Robin Singleton

Interview with Burder and Betty Reeves and daughter Robin Singleton

Leicester, N.C.

Conducted by Stephen Cain

Aug. 2, 1998

(Tape 1, Side A)

Cain: Sunday, Aug. 2, 1998. Burder and Betty Reeves. Betty, tell me about where your family came from.

Betty Reeves: On my mother's side, the Caldwells came from Catalooch, but originally, before that, they came from Sandy Mush. I just recently read a book that a Caldwell lady had written about Catalooch, and when the government took over Catalooch, and ran the Caldwells out. (Davis, Hattie Caldwell. "Cataloochee Valley: Vanished Settlements of the Great Smoky Mountains." Alexander, N.C.: WorldCom, 1997). But they originally came from Sandy Mush went to Catalooch, and then from Catalooch.

Cain: And this was a homecoming.

Betty Reeves: And this was a homecoming.

Cain: Are you going to go back to the reunion?

Betty Reeves: At Cataloochee? We had planned on it, earlier, but my mother is real sick, so I doubt if we will make it this year, but we had planned on taking her back to the reunion.

Cain: Have you been in the past?

Betty Reeves: No I haven't, but I have been back to Catalooch and visited the cemetery and the church, both churches and both cemeteries, and been to the Caldwell house.

Cain: It's still standing?

Betty Reeves: It's still standing.

Cain: I'm going to go up. It's next Sunday, and Jim Hannah.

Betty Reeves: The Hannahs were in Catalooch also.

Cain: Right. And one of the real funny things was, I guess Steve Woody has been master of ceremonies, but Robert Woody, who ended up as a history professor at Duke, wrote an article in the "South Atlantic Journal" about the homecomings in Catalooch back in 1950, thought it would die out when the last of the originals died out. But it's been a renewal for everybody. It happens - and I have to transcribe this on my own tape, which is an irritation -but my history professor that I'm working with got his Ph.D. from Woody at Duke and has no idea that there is this connection at all.

Betty Reeves: Oh really!

Cain: So it's going to be a surprise. It's going to be kind of fun.

Betty Reeves: Well Jonathan Woody, which I guess is Robert Woody's dad or brother.

Cain: One or the others. I'm not sure which.

Betty Reeves: Luke Caldwell, originally owned a log house out of Cataloochee and moved it to Waynesville.

Cain: Where's Waisill?

Betty Reeves. Waynesville.

Cain: Oh, Waynesville. Yankee ears. (Laugh). I know where Waynesville is. So that was the Caldwells, and they were originally, were they part of that Scots-Irish or English?

Betty Reeves: They were part Indian and Irish.

Cain: And on the other side?

Betty Reeves: The women's side. They were Irish, and as far as I know, as far as I can go back with them, they were all Spring Creek, and there's just none of them. My great grandfather had two brothers that I know of, and they both left and went to California. And my grandfather had one sister, and she left and went to New Jersey, and she didn't have any children. And my dad was an only child.

Cain: Which made you kind of unusual.

Betty Reeves: Which was not the typical for that day and time. And he had two girls.

Cain: So you're the last Fleming. Okay. Burder, tell me about your. Oh well, anyway. So the Flemings would have been at least mid-1800s in this area if not earlier.

Betty Reeves: They were earlier. I think my great-great-grandfather, I have heard in time past, that he changed his name, and from what I could find out, he did. Because he changed it to Hoppis.

Cain: How would you spell that?

Burder Reeves: Changed it from Hoppis to Glenn.

Betty Reeves: Changed it from Hoppis to Glenn.

Cain: H-O-P-P

Betty Reeves: H-O-P-P-I-S, I believe, or U-S. And there is one (inaudible) at the record office, at the Gaston Mountain on Spring Creek, the cemetery. And the mountain that we own, it came down ... and the Browns, which was my family. They owned that property back there. I guess both sides of the family

Cain: So your best guess it's been in the family how long, how far back?

Betty Reeves: I'd say early 1800s.

Cain: Burder. Now I know, because you told me the story about the Civil War barn. When did the first Reeves come here, do you know? Do you have any idea?

Burder Reeves: I don't know the first. My great-great-grandfather settled on Sandy Mush, Big Sandy Mush, and he's buried over at the Brick Church on Big Sandy Mush, and his grave is lost. Somehow, they never did put a marker up or anything. His grave is lost over there. And then his son, Malachi Sr., he moved, married a Robinson down the road here. No, now wait just a minute. (Burder and Betty quietly discuss genealogy). Anyhow, there was three Reeves brothers married three Robinson sisters in the early times.

Cain: Oh geez. That would be early 1800s?

Burder Reeves: I would say so. He was married and built this house and they was living in it before the Civil War, Malachi Jr. was. During the Civil War, they were living in it.

Cain: There are quite a few Reeves around now.

Burder Reeves: Right. Right. That marriage was 13 children.

Cain: And that was the Reeves that you descended from.

Burder Reeves: Malachi Jr. There was 13 children, lived in this old brick house, this one.

Cain: So this has been added to? This house?

Burder Reeves: When I remodeled it, the kitchen and everything was such bad shape, I had to take it off and I added this (a family room where the interview was taking place). The front section is original.

