, the neighborliness

Duckett: Uh huh.

Cain: Setting a good table.

Duckett: Uh huh. Used to on Sunday, we'd have a big crowd every Sunday. It's not that way any more.

Cain: A crowd, where?

Duckett: They eat dinner with us.

Cain: Why is that, do you think?

Duckett: I've wondered.

Cain: Too many people in a hurry?

Duckett: I'd think so, mainly, (end of tape)

 (Mable Duckett interview: Tape 1, Side B)

Cain: Miss Mabel Duckett. Side two of the interview, and we are getting pretty close to the end. You see any hope for Sandy Mush, or is it just going to kind of go the way of other places?

Duckett: I think it will hold on for a few more years, but, if locals keeps going out, it will change.

Cain: But some of it has to do with the newcomers becoming a part of it?

Duckett: Right.

Cain: I guess I'll do my part, I hope.

Duckett: It has its advantages and disadvantages, all things does.

Cain: Some of things that have really, like events that have made a difference: The closing of the Waldrop store.

Duckett: Right.

Cain: Was a focus of the community that went away.

Duckett: Uh huh.

Cain: The high school closed in '51. There were like two kids graduated that year?

Duckett: I believe there was four.

Cain: Four? Okay.

Duckett: I'm not sure.

Cain: It just wasn't efficient any more.

Duckett: No. They had the grammar school up there for maybe four or five more years. I believe it closed down in '66.

Cain: So, was that a loss to the community as well?

Duckett: Uh huh. Sure was.

Cain: They do have the Community Center now, but

Duckett: Oh yes, and the 4-H Club, which has helped.

Cain: They have the suppers the first Friday of the month.

Duckett: Uh huh. And 4-H meets the last Saturday of the month.

Cain: You going up to the supper?

Duckett: No. Can't drive at night and don't like to go at night anyway. Never did. It's interesting, though.

Cain: Which?

Duckett: The Community Club meeting. They have, I remember me and this lady going (to the meetings) before she became disabled. One time I remember the sheriff come around and gave a program.

Cain: Now is this the, maybe I'm confused. On Friday, there is a potluck. Is that the Community Club?

Duckett: Uh huh. Friday night.

Cain: So it is more than just kind of a potluck supper. They have programs, too.

Duckett. Right. A lot of times they invite maybe the sheriff or some kind of politician of some kind.

Cain: You started to say you and your neighbor...

Duckett: She enjoyed it, too. Oh, this used to be the best neighborhood we ever lived in. But they're all dead and gone now. But their kids, and their kids are working, and it's not that way any more. It's new.

Cain: Who all lives, does anyone else live around in this little cove?

Duckett: In here?

Cain: Yeah.

Duckett: No, not right now.

Cain: So there's no one in the trailer?

Duckett: No.

Cain: Oh. When they wanted to bring nuclear waste in ...

Duckett: Oh, gee! I've got a scrapbook that thick on that.

Cain: We'll look at that in a minute. Tell me a little bit about what that did in the community.

Duckett: Well, it shook us up. When you think you're going to have to leave where you've always lived, that's.

Cain: They talked about moving everybody out?

Duckett: Well, it sounded like they might have to, specially if they're right around it. Us further down this way wouldn't have wanted to stay, getting in the water.

Cain: Where were they going to put it.

Duckett: It would have been on the (Waldrup farm?). Newcomers really did fight.

Cain: So they were okay then?

Duckett: Yes. They're okay all the time.

Cain: Well, sometimes more okay than others. Bill Duckett, I understand, was the leader on that?

Duckett: Oh yeah. He got to have dinner with Bush.

Cain: Jim Hannah was with army intelligence at the time in Washington, and he would pay visits to the congressmen.

Duckett: Oh really?

Cain: That's what he said, yeah. Why did they decide not to come here?

Duckett: Well I don't know. Rocks, for one thing, the way I understood it.

Cain: Too much water in the ground?

Duckett: Yeah, and they said cracks in the rocks, and it could seep through, somehow that way. I never did understand it.

Cain: Did you go to any of the meetings?

Duckett: Uh huh. And I had some papers that they gave. They had a meeting, preacher and a bunch of them, took some papers. People from everywhere wrote letters. I had a cousin who was clerk of the court office in Durango, Colo., and I noticed some of his papers, he was thinking about retiring, and he was wondering about Sandy Mush, but not now.

