Faye Ferguson

Faye Ferguson, Candler Jones interview

(Sister and brother)

Leicester (Sandy Mush), N.C.

Conducted by Stephen Cain

Wed. Aug. 5, 1998.

(Tape 1, Side A)

Cain: Pretty good tape recorder. Faye Ferguson interview and Candler Jones interview, 1:30 Wednesday, Aug. 5, 1998. Okay. Well, well's just kind of, I'll tell you a little bit about what I want to do, and then we'll just talk, or anything you want to say. I want to ask a little about your ancestors that came to the area, at least the things that were handed down in family stories. I want to ask you about the old homeplace and the importance of family and economic changes, and then I'll ask you, as you see the changes happening, what you think has been good and what you think is being lost, because I think there has been a little bit of both. And that's it. There's really no right answers. It just, you know, I'm interested in what you have to say and how you see things. I guess my first question would be: I spent my childhood in Tennessee, but I was really raised in Michigan. So, I have always thought of myself as a Yankee. That may change. There are other people that would be city folk or country folk. And these are the mountains. Do you view yourself as mountain folk?

Ferguson: Oh yes, sure.

Jones: Mountain or hillbilly.

Cain: Well, you know. Hillbillies. I look to the past, there were some bands that called themselves hillbilly bands, and that was okay, but then people started, outsiders started using that as a dirty word.

Ferguson: Uh huh.

Jones: Yeah.

Ferguson: Putting you down because you're

Cain: Did you ever run into that?

Ferguson: Uh huh.

Cain: People on the outside, what would they think of you because you were from the mountains?

Ferguson: Well I think they just thought of you as below par, you know, you weren't educated.

Cain: Did that bother you, or did you figure that was their problem?

Ferguson: Well that's their problem (laugh).

Cain: When you had told me that you and your husband had gone up to Michigan. Did he work for Ford or.

Ferguson: No, I think he worked for GM when he worked there.

Cain: Was that up there that you ran into kind of that prejudice against mountain folk?

Ferguson: Oh yes.

Cain: You proud of being from the mountains?

Ferguson: Sure. Couldn't be any prouder to be the Queen of England. (Laugh).

Cain: She sure had problems with her family, though. Candler, where did your first name come from, do you know?

Jones: My mother, she was raised, she came from over close to Candler, the Candler place, you know, and I always figured it was because she came from over there that she named me Candler. I always thought that. She never said for sure.

Cain: Well there were some places if you'd come from you wouldn't have wanted to have that name.

Jones: Then my daddy used to have a lawyer whose last name was Candler, and I have wondered regularly, that might have had a little bearing on it too.

Cain: It's not a first name everyone shares.

Jones: No. I used to didn't like it. Wished they'd of named me something else, but now I like.

Cain: Kind of grew into your name.

Jones: A shorter name or a more common name, you know.

Cain: Did they call you something different when you were in school?

Jones: Well... there was a man started calling me Cottonhead, and everybody, I went by the name of Cotton all the way through school, nearly.

Cain: But you like Candler better.

Jones: Yeah, but now and then they still somebody calls me Cotton.

Cain: Then you know it's someone whose known you from way back.

Jones: Yeah, some of them old timers.

Cain: When, to the best of your family memory, did the first of your people come to Sandy Mush?

Jones: Well, it goes back to my great-great grandfather. We've got a history on them. He came to Sandy Mush, must have been one of the first settlers, one of them.

Cain: Pretty close to 1800, then?

Jones: I'd say close to 1800.

Cain: And his name was?

Both: Ebed.

Jones: Ebed. E-B-E-B. He's buried up here at the Methodist Church.

Cain: The Jones Valley Baptist, is that named for your family?

Jones: I think so. I heard when they first built the first Jones Valley, the first Jones Valley washed away in 78. There come a flood. It was beside the creek. And I've heard that when they built the first one, that Josiah Jones would give $100 if they'd just name it Jones'Valley. I heard that, you know, and he give $100. That was a lot of money then.

Cain: He was a farmer?

Jones: Yeah, he was a farmer, Josiah Jones.

Cain: Josiah?

Jones: J-O-S-I-A-H.

Cain: How much land did he have in the valley here?

Jones: Well I guess at one time he probably owned a thousand acres along here.

Cain: Some of that was sold over time?

Jones: Yeah. Divided up and sold.

Cain: How much do you have left now?

Jones: Well, I've got some of my great grandfather's place. His name was Alan, He was Ebed's son. And I own his place over on Sugar Creek. I guess it's just part of what his place had been. There's about 150 acres over there.

Cain: Do you have somebody farming that now.

Jones: No, I farm it.

Cain: Oh wow. You're how old?

Jones: Seventy-five.

Cain: You put out hay or cattle or tobacco.

Jones: Yeah I feed cattle all winter when its cold. I don't hay farm. I don't tend the tobacco any more. My nephew tends it. Gets the tobacco out.

Cain: What's his name?

Jones: Tim. Timothy.

Cain: How much tobacco is that?

Jones: He's got about two acres and a half.

Cain: He can do that, then. I know some of the people.

Jones: Works for Larry (Larry Cook, Cook's Grading) and comes in in the evening. And on Saturdays.

Cain: Its kind of hard to make a living just farming.

Jones. Yeah. yeah. Young people can't hardly make it just farming.

Cain: Your people have been around forever, not forever but fora long time.

Ferguson: Uh huh. The Jones have. See that Ebed, he had two daughters that married Fergusons. And they settled in Haywood County. What section is that?

Jones: Fines Creek.

Ferguson: So my husband comes down from they.

Cain: But they started off in Sandy Mush and then they moved, and then you descended and came back.

Ferguson: We was raised here, naturally, but those two Fergusons, that married the Ferguson men, they stayed over there but they had.