Cain: And the original brick section would have been built around.

Burder Reeves: Before 1860. They were living in it. I don't know the exact year.

Cain: That's pretty unusual to have a brick house here that early, I would think. There couldn't have been too many around.

Burder Reeves: Yes. I don't believe there was.

Betty Reeves: There were six rooms.

Burder Reeves: All I'm telling you is handed down through the family, generation to generation.

Robin Singleton: And it was not like they shipped the bricks in because they made them all over here in the brickyard.

Cain: Oh. The brickyard is?

Robin Singleton: Behind the log cabin.

Cain: And good clay there?

Robin Singleton: Evidently, (laugh)

Cain: For the sake of the tape, that was Robin speaking. That's okay. As long as I can tell you two apart, we're in good shape. And if I can't, when you listen to the transcript, or look at the transcript, you can say I got it wrong. You were telling me a great story about when the carpetbaggers came through. Tell me that again. I want to get that one right.

Burder Reeves: Well, it was Uncle Zack. He was about 14 years old at that time. The carpetbaggers came through the community here ,and so they had one old horse left, and they was fixing to steal the horse, and he happened to be hid. He suspected what was going to happen and he happened to be hid in the loft of the old barn up here. He had an old hog rifle, and they opened the door. And he was hid in the hay up there. They had some hay in the loft up there, and he was hidden in the hay, and he got the drop on the people that was stealing the horse. And he said, "You lay a hand on that horse and you're dead." So they rode off and left the horse. And at that time, there was some old rock piles up in the field up here, and they had knew they was coming, and they had carried their meat up and hid 'em in the old rock piles, and they didn't get their meat either.

Cain: The menfolk were still off at war. They hadn't come back?

Burder Reeves: No.

Cain: So they were pretty proud of Zack.

Burder Reeves: Yeah. Yeah. He was about 14. And his son, Zack's son, was named Burder, and that's where I got my name. And we think there was an old college down here on the, Transmatain College, it was built down at the Little Sandy Methodist Church down here.

Cain: Can you spell me the name of that?

Burden T-R-A-N-S-M-A-T-A-I-N, I guess.

Cain: Church college?

Betty Reeves: Uh huh.

Cain: Baptist? Methodist?

Both: Methodist.

Burder Reeves: And we think that there was Professor Birch from Haywood County over here teaching, and we think Malachi, he was on the board of directors of the college, and we think that he named, Zack named his son after Burder Ferguson that was teaching college at that time over here, teaching school.

Cain: Now did Ferguson marry into anybody or is that somebody else?

Burder Reeves: We're related to the Fergusons a whole lot through the Reynolds side of the family, and my great-grandmother Reynolds was a Ferguson. My great-great-grandfather was Abraham Reynolds, and let see, John Haskue was my great-grandfather.

Cain: H-E-S.

Betty Reeves: H-A-S-K-E-L

Burder Reeves: H-A-S-K-U-E. That's close. Anyhow, he was the father of A.C. Reynolds. A.C. Reynolds High School in Buncombe County was named after him, and he was founder of Asheville-Biltmore College, which eventually turned into UNCA, and he was for a number of years chancellor of Western Carolina College.

Robin Singleton: And his picture hangs on (inaudible).

Cain: Well, I'll go look at it.

Betty Reeves: And A.C. Reynolds High School in Buncombe County was named after him.

Cain: Pretty illustrious family. Any black sheep?

Burder Reeves: (laughter) Well I ain't going to tell you about them.

Betty Reeves: There aren't any in my family because there are too few. They just run out. (laughter).

Burder Reeves: I'm just going to tell you the good stuff.

Cain: Oh, that's okay. It can't have been too bad because you're still here. They didn't run you out.

Burder Reeves: Right.

Cain: This goes to identity. I told you I spend my childhood in Tennessee, but I was raised in Michigan. I'm a Yankee. There are other people that are city folk, that see themselves as country folk. Do you identify yourself with the mountains? Are you mountain folk?

Betty Reeves: Yes.

Burder Reeves: Why sure! I'm a mountain person. Yessir.

Cain: Does that, is it important to you?

Burder Reeves: Well where I'm raised is important to me. All my heritage is here.

Cain: Betty?

Betty Reeves: Yes. That's where our roots are. We have something we that we can tell our children and our grandchildren. This is home.

Cain: Robin, you're into that?

Robin Singleton: Yeah, I do buy into that, but you also run into a thing where I work, and I work for the health

system, and I'm computer services with a group of very, very intelligent people. And it always goes back to, "You're from Madison County. You're not as smart. You're not this. You're not that. You're from Madison County." And you have to, it seems like you have to continually prove yourself over and over again because of the, quote, of being mountain.

Cain: The stereotype.

Robin Singleton. Yeah. I mean it's a day-to-day thing that you deal with, and so that's a real struggle. It's like, "Yeah, I'm from Madison County, and I'm just as smart as you." You deal with that.

Cain: Yeah. If you want to underestimate me, that's your problem.

Robin Singleton: That's it! Right. There is a discrimination about being from the county that you're from.