Cain: Because that would have killed the community.

Duckett: Sure. The cemeteries were a factor.

Cain: Did you take part in the quilt?

Duckett: Yeah, I made the Payne's Chapel part.

Cain: Oh, I've seen it. Whose idea was that, do you know?

Duckett: I believe it was a newcomer. Bill (Duckett) might know. Are you going to meet with him?

Cain: Sure.

Duckett: He might know. But that's a pretty quilt.

Cain: It's a pretty quilt and.

Duckett: It's been everywhere.

Cain: Where all did they take it, do you know?

Duckett: I don't know. But it's been all around, I understand.

Cain: What that quilt represents is what you value?

Duckett: Did you notice the churches is a church out of them?

Cain: Yup. (In the quilt, which hangs in the Community Center, the panels depicting the individual churches of Sandy Mush are joined in such a way that they form a larger church and steeple). I was thinking it had a lot of talent with the needle and a lot of heart that went behind it.

Duckett: Sure did. There's a lot of interest in that quilt. (Inaudible) A lot of work's been done (to the Community Center).

Cain: And a lot of work still has to be done.

Duckett: Right.

Cain: It's a little musty down in the, where you go in. I was in there with Jim Hannah. And they need a ramp for the handicapped.

Duckett: Uh huh.

Cain: And curtains for the sound because the sound just echoes around the gym like something fierce, and the wood banisters probably could use some stripping.

Duckett: Right.

Cain: It's the kind of building you'd like to see used more by more people. It's a pretty big building.

Duckett: The movie people used it.

Cain: What was that movie?

Duckett: "The Good Baby." He was our speaker for our class reunion, school reunion.

Cain: When was the school reunion?

Duckett: The 19th of July.

Cain: Of this year?

Duckett: Uh huh.

Cain: And how many people came?

Duckett: There was over a hundred, I'm sure, because there was 90 some registered, and there were several that didn't.

Cain: What all did you do?

Duckett: Well, we had a memorial table for the ones that's died since this one two years ago. In 2000 why we'll have memorial tables for the ones that dies between that period. And we have a speaker or a dance team or something, you know, just a little something, and I'll take all this bunch of books, and

they'll look at that.

Cain: How long does it last?

Duckett: It's been starting about 10 o'clock and lasts till 3 or 4.

Cain: On a Saturday or Sunday?

Duckett: Sunday, each person takes food, and we have a terrible lot of food, tables all across the back of the room. You just go around and fill your plate up, and go on to a table.

Cain: And these are done every how many years?

Duckett: Every two years.

Cain: What does it mean to have a reunion like that?

Duckett: Well, you just stay acquainted with the ones that you graduated with and knew when you were in school. It's good to see them again once in a while.

Cain: Is there someone that just really organizes it, or is it sort of everybody.

Duckett: Every year, why they have a little business meeting, and they get somebody else to do it the next two years, and this year it was kinda hard on Reeves Black, who lives in Charleston, South Carolina, but they done a super job.

Cain: Of the hundred or so people that might come, how many would be from outside Sandy Mush and Leicester?

Duckett: Oh gee, near half of them, I guess. We're all getting at the age, though, where a lot of them don't come any more.

Cain: But for a school that small, what, the biggest graduating class was yours.

Duckett: There were 14.

Cain: Fourteen. And the school lasted from 1935

Duckett: No, it was built in 1927, and the first graduating class was 1935. Before high school it was a one-teacher school.

Cain: Where was that?

Duckett: Where the fire department is. I thought I had a picture in that, but I guess I didn't.

Cain: There used to be a school in just about every cove.

Duckett: Uh huh. And a Post Office. There was a Sandy Mush Post Office and a Gem Post Office.

Cain: Which?

Duckett: G-E-M. That's the way they spelled it.

Cain: Where was the Sandy Mush Post Office?

Duckett: Me and John Duckett, the best we could figure it out, it was up there across from the church and the old Burg (?) Duckett place.

Cain: Where would that be?

Duckett: Do you know where, what we called "The Cut," were the banks are so high on each side, and it opens out and there's a little church, it's on the left there, that white house and the barn.