Cain: Had children that.

Ferguson: Came back over here. And this, where I live now, and my brother's place over there, it's off of that Ebed Jones owned this. We're still living on land that he owned. We've got some old deeds that were handed down, wills.

Cain: A lot of family history here, and your kin are buried in a cemetery. Both: Yes.

Cain: Some in Jones Valley?

Ferguson: Yeah, our grandpa's father and grandmother, and our daddy. The Fergusons, they're buried up at the

Methodist Church. And my husband and his father and mother's down at the lower Methodist Church.

Cain: Lower Methodist Church?

Both: Payne's Chapel.

Cain: When did they stop having services at Payne's Chapel?

Jones: It's been forever.

Ferguson: Twenty years or more ago.

Jones: Twenty five years, 25 or 30 years.

Cain: It's a nice little church, pretty. I understand they just painted it last year. It's already peeling.

Ferguson: I know it. Somebody done a bad job.

Cain: They didn't scrape it down, I think. You were here for the, you go to Jones Valley Baptist?

Ferguson: We both go.

Cain: You were here, of course, when the flood.

Cain: The waters didn't get all that.

Ferguson: Oh yes. I didn't sleep any that night. I sat over there in a chair and watched the water down there in the field. It was just continuously lightening. You could see, we had, I had some cows, four or five or six down there, and I was worried about them, but I finally spotted them up close to the road. You could see water all over those fields.

Cain: They had sense enough to get out.

Ferguson: Yes they did.

Jones: Our grandfather is buried at Jones Valley Cemetery, and our great grandfather and great-great's buried at the Methodist Church.

Cain: It seems to me - I was looking at the graveyards - that I see the names of the old families both places.

Ferguson: This is the oldest cemetery, the Methodist Church.

Cain: There are some stones there that have just eroded away. You can't even see what was ever written on it.

Ferguson: Just two years ago, we redone. We had some new stones put up of Ebed and his wife, and another one.

Cain: Did you have people in the Civil War?

Jones. Our grandfather was in the Civil War.

Ferguson: At Chicamagua.

Cain: He was killed?

Both: That was our grandfather Howell.

Ferguson: He was my mother's

Jones: On our mother's side.

Cain: He was fighting for the South.

Jones: I think he was on the southern side, I think, and our Grandfather Jones, he was in the Civil War, but I never did just exactly hear which side he was on.

Cain: I heard that, while most of the people out of this valley were on the Confederate side, some were on the Union side, too, and that would be a little bit touchy sometimes after the war.

Ferguson: Which one was it that ran through the cornfield?

Jones: Well I think that was Grandfather Jones that they dragged him in there on one side, but he didn't want to be on that side, and he run off. That's what I heard.

Cain: You don't know which side.

Jones: I don't know which side that was. I should have asked my daddy, but back then I wasn't interested in that, and I really don't know which side that was.

Cain: I understand also they had some guerrillas, some people that were just being like bandits.

Ferguson: I know.

Jones: I heard that. Some mean people that would steal and everything else while the men folks was gone.

Cain: Burder Reeves tells a story about, after the war but before the menfolk got back, some carpetbaggers were coming through stripping just everything they could take. He had a great great-great-grand nephew or something like that who was 13 or 14, hid in the old tobacco barn, got the drop on them, saved the horse. Do you have any family stories handed down about for things that your folk did?

Jones: No, none of that.

Cain: More recently, family stories?

Jones: I can't think of nothing else. Just routine living.

Cain: Well that can be hard enough, sometimes. The two of you live together. Is that good for both of you?

Ferguson: Well, yes, cause he was living by hisself when my husband died. Well, I'd have been by myself.

Jones: She can cook for me, and then I'm doing lots of work looking after her farm.

Cain: Sounds like a pretty good partnership.

Jones: Yeah.

Ferguson: I was in a wheelchair for a long time, about 10 years I guess.

Cain: What had happened to you.

Ferguson: Well, I just started losing use of my legs. They first thought they could be tumor or something on the lumbar spine, but they did surgery and found it wasn't. It was deterioration of the spinal cord, and they said it was sort of like multiple sclerosis in a way. It started out the same way.

Cain: Then it started getting better?

Ferguson: It started getting better a few years ago.

Jones: It was a miracle. Her getting older too, but then it got better, and she can walk again.

Cain: That's great.

Jones: She went all over the house in a wheelchair. Had to take a wheelchair to church.

Ferguson: I drove up and somebody rolled out to get me.

Cain: So they're pretty good for being helpful.

Ferguson: Uh huh.

Cain: To the people in Sandy Mush, how important is kin?

Ferguson: Well you just have a sort of closer feeling, I guess. You know, with your kinfolks, you feel a little closer to them, usually.

Cain: Is that part of what makes it a community, the people being related to each other? Of course, kin don't

always get along.

Ferguson: No, no. Then there's a lot of people that's not akin that you feel just as close to though, in a way.

Cain: I wanted to ask about that, too. Things about people doing things for each other in the community. Can you tell me a little about this?

Ferguson: Well, it's a little different now than it used to be. It used to be, it used to be if somebody got sick, why, you know, they didn't go, too many, to the hospital, and as they got old and helpless, why just neighbors and people went in and helped take care of them, and also, if like they had a barn building, they'd help build barns and things like that, but it's not too much that way any more.

Cain: Candler, what do you think caused it to change?

Jones: Just more modern, just come that time, I reckon.

Cain: Well is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Jones: Well, I guess it's a bad thing.

Cain: There are benefits of modern, but there is a price too.

Jones: Yes.

Ferguson: Well, the government took away some of that when they started, you know, of course a lot of people needed help, but, you see, that took away some of that. Now so many people rely on federal help or county or whatever.

Cain: That they don't help each other. Were you on barn raisings? Did you ever do any barn raising?