Cain: I'll get into more of this later, but are you different from like folks from the Piedmont. Are there different sort of values that are important up here that come to mind immediately?

Robin Singleton: They have their values. It's not that their's are bad or good, it's just all different.

Cain: What are some of the things that you sort of view as really important here that maybe other people don't pay as much attention to?

Burder Reeves: What's important to me is the beauty of our county, the beauty of the place we live. I just couldn't make it nowhere else, I don't think. I've been around right smart, and I'm always proud to come back home.

Cain: Betty?

Betty Reeves: There's just a difference in people. I mean, here there's lots of nice people, and you just forget to lock the door. And it may be me being in a strange place, but I certainly wouldn't live down in the Piedmont or the coastal either, and not lock my doors. And some of that may be the unknown.

Cain: There is an image of mountain people as being sort of hostile. But I knocked on your door, and you invited me in without really knowing who I was.

Burder Reeves: Well that's right. I'd invite anybody in.

Robin Singleton: And I think that's an image. I think you could go to Sheldon Laurel and they wouldn't shoot you when you were on their doorstep. That's all the image of people who try to trespass on somebody's land and try to take from people. You protect things when somebody is trying to take from you, but if you come in and you're nice and you're neighborly, they accept you into the community, I think.

Cain: When I was doing the barn paper, everybody, I just went up to doors and knocked on doors, and everybody.

Burder Reeves: I never saw you before in my life.

Cain: Invited me in.

Robin Singleton: And you haven't been shot.

Cain: Haven't been shot.

Burder Reeves: And everybody's been nice to you.

Cain: My background is as a reporter, so I'm used to approaching people, but I was just blown away in a very good, good way. And a couple people, before I could even say who I was, said, "Well, come on in." Then they wanted to know who I was.

Burder Reeves: I'm going to ask you a question.

Cain: Shoot.

Burder Reeves: Are you not glad that you moved to Western North Carolina?

Cain: I'm delighted. There is going to be a supper, the first Friday of every month over in the Sandy Mush Community Center, and Irene Cook said, "Well you come along. You bring a dish to pass, and I'll cook a second dish for you." What can you say? Of course.

Robin Singleton: And there are a lot of people here who are like that, and it doesn't necessarily that your generations have been here since 1800 and that makes you that way. A lot of people who wanted to be in the community, you know, who said, "Yes, I am part of the community." They are the same way.

Burder Reeves: We have had an awful lot of good people move into our community that are outsiders, that's good neighbors and good friends of ours. In this community, you don't have nobody getting out and messing your business, but if you need help, you got it.

Cain: I want to get to that, because that's also changed some. I mean, it used to be every house around here was built through a working.

Burder Reeves: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Cain: Through people coming in.

Burder Reeves. That old barn there. We had a working and erected that thing.

Cain: Which barn? Oh, that's your tobacco barn?

Burder Reeves. Yeah.

Cain: The one where you used the old logs that came from.

Burder Reeves: Yeah. That came out of the old house that was here before this one.

Cain: So that would have been a house from the early 1800s.

Burder Reeves: Right. Right.

Cain: And those were the original logs.

Burder Reeves: That's original logs.

Cain: Half dovetailed.

Burder Reeves. We had two logs, I believe, that had rotted. And my dad got up and got in two more and hewed them out, and that's the only two new logs in.

Cain: And then you had some planks and some other stuff and then the neighbors came in.

Burder Reeves: Yeah.

Robin Singleton: But even in my childhood, I remember it being a working community. I know it's been 30 years but we would all silo together. And talk about dinners! My goodness, the food. I mean that whole table in there would be covered, and some up on the counter. I mean it would just be food everywhere. That's when I was 5, 6, 1.

Cain: You're talking shuckings then or loading the silo?

Burder Reeves: Silo, cut corn, silo for the cattle.

Cain: For feed.

Burder Reeves: For feed, yes.

Robin Singleton: And you went to every farm in the community, the whole group of them.

Cain: And you'd do that for, how long would it?

Burder Reeves: Oh, we'd be siloing two or three weeks.

Cain: Get pretty well fed by the time your done.

Burder Reeves. Oh yeah. We worked hard, but we had a lot of good times, a lot of good food.

Cain: Do they still do that?

Burder Reeves: That's something in the past.

Cain: And the last barn raising I heard, well, your cousin was telling me one that he was a part of before he went in the Korean War. There was a barn belonging to a preacher over on North Turkey Creek or somewhere in there, about three or four years ago, got hit by lightning on Sunday.

Burder Reeves: Bill Gillespie. He and I graduated from high school together, and we've been best friends all of our lives.

Cain: I guess maybe I ought to give him a call.

Robin Singleton: And his son and grandsons, her grandsons showed cattle with her. I mean so like you just pass it on down.

Cain: Is he a full-time preacher? (Note: part-time, also farms)

Burder Reeves: That's a real old family too. That's a real old family.

Betty Reeves: He's pastor at Jones Valley.

Burder Reeves: Right up from you.

Cain: Right. You go up Turkey Creek and then hit Early's Mountain, so if you went straight, you'd hit his church, right?

Burder Reeves. No, his church is on your side. It's on Sandy Mush side, right there above you.