Cain: And then Gem, where was Gem?

Duckett: I believe it was up Willow Creek. I've got it all wrote down. Then there was old Cross Rock. I've got a knife that was my granddaddy's, picture on one side, the Cross Rock address on the other side.

Cain: And there is one at Canto.

Duckett: That's down here at Randall's old store where Don Reeves is now.

Cain: Whose store was that first?

Duckett: Randall's.

Cain: That's funny, because it still says Canto on all the maps.

Duckett: Oh really?

Cain: Of course there isn't any Canto there. If you were looking for it, you'd never find it, drive all the way to, I don't know how far it goes. On some maps they call it Canton. They couldn't believe it was Canto, so they put an "n" on the end of it, but you have a Canton.

((Note: Reeves said there really was a Canto at the corner perhaps 75 years ago).

Duckett: In Haywood County.

Cain: They shut down the post offices.

Duckett: My great granddaddy drove the buggy and horse and delivered the mail to those little old post offices.

Cain: He'd bring it out of

Duckett: Leicester.

Cain: Leicester. Every day?

Duckett: I reckon.

Cain: Would they pick it up at the post offices or would they have people who carry it out to the houses?

Duckett: I can't say exactly. His daughter might know.

Cain: The little schools. Where did you start off in your schooling?

Duckett: Cross Rock. You know that picture

Cain: That's on Little Sandy Mush

Duckett: That Burder Reeves', and the games back then were (inaudible) You ever heard of that?

Cain: You threw something over a house

Duckett: Ball, and somebody on the other side caught it and would run around and throw it to hit somebody, and kids wouldn't know how to play them old time games now, would they?

Cain: But that sounds like a game you just invented. Did you hear of anybody else playing it?

Duckett: That's about all we played back when we started school, and "tap hand."

Cain: Tell me about that.

Duckett: I about forgot that. It's been a long time.

Cain: Cross Rock went through how many grades?

Duckett: Seven.

Cain: And there were about how many kids there?

Duckett: Well, I guess there were 40 or 50 maybe.

Cain: All in the same room.

Duckett: Uh huh.

Cain: One teacher?

Duckett: Right. Mont Hannah was one of them one year. And when the weather got bad and him not wanting to walk home, he would walk across Little Sandy Mountain and he'd go home with some of the kids, especially if it snowed. We had to walk.

Cain: It's a pretty fair walk.

Duckett: Uh huh. Up there where Bill Duckett lives. You know where he lives?

Cain: Yep.

Duckett. And Cross Rock, and you went across up to Clark Branch and went across the mountain.

Cain: There wasn't a road there, so you were walking

Duckett: Yeah, it used to be open road.

Cain: It was? Okay.

Duckett: Uh huh. Started in there at Rogers' old farm and went across the mountain and on over there at Clark Branch.

Cain: Rogers is where they painted all the barns red.

Duckett: Right.

Cain: The only one who painted his barns.

Duckett: Yeah.

Cain: But that road isn't open now.

Duckett: No. It's closed. I wish they'd make a road across there. There would eliminate a lot of this traffic.

Cain: Well an awful lot goes over Early's Mountain.

Duckett: Oh, yeah. And you can be up to church maybe all day and the traffic is bad. You wouldn't believe it, what with coming across Early's Mountain, but they don't like our little road, and I'm glad of it.

Cain: This road?

Duckett: Right.

Cain: It takes longer.

Duckett: Yeah.

Cain: But my wife doesn't like heights.

Duckett: And I don't either.

Cain: She doesn't like all those little curves on Early's Mountain.

Duckett: Oh really?

Cain: So it may take 10 minutes longer to go around, but I'm never going to get her. We went over it once, and she said that was all.

Duckett: I don't blame her. I don't go over it either. I like to got killed on one side one time. There was a woman, went to a funeral with me, and that made it quicker for me to get her home, and we come back that way, and I was coming up one of those curves and here come a hunter. He'd been out in here hunting, and he was way over on my side, and I had to hit the ditch, and I said I'm through with this

mountain. But they say this little old road is so narrow, and they just don't like to go out over Union, and that makes it good on us down here because we don't have so much traffic. But now all the trailers and the heavy stuff comes this way because they are afraid to try the mountain.