Jones: I didn't, but when I was just a boy, I went with my daddy to one where they had one.

Cain: Do you remember where that was?

Jones: It was up on Sugar Creek above my place. A fellow by the name of Ezell King. They already had the logs pulled out of the woods and piled to where they were going to build it. Some of us were notching, putting notches where they fit 'em together and rolled 'em up and put it up.

Cain: How many people were there, do you recollect?

Jones: I guess there's 15 people, 20.

Cain: And women?

Jones: Well there's some women, helped get dinner and had a good dinner. That was the custom. Women folks had a good dinner for 'em. I was just pretty small. That's the only one I was ever at. Before that, they had a lot of them, I reckon. It was kind of dwindling out, then. They used to have a lot of corn shuckings now. And I've been to a lot of them.

Cain: Tell me about that.

Jones: Oh, people would have a corn shucking and let it be known all over the community, and they'd build a good crowd most of the time.

Cain: They'd get a big pile in the yard.

Ferguson: They'd haul it in out of the field.

Jones: Pretty close to the barn, shucking all the way around the pile.

Cain: Feeder corn or eating corn?

Jones: No, it was corn for grain that they put in their cribs to make bread out of and cattle feed. Shuck an ear and

throw the shucks behind you, start a separate pile of it.

Cain: Would the women shuck too or was it just pretty much the men?

Jones: Well sometimes some women shucked some.

Ferguson: That was more or less after they fed 'em, wasn't it?

Jones: Yeah. They would shuck at times.

Ferguson: I remember being at corn shuckings.

Jones: Sometimes they had it at night, and they didn't feed 'em. The most I went to was at night, and they didn't feed 'em.

Cain: Was that because at night more people had day jobs.

Jones: Yes, always busy, day jobs.

Ferguson: And children, you know, could come too.

Jones. I was glad to go to a corn shucking, could be late to home.

Cain: I was told during the season, when the corn was coming in, they'd sort of stagger it so it would be one day here and the next day, just go around for a week or 10 days to one corn shucking or another.

Jones. Yes. Somebody had one every few days. Every few nights. And I reckon they used to, before my time, had them during the day sometimes. They'd shuck all day and have a big dinner.

Cain: Was this also a social, music and dancing.

Jones: Sometimes they'd have somebody to make some music, get all shucked out and make music.

Ferguson: I have heard in older times they'd have a jar of white whiskey down in the middle of that corn pile (laugh). I could have got it all shucked.

Jones: To get to that liquor. I think they did. I heard they did.

Cain: I was talking to Mr. King about that. He said he heard that too. That's what they always told him, but he never found it.

Ferguson: Was that Don?

Cain: Yeah. The other story was that, if it was a red ear, you could kiss a pretty girl.

Ferguson: Well, there was something about a red ear of corn.

Cain: Of course if you were shucking, what good would it do you to find the red ear? Maybe you get to kiss the guy of your choice.

Ferguson: I don't know (laugh).

Jones: Imagine something like that.

Cain: Tell me about your old homeplace.

Jones: You mean about the building on it?

Cain: Sure. And where was it?

Jones: Well, I was born down here where (inaudible) Ball is, there's another old house down there. Lived down there until I was 'bout six year old, and we moved up on Sugar Creek.

Ferguson: That old log house on Sugar Creek.

Jones: Have you been up Sugar Creek?

Cain: I have, but I don't remember it.

Ferguson: This road right here.

Cain: I know the road.

Jones: Do you know the log house on the right up there? Anyhow, we moved up there on Sugar Creek and, there was another log house that stood below the one that's there now. We moved into it. When I was about 12 year old, my daddy bought this other log house from a Hayes fellow that lived up the road and built them a new frame house. They sold it to my daddy. He tore it down and marked the logs so he could get it back just like it come down. That was when I was about a 12 year old. Then we lived in it.

Cain: So you had several houses then.

Jones: Yep.

Cain: There's no one house that's particularly in your memory?

Jones: Well the one that's over there now is in my memory good.

Ferguson: For the old homeplace, that's mostly it.

Cain: And that's where, where is that one again?

Ferguson: Over here, first house up Sugar Creek. There is a red barn on the left of the road and an old log house on the right.

Jones: It's a two-story log house. And they said that house that stood on up the road at Hayes place about half a mile on up the road, and it was built from logs that was cut and put up way back before the Civil War, the way I hear it.

Cain: The one you lived in just up Sugar Creek. The two-story. The front of it, did it have one front door or.

Jones: It just had one.

Cain: And if you go in that door, what was the room that would be on the right hand side?

Ferguson: Well, we called it our front room then. Living room we'd say now.

Cain: And on the left hand side?

Ferguson: Was a bedroom. Then upstairs. There was two bedrooms upstairs.

Cain: Kind of one room thick?

Jones: Yeah.

Cain: I mean it wasn't two rooms deep. You had a kitchen ell in the back?

Jones: They built a kitchen on the back.

Ferguson: It's like a shed built off the back. It's long. Never did put no partition between what you say the dining room and kitchen. It's all together, one long room.

Cain: Did it have two chimneys or one chimney.

Jones: It just had one chimney.

Cain: Was that in the middle or was that at the.

Jones: It was in the middle. On the middle of one end.

Cain: Okay, right. On the living room end?

Jones: Yeah.

Cain: The parlor, the living, the room you lived in.

Jones: Well we used the fireplace a while and then everyone went to heaters to save more wood and warm the

house better too than the fireplace. A lot of the heat goes up the chimney, you know.

Ferguson: We heard the logs was really the kitchen of another house. The (inaudible name) place that Jack Worley used to be the high sheriff of Buncombe County. It was his place. And it was just the kitchen part.

Jones: So it really would have been a big house if it was just a kitchen. Yeah, they said he was the high sheriff of Buncombe County.