Cain: Oh, got it, got it.

Burder Reeves: Up near Irene Cook's.

Cain: Oh, now I got it. Okay. It's up on Hog Eye? No.

Burder Reeves: Right on the main highway up on the hill there.

Robin Singleton: It's up on the hill, a beautiful newer church.

Betty Reeves: It was in the flood.

Cain: In 77, right. Oh I know, pardon me, now I know. He's in the book. I'll just give him a call. I'll tell him it's your fault I'm calling him. (Laugh).

Burder Reeves: You tell him I recommended him.

Cain: Were you part of the raising of his barn? Did you help on his barn?

Burder Reeves: Bill Gillespie's? No, I didn't go over there. I didn't even know they had it.

Cain: I guess people even brought their own wood to help put it up.

Robin Singleton: But that's true because, I mean, because we lost everything we had in a fire two years ago. I mean we were on Swannanoa. It's not like we were in the community. But people from the community came and helped clean up and helped us go through stuff to see if anything left and brought stuff. I mean, there is most definitely still a community even if you are not right here.

Cain: So then you moved back here after the fire?

Robin Singleton: Then we moved back.

Cain: Well, you've answered part of my question. One of my questions.

Betty Reeves: Could I come back to.

Cain: Yeah, anything.

Betty Reeves: As commissioner of Madison County, we are doing, having a straight-pipe elimination. We got a grant to work on straight pipe in Madison County. And it has been said all over the state that Madison County, they don't know anything about septic systems. They don't. They're just not too smart. Well, when we got into it and they started testing, the rate of people not having septic systems is a lot lower than had been anticipated. But we have got, part of my interns, and two of them are full-time employed, and have gone to houses and they have knocked on doors. They have not been shot at or anything. I was in a meeting one day, and Slate, one of the guys that has worked so diligently on it, he has just been amazed. He said everybody's been friendly. There have been like two people out of a thousand, twelve hundred houses, that he has gone to that has asked him to leave. So that says something about the mountain people. There not, unless you really threaten them.

Cain: But it doesn't mean they also welcome all kinds of authority?

Betty Reeves: Well, they don't necessarily welcome new kinds of.

Robin Singleton: Dictate their lives.

Betty Reeves: But they are not the vicious people that have been played up.

Cain: Like in "Deliverance." (Laugh)

Robin Singleton: I don't think any of us want our lives to be dictated by somebody else. I don't think that's necessarily mountain or Texan or whatever, you know. I think there are a lot of people who don't want people that dictate everything that they do in their lives.

Cain: I like my freedom.

Robin Singleton: Yeah. And that's why we're in America, because we like our freedom, you know.

Cain: But there are people who are more used to giving into authority that others. I mean, there is no zoning, for example out in Sandy Mush.

Betty Reeves: Oh yes there is. There is in Little Sandy Mush. All of Madison County is zoned.

Cain: Okay, I'm sorry. But not in Buncombe County in Sandy Mush.

Burder Reeves: Well there should be.

Betty Reeves: They're getting a stricter law enforcement on zoning, but out in Sandy Mush is not. I think everything in Big Sandy is zoned residential, or R-2.

Cain: I knew there were restrictions for septic, and you have the ERA and the Army Corps of Engineers if you wanted to do certain things, but I thought you could basically build anything you wanted anywhere.

Burder Reeves: But anywhere in Madison County, if you want to put up a business, if it is zoned farming or residential. But if you want to put up a business, you have to go before the zoning board and get an okay for your zoning.

Cain: I have to check on that because the real estate person I dealt with said there was not zoning in Sandy Mush.

Betty Reeves: We're just a step ahead of Buncombe County.

Cain: I want to talk a little about kin, and you've already. Kin's important.

Betty Reeves: Being able to track who you are is important. To me, I see a lot of people that are moving in here from, we'll use California as an example because that's the farthest point away. They may talk by phone or fax or that sort of thing, their parents or whatever, but they've not seen their parents but once a year, maybe not that, and their brothers, their siblings, not that often. Some of 'em, it's been 10-12 years since they've seen their siblings, so that's not.

Burder Reeves: A very close family.

Cain: That's not the mountain way.

Betty Reeves: That's not the mountain way.

Robin Singleton: And we think it's so sad because some of our family lives in Alabama, and we don't see them but once every three years, but they're.

Burder Reeves: My first cousins.

Robin Singleton: Daddy's first cousins, and our second and third. We want them to be part of our lives, you know.

Cain: But if you look at the economy, particularly over time, when people were having the larger families, and there was not an awful lot of jobs at which you can make a decent living, and if you have a whole lot of kids and the land is a fixed amount, you get a lot of young people moving away. I mean that's happened over the years.

Betty Reeves: That's happened here.

Burder Reeves: That's the sad part of it.

Betty Reeves: In Madison County because the young people, when they finish high school, they go either to service or go off to get jobs or they go to college, and if they go to college,.

Robin Singleton: They normally don't come back.

Betty Reeves: They normally don't come back ...

Burder Reeves: If you don't have employment for your children. That's one thing that we need very much is some clean, small factories in Madison County.