Cain: Well, they're so wide, if you're coming the other way. It's one thing if you go into the ditch on the mountainside. It's another if you go on the other side. They drive fast. We were talking about all those little schools in the various coves. Where did their teachers come from?

Duckett: Well, when mama first started school. Have you talked to any of Wade Reeves' family? He's dead.

Cain: No.

Duckett: His wife's still over there. His mother taught. And, you know, back then, people had to make money somehow and pay 'em.

Cain: So subscription schools.

Duckett: Right.

Cain: You'd go to school three months out of the year and then help with the farm.

Duckett: Then it got up to six. And this man that lived out here. You know the big two-story house across the creek out here that (Perry) Coe owns now. He went to school, he said, three months a year, but he got out of it what little there was in it, and they was a school teacher. I can't recall no name. Used to he'd come in here and measure tobacco. And her husband raised tobacco. Where she couldn't count up his tobacco, he'd come down here and got this old man, never had gone to school but three months out of the year, and he couldn't have passed the seventh grade because there wasn't much down here above that then. He just got the good out of it.

Cain: The teachers didn't always have much schooling either.

Duckett: Well, as far as I know, the school that put them out always had college. But now these little schools, you could finish high school and teach. My first teacher was Burder's mother.

Cain: What did you learn?

Duckett: My A-B-Cs.

Cain: The most recent thing was the government was talking about taking the valley for the nuclear waste dump.

Duckett: Right.

Cain: And that would have been stuff from Oak Ridge or all over?

Duckett: All over.

Cain: But before that, they wanted to take the valley for.

Duckett: Well the thing before that, my mom and a neighbor were sittin out here on the porch, and the neighbor said, I see somebody at the line fence over there, and they hadn't said nothin to us about it, and it was CP&L surveying out for a dam, and it'd go up to the Chapel Church (Payne's Chapel), you know, just for a feeder.

Cain: CP and

Duckett: L. The light company.

Cain: Carolina Power & Light.

Duckett: Uh huh, and it was going to be dammed up there down there on our line fence, ours and Don's (Reeves). And they was over there surveying it out and hadn't said nothing to us about it.

Cain: That would have been for power?

Duckett: Some kind of feeder dam. I think it was power.

Cain: And that would have backed the water all the way up to

Duckett: The chapel.

Cain: About when was that?

Duckett: It's been, I guess, 15 years ago.

Cain: What happened to that?

Duckett: They bought land everywhere in here, but I never did hear, did you?

Cain: So they still own the land, or did they sell it?

Duckett: They own some of it.

Male companion: (inaudible)

Cain: I should go look up the maps.

Duckett: And before that

Cain: Do they have the power to condemn? Could they have forced people out?

Duckett: I wondered about that. I guess they can do most anything. And before that, there was going to be a big dam. Wasn't it down on the French Broad River and come up the mouth of the Sandy Mush down toward Marshall, come on up, I believe it went up to about Garrett (Cove). It would be water that

much. That would have been water looked like Fontana or something, I guess.

Cain: And this was also Power and Light.

Duckett: No.

Cain: Oh, this was the government.

Duckett: As far as I know. And then in 1939, when we moved down here, it was the park taking it. When the maps come out, we was just moving in, so we didn't get maps, but I've seen it. Bill Duckett might have one. We wouldn't have a thing but the tip top of that mountain.

Cain: And they just would have forced everybody out:

Duckett: Well it sounded like it.

Cain: You don't know what happened to change their minds?

Duckett: No I don't. May be on the map somewhere.

Male companion: They own acres and acres of land there down by the old home down Sandy Mush Creek there

Duckett: That's CP&L.

Male companion: Yup. Carolina Power and Light.

Cain: If it's not one thing, it's another.

Duckett: It might never of popped up again, and then you might face something just shortly.

Cain: There was one black family that had lived in Sandy Mush

Duckett: Right.

Cain: The earlier part of this century. They were the Boyds.

Duckett: Boyds: Darryl, Paulos, Buck and Wix, I don't know what his real name was. Their parents were Thadeus and Meaner Boyd.

Cain: And they built a house in the 1870s, and where was that located?

Duckett: That was up Garrett's Branch. Have you been up that road yet?

Cain: No. Is it still there?