Cain: So that house would have been built originally, any idea?

Jones: It's been before the Civil War, maybe a long time before it, I'd say.

Cain: How long has it been since anybody's lived in there?

Jones: It's been 30 year, no, there's been some people lived in it until about 72. About 25 years.

Cain: Do you still own that?

Jones: Yeah.

Cain: Is it in pretty good shape, or is it getting kind of old? Well, it's old of course, but I meant, is it falling down or is it still together.

Both: No.

Jones: It looks, just drive up that way.

Cain: I'll do that if that's okay. I'd love to take a look at it.

Jones: Red barn on the left. It's on the right.

Cain: One of the things I'm kind of interested in is the way that mountain families were set up. The man would do a lot of the field work and the woman would do a lot of the house work, but the women would work in the field too?

Jones: My mamma did.

Ferguson: Yes they did that, too.

Cain: Some things were written about that portrayed a man as kind of the patriarch, the big boss. Was that true or was that a myth or was it a little bit of both. How would you?

Ferguson: Pretty true, wasn't it? He made all of the decisions I think, my dad did.

Jones: Yeah.

Ferguson: My mother went along with him, I guess.

Cain: Okay, all right. Wives today, the younger people today. Is it still that way or?

Ferguson: I don't think so. Not too much.

Cain: I got a couple of daughters that I don't think anyone could tell them what to do.

Ferguson: Of course my father, he was not an overpowering man. He was just a meek kind of man. I don't think I ever heard them quarrel. Did you?

Jones: No.

Cain: I asked you a little bit about, you're both active in Jones Chapel. You're part of the committee, how is that?

Jones: In the church, you mean?

Cain: Yeah.

Ferguson: He's a deacon in the church.

Jones: I don't feel like a deacon much, but I reckon ain't nobody worthy of it, really. But I'm a deacon, and I'm a Sunday school superintendent, not much good on either one of it, but I am.

Cain: Rev. Gillespie said that probably not too many more than two dozen people attend. Ferguson: We have some more come in at preaching hour that's not members. Pretty faithful coming to church. Jones: People just lost interest. They just don't go to church any more. They say its like that, every church nearly, lots of churches.

Cain: Lots of churches, that's true. I didn't know whether it was the old people kind of die off and the young aren't interested.

Ferguson: They have too many other things to do. Fun things, you know. Jones: Go to the lake or somewhere.

Cain: I heard that years and years ago, just an awful lot of work on a farm, and the kids would work a lot too. Sunday was your day. Ferguson: Uh huh.

Cain: Just like you used to look forward to the corn shuckings because you could get out of the house. Jones: Yep.

Cain: Sunday'd be the day that, sure, you could go hear the preacher, but then you could socialize. Ferguson: Play, yeah. After that.

Cain: So there was a lot of social as well as religious. Is that?

Ferguson: Well, we didn't go anywhere. We just, children got together and played, and hung around like that. Cain: It seems to me, and I was just wondering, that church now is more religious, well, or less social. People would go in the old days for both the religious and the social, to meet their neighbors, and so on. And now, they have other things for social, so there is less reason to go

Jones: Back early there. Not many people had cars to go off anywhere, so we stayed at the church, meet the people.

Cain: There was an expression I heard that some people have used, some didn't. If I referred to somebody and said he was a "good liver," what would that mean? Ferguson: That they provided, had plenty, I don't know.

Cain: That may be an expression that's from a different area, then. Let me ask it a different way. How do you judge, how to you measure a person's worth as a person? What's important in a person to you in terms of what you value?

Ferguson: Honest, honest person.

Jones: Friendly.

Ferguson: We live in, you know, the help if needed to be, kind and gentle.

Cain: Neighborly?

Ferguson: Uh huh.

Cain: Set a good table? Help out? Are these things that have been changing in recent years?

Ferguson: I think so.

Jones: Yeah. Not as many close neighbors as we used to have.

Ferguson: People don't visit any more like they used to.

Cain: What was visiting like?

Ferguson: You just went to your neighbors. You didn't have to call them, set no appointment to go. You just went, and they did you the same way, maybe going up the road by your house. They'd stop and rest a while, visit. They don't do that any more.

Cain: But that was nice?

Ferguson: Yes.

Cain: Fay. You really lived somewhere else, so you got a chance to see up close people that were different from folks in the mountains. What are some of the ways in ways, some of the differences you noticed between the way the people of Sandy Mush were and Lincoln Park in Michigan.

Ferguson: Well, I just, of course living in the country was all the difference in the world than living in the city. You just really didn't get to know people - I didn't - like you would here. That's just about, I didn't know 'em much, I guess. Just a few close ones. Well, I knew some more people from here, you know.

Cain: Up there?

Ferguson: Yes. There were a lot of people from Madison County up there that I didn't know before I went up there, but you still had a lot of people you knew, I mean from your section of the country, you stayed closer with them.

Cain: Why did you move in the first place?

Ferguson: Well, a lot of the, back in the war, a lot of the people went up there and worked in the factories during the war. And, of course, my husband had been up there before.

Cain: Ah, okay. During the war? Or, before you guys were married?

Ferguson: Uh huh. Oh yeah.

Jones. Yeah, there's a spell here, when the war first started, a lot of people was going to Newport News, Virginia. Ship building, you know.

Ferguson: And Detroit.

Jones: And then they kept a going to Detroit. There wasn't no jobs around here much. A lot of people went.

Cain: It was hard on farming.

Jones: Yeah, it made farming help scarcer, with so many going off and going into the service, too.

Ferguson: But I met a lot of people up there that I really liked, made friends with.

Cain: But a lot of those were also people from down here?

Ferguson: Well, some of them were. Some of them. I met one girl, she come from up Saint, Sioux, what is that up toward the Straight?