Robin Singleton: My husband and I, we both know that, if both of us move away, then I could go to Atlanta and make double, triple time what I'm doing now ... (Robin's sister) could do the same in Raleigh. But, it's like, yeah, you can give up the money to stay at home.

Cain: So what you're saying is kin is important to you.

Robin Singleton: Yes.

Cain: And important to your life.

Burder Reeves: Robin is the fifth generation on this farm Our little grandson will be the sixth generation.

Robin Singleton: And I want to stress it so he learns that it is just as important to him as it's been stressed to me ... When I get upset, I go to the graveyard and talk to grandpa. I mean it's that important, you know, and Malachi Jr. and I, it was one homecoming when Dad and I walked down to the cemetery and, it's like, "Hey, Daddy, this man's got the same birthday, we were both born on March 28." and Dad says, "Well, that's your great-great great­grandfather, you know. That's Malachi Jr., and Reeves' name is Malachi Reeves Singleton, you know, and that's important that he carried on that name. And I told (my husband), he has your last name but that's all he gets. (Laugh). And he was born April 28.

Cain: This is your old homeplace.

Burder Reeves: Yes.

Cain: And that's really unusual because, again my readings. There is a woman named Michael Ann Williams that wrote a book about Homeplace: The social use and meaning of folk dwelling in Western North Carolina, and an awful lot of the building that was done was just built to last a generation, a generation-and-a-half, and it was gone. So it's pretty unusual for you to have a homeplace that has endured for more than a century.

Burder Reeves: I'm four. She's five.

Cain: So this is your homeplace too?

Robin Singleton: Right.

Cain: Betty, do you have a homeplace?

Betty Reeves: No. My mother's still living, but the house that she lived in was not where I was born. Now the house where she was born is still in the family, and very much intact.

Cain: I'll talk a little bit about gender. Gender roles. There is a lot written about the mountains that portrays the man as the patriarch that rules the family (Laughter from the women). I was wondering whether that is myth or kind of half myth or not true at all or it depends on the family.

Robin Singleton: You have to realize that this man had three women in his household (laugh), and his two daughters are very strong willed, stubborn, fresh (laughter). We are, we both should have gone into law because, if we had teamed up against anybody in law, we'd have won. But the women in the Reeves family have always been very strong. Great-grandmother, she was the patriarch of the family.

Burder Reeves: My grandfather died at about 50 years old, and she (Burder's grandmother) had six children she raised by herself. And the oldest one was 13, 13 or 14 I think.

Cain: So that was a strong mother.

Burder Reeves: So she raised those children, and she kept her mother-in-law, lived with her. Her mother-in-law lived with her. She lived here. They lived with my grandfather and grandmother, and my great-grandfather died, Malachi, and she stayed with my grandmother until she died.

Robin Singleton: She kept the farm going, you know, with the kids and everything.

Cain: I haven't heard you say anything Betty. Are they answering for you?

Betty Reeves: No. (laughter)

Cain: I think you just answered just fine.

Betty Reeves: I want to elaborate on that a little. Being one of two girls, when there is no boys in the family and you grow up, you take the boy role. Somebody's responsible, and you fill that at an early age. It is no different from my two girls. They had to take the bull by the horns.

Robin Singleton: Even on Mom's side, my grandmother was a very strong woman. I mean she could shoot a gun with the best of the men. She could work and cook. She could do it all.

Betty Reeves: And my Grandmother Caldwell, she had a sister. They were very close. There were several in that family, they married brothers and they lived close together. Their husbands both logged, and were away from home a lot, and they done it all, too. I mean they kept borders, whatever there was to do. They run the farm. They run the house.

Robin Singleton: My Aunt Mary, she never married. She lived in the house until she passed away. That was the

end of that generation of women here, but she should have been an engineer because she fixed and she was outside, loved the outside more than she loved the inside. She was out there farming with Daddy and Grandpa.

Burder Reeves: I tell you, we all worked, and we all worked together. It was a cooperative thing, and everybody had their place.

Robin Singleton: And Daddy always told us growing up: "We work together; we play together. And that's what we did as a family, we worked together, and then we showed cows together, or we played basketball together.

Burder Reeves: Or square danced.

Robin Singleton: Or we square danced together. My sister and I never grew up with the thing that, okay, you're a child, you can't do what we adults do. They were always with us. Sometimes we'd like ditch them to chase the boys or something.

Cain: You didn't chase the boys?

Robin Singleton: Not unless Mom and Daddy were chasing them? (laughter). I mean, that's true. When I first started dating, for three years, his mom and dad and my mom and dad were best friends. We all three as couples went out to eat. That's what our dates consisted of, and then we went out and washed Daddy's truck. That's what it was. We worked together, and we played together.

Cain: Let me move on a little bit. Religion?

Betty Reeves: Methodist. Grew up Methodist, married Methodist. Come to the Methodist Church. That's where the Reeves went to.

Cain: Both of you then. This is the church. A lot of the churches in the mountains that I have come across or read about have somewhat loose ties to the larger denominations. In other words, they are not really told what to do all that much, are pretty independent.

Betty Reeves: No, the Methodists are very connected to the conference.

Cain: That answers my question. You answered it better than I asked it. How important is the church in your lives?