Duckett: Uh huh. It is now used to store hay.

Cain: And you knew them growing up.

Duckett: Uh huh.

Cain: Tell me a little bit about them.

Duckett: Well, Thadeus was real nice, but she believed in witches, and I was afraid of her.

(Omitted anecdote of practical joke played on Mrs. Boyd).

Cain: The boys worked, helped out on a farm? Duckett: On the Waldrup farm.

Cain: What became of them?

Duckett: They're all dead now. They moved out of here. Now Thad was buried up across from the Brown dairy farm, and Meaner is buried in Leicester.

Cain: That's okay. The last time they moved out was, the last one was here when?

Duckett: Well, Buck left out last, no, Wix. He moved out, the last one. He died I guess eight year ago. Now, anybody would like Wix. He was just the ideal citizen.

Cain: Thank you. (Tape off/resume recording after a casual conversation in which she told an interesting story)

Cain: You're how old?

Duckett: 72.

Cain: And what kind of rifle do you have, or shotgun.

Duckett: It's a 12.

Cain: 12 Gauge?

Duckett: Uh huh.

Cain: And a bobcat was

Duckett: 22 pounds. It was in the chicken house, I mean chicken walk, trying to get Mama's last chicken. Some my mother had, and I still got 'em.

Cain: One shot?

Duckett: I shot it once, and Harry come and he ventured, he was braver than I was. When I called Ada, I told her I had something shot that was under the chicken house. It got under there, and I couldn't see. And he shot it twice. Like he could see its eyes. He said, hand me the gun, so I handed it over the fence,

and he stuck it in there and finished him up. And I caught three coons out of the garden in the past week.

Cain: Shotgun, too?

Duckett: No, pistol.

Cain: Wow.

Duckett: I catch em. They call em live traps now. They're eating all the corn. I've got to eat too.

Cain: I had this vision of you as Annie Oakley.

Duckett: Everybody calls me Annie Oakley (laugh).

Cain: So what did you do with the coons?

Duckett: We just disposed of them.

Cain: How big is your garden?

Duckett: Well, it's about as big as that patch over there in front of the trailer.

Cain: That doesn't help me very much.

Duckett: I guess it's a tenth, but I put out just about half of it, and the rest is in flowers this year.

Cain: You do corn.

Duckett: Uh huh.

Cain: What else?

Duckett: Beans, okra, cabbage, make kraut and slaw and stuff, and beats, tomatoes, potatoes, squash.

Cain: All the good stuff. Any peppers?

Duckett: Uh huh. Onions. I make enough onions to cook with my pickles, cucumber pickles.

Cain: Do a lot of canning? Or freezing?

Duckett: Freezing. I can beans and okra. I don't like okra out of the freezer.

Cain: No livestock left. Just one chicken?

Duckett: We sold all the cattle, and this man down the road pastures the pasture, and I've got two guineas left and two old hens. And the bobcat had been in there a few days before I found it, and he had tore one of the hen's leg loose from the body. It just flops.

Cain: You keep the hens for eggs then?

Duckett: They do lay. I just keep them cause they was mother's.

Cain: Because

Duckett: They was mama's.

Cain: And your mama died when?

Duckett: '94. She was 92.

Cain: I didn't know hens lived that long.

Duckett: Well she had em when she got sick. They was young then. Used to have frizzlies. And they'd kept them raised every year, with the chickens, every year since the Civil War. My dad got em from his granddaddy that was in the Civil War.

Cain: What are frizzlies?

Duckett: Their feathers turned the opposite way. Instead of lying slick, they turn back up toward the head.

Cain: And that's a special kind of chicken?

Duckett: Uh huh, rare breed. You can't get em now.

Cain: From the Civil War, it was the same breeding stock, It just kept going.

Duckett: We just kept raising little ones.

Cain: For how many years? Until when?

Duckett: The last one died about '95, I guess.

Cain: You heard of anyone else having those?

Duckett: Not around here.

Cain: Did they taste any different?

Duckett: No, and the eggs was just the same.

Cain: Did people know what you were talking about when you said, here's a frizzlie egg?

Duckett: Locals did.

Cain: How would you spell frizzlie?

Duckett: F-r-i-z-z-l-i-e. I believe that was the way it was in the paper.

(End)

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