Cain: Sault Ste. Marie.

Ferguson: Yes. And she come from there, and she was a real sweet person. I liked her a lot.

Cain: But you came back here.

Ferguson: Well my mother and daddy was. My daddy was getting disabled, and I needed to come back and help with them.

Jones: Our daddy had been married twice. His first wife died. Had one son from his first wife, so I had a half-brother. And my daddy, he married my mama when he was 50 years old then, and my mama was right at 40, 39, so we had older parents, you know, but we loved them, but it caused them to get older quicker on us. They both died

the same year then. My daddy died in January and my momma died in July, in '55.

Ferguson: I was just 30 year old when they died.

Jones: I was 33. I was 32.

Cain: Tell me about when they wanted to come in with a nuclear waste dump?

Ferguson: Oh, that was really (laugh). That had us all up in arms. We didn't like that at all.

Jones: Didn't like that at all.

Ferguson: They talked about having to move the cemetery and all that. Really, everybody was up in arms about that.

Cain: Did you do part of the quilt?

Ferguson: Well, I must have. Let's see. I have different quilts. I guess that was the one they made with the different things of Sandy Mush.

Cain: The churches and people's different memories.

Ferguson: Yes. I did this church, Jones Valley. I did the new one, and somebody else did the old one, the old church. And then this cabin. My sister turned that in, but, I did the quilting on it. She turned it in as her's.

Cain: Is that the Cy Jones?

Jones: Yeah. Cy Jones.

Cain: That was, were you up at the Community Center when Model, the secretary of interior, came in in a helicopter.

Ferguson: Yeah. Un huh.

Jones: Yes. Helicopter came in. At the old Civic Center, they had a meeting or two over there. I went to several of the meetings.

Ferguson: I didn't go there because I wasn't walking. I set in a car up here.

Cain: Well if they done that, it would have been the end of Sandy Mush.

Jones: Yep. Thought about it. Didn't start doing it. Unreasonable, wasn't it? Unreasonable.

Ferguson: For everywhere else they wanted it, too.

Cain: No one wants it, but when they started doing all that stuff, they didn't make provisions for taking care of it. They ought to clean up their own waste, I believe. The government licensed these things, but they didn't figure out what they were going to do with it.

Ferguson: Everybody was up in arms quite a bit.

Jones: Yeah, I believe everybody would have gone to court on that, didn't want it.

Cain: I heard a pretty good story where one of the surveyors, one of the people studying for that, parked his car in one of the coves. As soon as he got out and walked away a little bit. Some people with rifles put some holes in his car to show he wasn't welcome. Did you hear that or?

Jones: I don't remember whether I heard it or no.

Cain: Well, I was told that, but I didn't find it in the papers, so I didn't know whether it happened or not.

Jones: Somebody might have made it up or it might have happened. I don't remember.

Cain: I do know there was one fellow from Louisiana that was out looking for property, just innocent out looking for property, and was walking up one of the coves, and the next thing he knows, there was a guy with a shotgun in

his face because he thought he was a surveyor for the Department of Energy. That did happen. He didn't get shot, though. And he apologized later. I was talking with Bill Duckett who, of course, took a major role in fighting that.

Jones: Yeah, he did.

Cain: And we were talking good times versus bad times. Of course, a lot of what went before was really pretty good. You kind of forget sometimes it was pretty rough. You didn't have electricity. No good roads. People died young sometimes. Sometimes they lived forever, but. I guess what I'm asking not very clearly is, when you look back on what times were, you remember the good things.

Ferguson: Uh huh.

Cain: Do you remember the bad things too?

Ferguson: Well I guess we thought it was bad then, but as I look back now, I'm proud that we lived like we did. It makes me appreciate it. We did live a hard life. We didn't have a lot of extras, you know, electricity.

Cain: But what made it good. That's what I want to know?

Ferguson: It was love, I guess. We loved one another. Our parents loved us, and they tried.

Jones: We was all happy, I reckon.

Ferguson: Teaches the right things in life. We had plenty to eat and clothes to wear. We had to take care of our clothes. We went to school, and when we came home, we had to take what we wore to school off and put on some rags, but we just.

Jones: Mama used to milk, milk cows. And she done more milking that anybody. We kept chickens and got eggs and made butter, and sold the eggs and butters, and she'd order our clothes from Sears and Roebuck.

Cain: So she was earning the clothes money for you folk.

Both: Yeah.

Fegruson. Then when the Sears and Roebuck catalogue come in every year, that was the height of everything (laugh).

Jones: We used to look at them bicycles, and I wished I could have a bicycle, but I never did get one.

Cain: You never got one, eh? When did you get your first car?

Jones: I was 20 year old, just lacked a month or two of being 21.

Cain: What kind was it?

Jones: It was a '39 Ford sedan V-8.

Ferguson: You had a bicycle after you finished high school.

Jones: I finally got a bicycle, but I was grown before ever got ahold of a bicycle. Daddy didn't believe in spending money for a bicycle. I couldn't get no money.

Cain: But you bought the car yourself?

Jones: Yeah. I begin to raise a little tobacco crop. My dad began to let me have a little.

Cain: When did tobacco come into Sandy Mush, burley?

Jones: Well it surely didn't come in until along in the early '30s. There wasn't too many people raising it before 1930.

Cain: Back in the 1800s, was there a different tobacco they used?

Jones: They raised flue-cured tobacco.

Cain: Here? But then that kind of went out?

Jones: Yeah, they must have raised it up in the late 1800s even, and I reckon it finally got so it wouldn't even pay the warehouse bill, and everybody quit. Several years then, when I was just real young there, up to twice 10 year old, there wasn't hardly any tobacco in Sandy Mush as a period there. I don't know how far back that. It appeared there wasn't any tobacco raised.