Betty Reeves: Very important, and, without God's creation, we wouldn't have this universe to live in.

Robin Singleton: I think the question today is, is the church important or is God important? I think maybe a little different, because God is very important to us. I mean whether I go to church at the Baptist Church or the Methodist Church or I go into town and go to the Catholic Church, I don't know that that is as important as God being in our lives.

Cain: I didn't know quite how to ask the question. But I figured you guys would answer it so (laugh).

Burder Reeves: Every denomination in the end is working for the same thing.

Cain: I would hope so.

Burder Reeves: I don't care what denomination it is. They're all trying to go to heaven.

Robin Singleton: Whether you're an Indian and you believe a little bit different that I do, or whether you're a Buddhist and you believe different, or whatever, God, I feel like, there is going to be a little bit if everything in heaven. I don't think because I'm Methodist, it's just going to be Methodists in heaven. There's going to be a little bit of everything.

Cain: If you went and took a survey of the folks you know in the mountains, would they tend to agree with your

view, or do they have their own truths?

Betty Reeves: I think there is very few mountain people who do not believe in God. They might not go to church every Sunday, but they believe in God.

Robin Singleton: And the probably pray every day, whereas people who are in church every Sunday.

Cain: Don't necessarily pray every day, gotcha. I want to talk a little bit about attitudes and values. If I referred to somebody as a "good liver," what would that mean to you?

Betty Reeves: A comfortable liver. He lives with modest means. A level of comfort.

Cain: In other words, not necessarily rich.

Burder Reeves: If you have enough to live on, you don't have to be rich. If you have enough to get by on, you're a good liver.

Cain: Does that kind of person set a good table?

Burder Reeves. Why sure.

Cain: What are some of the kinds of things that you value in people that lets you say that's a good person.

Robin Singleton: Honesty.

Betty Reeves: Moral.

Burder Reeves: That the person has a good moral character every day; you just don't do it on Sunday, but do it every day.

Cain: You talked about people in need, neighbors pitching in to help. Is that part of it?

Robin Singleton: Oh yeah. Most definitely. You know, to me, one of the things about, as my dad said, not just on Sunday but living the good life throughout the week, not gossiping and talking about people.

Cain: That's hard.

Robin Singleton: But that's one of my pet peeves. I mean that's just one of the things that I have a hard time dealing with is somebody who is continually, I mean every once in a while you say something about, but when you are continually downing people, and that's your way of life, I mean, why do you go to church on Sunday? People who help each other, I think that's definitely one of the.

Cain: I want to go back a little bit to the whole thing of outside authority. Sure, we like to be able to live our own lives. There are a lot of myths, a lot of junk written about Appalachia too. One of the things I discovered is that all the stuff that's written, you can tell more about the writer than you can about what he's writing about. Okay. Driving up here. I won't say exactly where it because it is on tape, but there is a place where all these little covered cages for roosters. Now why would somebody have 200 roosters in their front yard? All in separate cages. Because you could put two of those roosters together and one of them doesn't come back. (Laugh).

Burder Reeves: Let's suppose that he's selling those roosters. Rooster gambling in some states are perfectly legal thing, and it's perfectly legal in North Carolina. It's not legal to fight 'em, but it's legal to raise the roosters. And so, if they don't crow and bother me, that's all right with me. (Laugh).

Cain: I wouldn't torture a puppy to death, but I'm not an animal rights person that gets.

Burder Reeves: Right. Right.

Cain: I used to have a neighbor who would go out after a rain and pull the earth worms off her driveway so nobody would run them over. I thought that was a little silly.

Robin Singleton: We have shown cattle for years, and we have the animals rights people who come in to protest our shows because we are taming a wild animal. But, that wild animal gets baths.

Cain: I'm going back. If it was real, real serious on the part of the sheriff, they could stop some stuff.

Burder Reeves: We don't allow rooster fighting in Madison County. That's been tried.

Cain: It has? Okay.

Burder Reeves: It's been tried, and they've been caught, and they've been prosecuted, a hundred and some people at one time.

Robin Singleton: And also we don't allow poachers in Madison County.

Burder Reeves. We just don't allow that in Madison County. Under the present sheriff we've got, we won't put up with that.

Robin Singleton: Maybe Buncombe County. (Laugh).

Cain: It would take me a little bit longer because I'm on the outside, but I don't think it would take me all that hard to find a fight to go to or.

Burder Reeves: Not in Madison County.

Robin Singleton: Not in Madison County.

Betty Reeves: In Tennessee, yes you can.

Burder Reeves: I don't believe you'll find a rooster fight right now in Madison County.

Cain: I guess what I was really getting at was authority, and I was using that as an example, but, okay.

Burder Reeves: We kill chickens to eat. We eat chicken every day. So if a rooster gets loose and they wring his neck, that's what happens. It's their rooster.

Cain: Let's talk a little about economic changes and the difficulty of earning a living here. The other side of the mountain you have coal, but with that comes all kinds of problems. You got logging up here, but you take out most of the good logs, so you can't support all that many people logging. How long ago did they shut down the cotton mill in Asheville?

Burder Reeves: Oh it's been about ten years, I guess.

Robin Singleton: Longer than that.

Burder Reeves: Not since Bobby worked down on the river, baby. I don't think that's been 18 years, there at the Burlington Mills.

Cain: Was the Asheville Mill a Burlington Mill.

Burder Reeves: Yes. There were several mills, I guess, in Asheville.

Betty Reeves: There used to be quite a few around. Part of 'em was just, the one in Hastings, it took the cotton, (tape end)

(Tape 1, Side B)

Cain: This is Tape 1, Side 2. Economic changes. If there had been jobs here, do you think more of the young people would have stayed? Betty Reeves: Yes.

Burder Reeves: Well of course they would. You know what's been the mainstay of Madison County?

Cain: No.

Burder Reeves: Burley tobacco.

Cain: I did know that because you are No. 1 in the state. I looked that up. But it's, you're doing about how many, 10 acres?

Burder Reeves: Fourteen.

Cain: And that's put money in farmers' pockets.

Burder Reeves: It's fed lots of children.

Robin Singleton: Put food on the table.

Betty Reeves: Sent lots of kids to college.

Burder Reeves: It's gotten to where tobacco is bad for you, I guess.

Betty Reeves: It's interesting. I went to the 100th birthday party of a man Thursday, and he had chewed tobacco since he was six years old, and he decided recently that he better quit, that it might kill him. (laughter). And he had severe withdrawal symptoms, so he started back. That about killed him.

Cain: It's what, 200 or 2,000 tobacco allotments, 2.600.

Burder Reeves: I'd say 2,600 at least in Madison County. There used to be more. There used to be more. A lot of the farms been sold, and the people that bought them didn't care about tobacco allotment so they just let 'em go and lost 'em.

Cain: But you can lease them out, too.

Burder Reeves: Yeah.

Cain: So you get somebody collect enough.

Burder Reeves: And some people just didn't want them or didn't want anyone else to have them.

Cain: But tobacco's hard work.

Burder Reeves: Well, you've got to live. It's been a way of life for me all my life.

Cain: You spend 10 months out of the year on tobacco?

Burder Reeves: A little more. You're lucky if you get it worked off by the first of the year and then, mid-February, you have to start back into your tobacco bed, so, we've got ten-and-a-half months there.

Cain: Lot of labor goes into that.

Burder Reeves: A lot of hard work, yes, but it has been the only dependable crop that we have. We have government support price on it, and if you raise an acre of tobacco and it's pretty good, you're going to get some money out of it.

Cain: Looking at other parts of the farm economy, can you make cash money on anything else?

Burder Reeves: Well, some years beef cattle's good. And some years they about break you.

Robin Singleton: Some years hogs are nothing.

Cain: But you can't grow corn to compete.

Burder Reeves: No.

Robin Singleton: There's not enough flat land.

Cain: So you grow corn to feed your stock.

Burder Reeves: Yep.

Robin Singleton: We have some farmers now that are just growing truck crops, you know, but that's an awful lot of hard work. We were talking about tobacco. Tobacco is hard work, but it's spaced out through that ten-and-a-half months. But truck crops, you're killing yourself June-July-August-September. It's everything you could do. We grew tomatoes, and you kill yourself. You're not able to, and to find enough flat land in the county to even go into truck farms.

Cain: But then you had the blue mold.

Burder Reeves: It's a problem. Well, it's extra work. You can control blue mold. They've got Acrobat now. Redimill (?) was good. We sprayed it on the ground, and it controlled it for several years, but we got this new blue mold now that's immune to Redimill (?), and we have to spray it with Acrobat now.

Cain: It's pretty expensive, isn't it?

Burder Reeves: It's expensive, and, as it grows, you have to spray every leaf. As it comes up, you have to spray about every week or ten days with it. It's expensive.

Cain: Do you have to bring in crews to help?

Burder Reeves: We get some help in harvesting and some help in stripping tobacco. We get a little Mexican help.

Cain: Do you get the same people coming back every year or are they.

Burder Reeves: No, they just, you don't hardly ever get the same people. Sometimes one will come back for a few years, but most of the time it's new people every year.

Cain: That's been a change?

Burder Reeves: Big change.

Cain: Mexicans.

Burder Reeves: Yep, big change. We used to do all the work ourselves, or get local help.

Robin Singleton: But now local people, the younger kids don't want to work that hard. When Neal Ann (sister) and I were growing up, it was all the boys, of course some of the girls because all the boys our age. They'd come and, we'd have.

Burder Reeves: Pretty good help.

Robin Singleton: Guys, you know, helping hang tobacco and cut tobacco and.

Burder Reeves: Well, everybody could get help back then, you know, Robin, but now it's a different story. Everybody is working at jobs, and nobody wants to do farm labor except the Mexican labor.

Cain: The other thing, and check me out whether I'm right or not. You were talking about the cooperativeness in building a house or a barn, but when people have wage jobs, are they available then to do that, is that part of what changed?

Burder Reeves: Well they're not available as much, but still, you get right back to the point that, if anybody in the community has trouble, a lot of sickness, just anything like that, your neighbors will help you. We've not got away from that yet.