Cain: But when it did come in, it gave people money they never had before.

Jones: Yeah.

Cain: That's how you got your car.

Jones: Yeah.

Cain: That was a pretty powerful car for that age, wasn't it?

Jones: Yeah. I believe I paid about $800 for it.

Ferguson: The tobacco was what people depended on then, after that, to live on.

Jones: My first tractor and hay bailer and stuff, I made payments when they come due, when I sold my tobacco.

Ferguson: And the man that owned the grocery store, he'd credit people (tape end).

(Tape 1, Side B)

Cain: Yeah, I want to get back.

Jones: Tobacco was all they did have. Bought groceries and raised a family out of the tobacco crop.

Cain: So you had Will Waldrop's store, and his children ran it for a while before he died.

Jones: Yes, his daughter.

Cain: And was there another store also, or was that the main store.

Jones: Carl Ball finally took over up there after the Waldrups quit, and then Wallace Worley ran a story down near where the old church is at. There's a building down there, in the 40s.

Cain: And they'd hold you on credit until the crop came in.

Jones: Yeah.

Cain: When was that? When would you get your money for your crop?

Jones: Sometimes the first tobacco sold out the first part of December. It opened earlier than that, the market did. But then it would be about the first week in December before you'd start getting any money out of your tobacco.

Cain: So you'd pay your bills and have something for Christmas?

Jones: That's about all.

Cain: Talk about tenant farmers. You don't have any tenant farmers now, though, do you?

Jones: No. Back then, about anybody that owned much land at all had a tenant farmer. The Fergusons here owned all this land through here. They had five or six tenant farmers.

Ferguson: Every little house and every little cove.

Jones: Had a log cabin.

Cain: What would be the arrangements, typically, with the tenant farmer?

Jones: Well I think, where that tenant farmer lives on the landlord's place, he tended the corn crop, I think the

landlord got half of it. He furnished the horses and mules to plow with and everything. But if you furnished, some tenants furnished their own, furnished everything, then they'd get two-thirds of it. And they used to, people would clean up new grounds, they'd call them new grounds, just go in the woods and clean up the fields, and the landlord would let them have everything they made on it for about two years when they did it.

Cain: Pretty hard work.

Jones: A lot of 'em done that in these mountains.

Cain: Were the tenant farmers ever able to buy land of their own?

Jones: I don't think there's any of them able to, hardly.

Cain: That was a pretty rough life.

Jones: Yeah.

Cain: You never could get built up, get ahead.

Jones: Couldn't built up nothing, no. They just subsisted.

Cain: How long has it been, in your recollection, since there have been any tenant farmers around?

Jones: Thirty years.

Ferguson: Marion (name inaudible). He lived up on the Ferguson place and farmed.

Jones: Twenty year, maybe. Fifteen.

Cain: What do you see as the future for Sandy Mush? I mean the mountain stays. The mountain is the mountain.

Jones: Yeah.

Cain: But the community, the people?

Ferguson: They be more people move in, you know, buy property and move in. There will be less farming. The farming lands, all of these mountains and hills used to be clear. They're all grown back up because there's nobody clearing any land any more, and they're just selling out to people building houses. It will be more population.

Cain: The population has been going down for a long time.

Ferguson: Yes.

Cain: And then it started back up again with new people.

Ferguson: But they don't, we don't have any of the new people that's moved in come to our church. And I don't believe hardly any of the churches. I don't know whether any of them goes to church, or they go out of here or whatever.

Cain: The sense of community, is that being lost?

Ferguson: I don't think so.

Jones: Thirty year from now, there might be no farming none much in Sandy Mush.

Cain: And then the memory of what's gone before will be lost?

Jones: Yeah.

Ferguson: A lot of the old family names are gone. He's the last Jones. There's no more Fergusons. Now there's a new family, Jones, moved up here, but they're from somewhere else. And the Rogers is gone. The Waldrops is gone. The Hayes is gone.

Cain: You've got Duckett and Surrett.

Ferguson: A few of their, yes. The Kings. There aren't many Kings left. There used to be a lot of Kings on Sandy

Mush. Clarks disappeared too, aren't they.

Jones: Is there any Clarks around?

Ferguson: I was trying to think. I don't believe there is.

Jones: There used to be a lot of Clarks. That was the old names, the Clarks and the Ducketts and the Worleys, Wells, Jones, Fergusons.

Cain: There's still a few Wells around.

Jones: Yeah. The Engels (?), there used to be Engles (?) up on Sugar Creek. The Woodys.

Ferguson: Are dwindling down.

Jones: There are two Woody men left on Sugar Creek.

Cain: There was also a Woody family in Catalooch. Are they related, do you know?

Jones: Well, they could be. These Woodys here, their grandfather originally come from Spring Creek. Some of 'em come up.

Cain: I had heard that Sandy Mush had been pretty rough in years past.

Jones: Used to have a pretty bad reputation, lot of drinking and stuff like that. Weren't no stealing, not much of that. Several people scattered around back in the '30s and '40s that made liquor and on back in these coves.

Cain: And more recent than that, too.

Jones: Yeah.

Cain: I've come across some of that.

Jones: Yeah.

Ferguson: If you said you were from Sandy Mush, they looked down. That's what I've heard. I don't know, really.

Cain: That's been a few years, though?

Jones: Yeah.

Cain: Thank you very much. (Tape off, resume after casual conversation)

Cain: So, this is, how many years ago are we talking?

Ferguson: Well that's been, that was before, 35 or 40 years ago, I would guess. But anyhow, we hadn't missed the cow for several days. And finally, somebody heard it mooing up there, and we went up there to look. And it had been up there about a week. And it was so thin that it, well, my husband got down in the still with it and kind of helped it up out of there. It had rained, and there was a little puddle of water in there and some dry leaves. It couldn't get out of there. It just stayed there and bawled. And another cove over here they was a still, me and another woman found that, and there was one back on my brother's back in that way, and then we knew a bootlegger up here. We went in and reported it and they got him (laugh). They made a raid on Sandy Mush and got him. Tore the stills up. They didn't catch him.

Cain: Oh, okay, yeah. The attitude towards the law, I understand, wasn't always all that good.

Ferguson: No. No. Most law-abiding people don't go around with them. Some buddied with them. Some of the bootleggers.

Cain: You mean they buddied with the law?

Ferguson: That's what some people thought, that the bootleggers bought 'em off, in other words. It wasn't

nothing to see a big old bottle of white liquor.

Jones: Mostly bought it in half-a-gallon jars. I've seen bunches. Start a jar around, it wouldn't, didn't last a half hour and a half a gallon be gone.

Ferguson: There's an old rock cliff just down the road down there, and a lot of the men got to where they'd get under that rock cliff. They'd build a fire back under there. They'd come out and they'd be as black as real black people. They'd stay in their all that night. (Laugh) It was something else.

Jones: If you seen it all, you could of wrote a story. I can't describe all of it.

Cain: So Sandy Mush did earn its reputation.

Both: Yes.

Ferguson: This one old fellow here, we liked him, he was a likable fellow. He lived up Sugar Creek above us, and he'd come up the road and you could hear him ah-singing when he was a way down the road down here. What was it he sung, do you remember the song?

Jones: I can't think of it right now.

Ferguson: It wasn't "This world is not my home." It was something else. And then about the time that Richard Nixon and what was his.

Jones: Elsenhower.

Ferguson: Yeah. When they was running for president and vice president. He'd be so drunk he couldn't hardly walk. He'd come up the road, "Vote for Dick Elsenhower!" Ha. (laugh) He'd just be a hollering, "Vote for Dick Elsenhower."

Cain: This a pretty Republican area?

Ferguson: No, no. It's more Democrat.

Cain: Really? Okay.

Ferguson: There's a few more Republicans than there used to be, but. The years we were growing up they were mostly Democrats.

Jones: We used to have a justice of the peace on Sandy Mush. And we had a sheriff from Sandy Mush. Two or three sheriffs, but they done away with that. I've seen trial cases at the justice of the peace. And this store down here where the old store used to be, there was a tenant farmer and a farmer that got in a lawsuit. They was going to try it down there in that old storehouse. They wasn't going to have no store right that time. It was between times. Somebody had rented. And I was just pretty small. Only three men were on the jury, and my daddy was one of 'em. Well, they had the sheriff and he took, they heard the testimony. That justice of the peace. He was the judge. The sheriff took the jury, and they made a decision and they come back.

Cain: What did they decide, do you know?

Jones: They decided in favor of the tenant farmer.

Ferguson: The farmer and the tenant farmer both, they had their own lawyers, but it was just members of the community, wasn't it?

Jones: Yeah.

Cain: They weren't real lawyers?

Jones: No, they wasn't real lawyers.

Ferguson: This one fellow, the tenant's lawyer. He couldn't talk too good, or something. They'd come up with something, and he'd say, "I ject, I ject right thar." (Laugh) When he objected, he'd say, "I 'ject, I 'ject right thar."

Jones: I think he cussed. I think he said, I 'ject to such damn stuff."

Cain: But the tenant won.

Jones: The tenant won.

Cain: And it was a dispute over how much they owed?

Ferguson: Was it tobacco sticks?

Jones: I don't know. What one was supposed to do, and what the other one was supposed to do. Maybe they had a contract wrote out, but this tenant farmer's contact had got. The landlord was making him move, but the tenant farmer had a contract to the end of the year. And they thought the landlord's daughter had slipped in there and stole the contract. But they voted in favor of the tenant, though. He got to stay on, but I think he moved out before the year was over. But that was some trial.

Ferguson: Everybody laughed, remember that, "I 'ject, I 'ject."

Cain: I see a pillow with some quilt. Are you a quilter?

Ferguson: Yeah. I quilted quite a bit, but I've not in the last two or three years, but I've made several quilts.

Cain: Are there some patterns that you favor?

Ferguson: Well, not especially. Several of mine I made just different squares. They'd all be different. I made some the same, but most of them. The last quilt I made was the bear's paw, you know. It was supposed to be like a bear's paw.

Cain: Was that out of a book or out of your mind, imagination?

Ferguson: It was out of a book.

Jones: Talking about that justice of the peace, he married a lot of couples from Sandy Mush at that time, a lot of them.

Cain: Was he a lawyer or just somebody that was elected.

Jones: He was elected. He lived over Worley Cove over here. He was a deputy.

Cain: So you kind of had your own law in that sense.

Jones: Yeah.

Ferguson: Well, they had to. Back then, they had a Post Office on Sandy Mush. And telephones, and all of a sudden, all that went away. Didn't have that for a long time.

Cain: Do you remember when electricity came?

Ferguson: Uh huh.

Cain: That was about.

Ferguson: Well it was about.

Jones: I believe it come up Sandy Mush in '43 or '42 or '41.

Ferguson: It was up Sandy Mush, but it wasn't up Sugar Creek until after I finished high school.

Jones: It wasn't up Sugar Creek till '47. That's when they put it up Sugar Creek.

Cain: What's the first difference you could think of that it meant to you to have electricity?

Ferguson: Well, we could, the first thing, all we had was just the lights. But you could see better. That's a lot we

liked the best, I guess. We thought could see pretty good with the lamps, you know. We were used to it. But to have lights. I guess about the next thing we got finally was a washing machine or a refrigerator.

Cain: Before that, you had to wash by hand.

Ferguson: Yeah. I've done that, rubbed them on a scrub board, boiling in the old black pot, get the dirt out, especially the men's clothes and white clothes. You'd boil and fill up that pot with water the night before, and get your wood ready, and strike a match under the pot.

Cain: How long would it take to heat up?

Ferguson: Well if you had a pretty good fire, it didn't take awful long. You could make a big fire out under a pot. Get to boiling pretty good.

Jones: I was 24 year old before I lived in a house that had electric lights.

Cain: You had to haul your own water?

Ferguson: No.

Cain: You had gravity.

Ferguson: We had a spring house just outside the kitchen there a little, so we had plenty of water, but you had to carry it in a bucket and put it in the pot. And when the clothes got through boiling, you dipped them out with an old peg, a wooden peg handle, and then you took it back outside to the spring house and had your big water tubs there, and you rinsed them through that with your hand, just put them down like that, and you'd wring 'em out and take 'em to the clothes line. It took a day to do the family wish, a good day.

Jones: And I done my farming with horses and mules and different things until I was 32 or 33. (Tape off, resume)

Cain: You were talking about the naming of things. You said Raymond?

Ferguson: Raymond used to live in a little house in the cove over there, and they named the field after him, Raymond Bottom

Cain: So it was Raymond bottom.

Ferguson: Raymond bottom.

Cain: Then you had a corn mill.

Ferguson: Named a stream, creek after that. It washed away. Was that the time of the flood?

Jones: I think it was 1916 or'17.

Cain: There was a 1916 flood.

Ferguson: It washed away.

Cain: Whose mill was it?

Ferguson: Well, it was on the Ferguson property.

Jones: It was on the Ferguson's when it washed away, but that Ebed Jones, our great-great grandpa, he might have been one of the original, put the first mill there, because one of the old wills told about leaving property to his wife above the mill and below the mill. And that mill been up in the early 1800s. As quick as they could get a mill built on Sandy Mush, I guess.

Cain: Then it would wash away in a flood.

Jones: Yes.

Ferguson: Not many years ago, there was still some timbers out there, that you could see signs. I don't know whether there are now or not.

Jones. No.

Cain: Did they dam it up?

Jones: They dammed it up.

Cain: So how big was the pond behind the mill?

Jones: Well, they said it backed up, the water up to Hog Eye. Do you know where Hog Eye, the bridge is?

Cain: Yeah. So that would be a couple hundred feet?

Jones: Five hundred feet.

Cain: Five hundred feet. That's a pretty good pond. There must have been fishing then.

Jones: I heard it backed up to Hog Eye Road.

Cain: And when you take your corn in to be ground.

Ferguson: That was before out time. They ground wheat there, too. And corn, make flower and corn meal. It was the mainstay of Sandy Mush back in them days.

Jones: People grew a lot of wheat back then. The thrashing machine would come through to the farms and thrash their wheat. And they'd have big dinners then.

Cain: So the thrashing machines. Everyone didn't own one, though.

Ferguson: No. They would come from somewhere else.

Cain: They'd thrash your wheat.

Jones: Every farm that had enough to meet their knife width.

Cain: And then you had the mill locally to make your flour and then also mill your corn.

Jones. Right. In our time, the, make (inaudible) up at Leicester, the Leicester Mill.

Cain: That was more recent then.

Jones: Yes.

Cain: Was that a water mill too?

Jones: No. It wasn't a water mill. When this washed away, it forced a lot of people to take their wheat to Leicester. They had a little corn mills all around after that, just small mills that people ran.

Cain: How would they make a corn mill, would that be two stones?

Jones: Yeah, two big stones you have to have. There is one of them stones, one or two of them, that was in that mill out there that washed away, up here at this first trailer on the right as you go up the road, in his yard. Stop some time and look at it.

Cain: So he's still got it then?

Jones: Yeah. They came out of the old mill, the old water mill.

Cain: I've seen some pictures of mills where they'd have the stones and then a horse or a mule would go around, walk around a circle on a big pole and turn the stone.

Ferguson: Wasn't it Grind Stone City in Michigan? That was interesting.

Cain: Yes, there is one. The old corn mills, though. They were water driven or horse driven, do you know?

Jones: One was horse driven.

Ferguson: But they had a motor.

Jones: A gasoline motor, the mill they had down there near church. They always had the mill on the other side down there, and every Saturday morning we'd shell about a bushel of corn and take it up to the little mill.

(Ferguson goes into the next room to answer a phone call).

Cain: So would you pay part of the corn.

Jones: Yeah, they took toll out of it.

Cain: What was the toll?

Jones: They had a measuring cup. I think it took an eighth, an eighth of a bushel, an eighth of it, I think that's what they took for grinding.

Cain: That's pretty good because I heard a seventh was used a lot of places.

Jones: It could have been a seventh. A seventh or eighth. They had a little box. They called it the toll box.

Cain: And then you'd bring the ground corn back.

Jones: Yeah.

Cain: So did you eat a lot of mush?

Jones: Yeah, sometimes Mama would make mush. I never did like mush. I'd rather have it baked in good corn bread. I still love my corn bread. I never have got tired of it, corn bread and milk.

Cain: Does your sister make corn bread?

Jones: Yeah. Every Saturday, evening, night, she just cooks a big skillet, round the cake of corn bread, and we just eat corn bread and milk that night. That saves her a lot of cooking too, and I love it too. Yeah, I come to the mill when I was so little my daddy would have to put the bushel of corn up on the horse with me. Then the miller, he'd come out and take it off and then put it back for me to start home. If it had fell off, I couldn't have got it back on.

Cain: How old were you then?

Jones: I was about, I guess I might have been 10 year old. That give me a chance to get away from home, ride a horse.

Cain: Even if it was walking, a walking horse?

Jones: Yes. It was just a work horse.

Cain: Well, thank you) (end tape)

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