Robin Singleton: It's the common every day thing that you don't go to the community now. I mean I don't get to help Daddy like I could if I didn't have an every day job.

Cain: But if you didn't have an every-day job, your family couldn't live.

Robin Singleton: Right.

Cain: Okay, I understand it now. So that's where you're talking about the need for clean, reliable industry. Robin, you hit up a little bit on the stereotypes, the mountaineer, so you must be stupid or backwards or something else like that. But you've seen that also because you are out a lot. How about the two of you, Burder and Betty, have you run into any of that kind of stereotype, putting you down because you're.

Burder Reeves: We don't deal with that kind too much.

Betty Reeves. Yes, I have. When I worked at the bank and when we had the store, I mean it was an ongoing thing. People that I deal with now quite often, it's just like straight piping. The WLOS-TV, they tried to make Madison County look like every sewage system in the county was going into a creek somewhere, and that wasn't true. They didn't look around Buncombe County, you see. They were constantly calling to come down and talk to somebody and go out. They called about three days to go out with the team that, the survey team, to actually make pictures, and we just refused.

Burder Reeves: Well another thing, they had an article in the Asheville Citizen-Times about paving Madison County, the interstate, and one of the things they had on the front page was an outhouse. Now, why would they do that?

Robin Singleton: They could have put the courthouse or someone's nice new $200,000 home, you know. They put the outhouse, and there is some nice new $200,000 homes in the county, you know.

Betty Reeves: It's a news media thing, also. It's the big thing to put Madison County down.

Robin Singleton: What I get the most joy out of is when they put the little educational review in the newspaper, and they have Buncombe County, and Asheville City Schools, and they have Madison County, and you know Madison County was higher than any one of them? And it's like, "Hey guys, we're not that stupid! I'm as smart as you." And that's what gives me pleasure is to see our school board and our superintendent say, "Okay, we're going to do something to change this attitude." And our county commissioners said, "Okay, we want to change." But when you have a Citizen-Times going around saying, "Well, everybody lives in outhouses." And I have friends from Illinois who came down when I was in 4-H, and we did a 4-H exchange, and they thought that everybody in the mountains of Madison County or North Carolina, actually, lived in shacks. Well, we went out to try to find a shack because they wanted to take pictures of shacks. We had a difficult time going out and finding pictures for them to take of shacks to take back to Illinois.

Betty Reeves: But it was portrayed to them that everybody in Appalachia.

Robin Singleton: We had a brick home, you know, and they were just in shock that they weren't going to have to stay in a shack. They were staying in a great house.

Burder Reeves: Their mother called that night worried about them, and the girl told her mother, "Well, they live in as nice a house as we do."

Cain: You have a Jacuzzi.

Betty Reeves: We have a Jacuzzi.

Robin Singleton: At that point in time we didn't.

Burder Reeves: Betty, tell him about - we're bragging on Madison County a whole lot - tell him about the brochures that are at the welcome center at the South Carolina line.

Betty Reeves: At the South Carolina line coming in, the welcome center down there. Madison County has brochures of things to do in Madison County, the Hot Springs spa, the rafting, and whatever. In the past six months, they have given out more of those brochures have gone out of that welcome county than any other brochure that they have for North or South Carolina. So that was a very big economic thing to us. This just happened, and they asked for them.

Burder Reeves: And a Realtor told us the other day that the problem with the real estate is they couldn't get none in Madison County. They said they could sell all that they could find.

Robin Singleton: But it's people like us who want to keep ours in our family.

Cain: This is interesting. I've been looking at property values. Part of the reason I came up here was you could buy a decent amount of land at what, to me, was a fairly reasonable price. But I'm looking at, I went and got stuff that showed price per acre. There are acres and there are acres, right? But over the years, it was like a wave coming out of Asheville as the price simply went up, particularly if you had a nice building site. But south of Asheville, my God, it was totally out of sight, and it is beginning to come up here pretty good. But it seemed to me it's kind of a mixed blessing.

Burder Reeves: Right.

Cain: If you want to sell your land, you can get a better price than you ever dreamed.

Burder and Betty Reeves: Right!

Cain: But if you want to stay, you have to pay higher taxes.

Betty Reeves: You have to pay taxes, but if you are going to own land anywhere, you're going to pay taxes, and you're going to pay higher taxes in Buncombe County, Haywood County, Henderson County, than you do in Madison County.

Cain: I'm not putting Madison County down, (laugh) As the land value goes up, your taxes go up, right?

Betty Reeves: The value of the property goes up, and taxes may go up some.

Cain: Because they are figured on the value of the property.

Betty Reeves: Well, not, yes, that too. But as a commission of the county we try to keep the taxes low, so any time you see it go up, that's the state law - true market value of taxes has to be on land - but the county commissioners set the rate of taxes that are charged. Madison County charges 62 cents on a hundred now, and that is low.

Cain: That is for schools as well as.

Betty Reeves: That includes.

Burder Reeves: The whole thing.

Cain: But there is a reason why you are working so hard to keep the taxes low. It isn't because you hate government. It isn't because you don't have things you could spend money on.

Betty Reeves: No.

Cain: It's because, if they were high, they would squeeze people.

Betty Reeves: Well, if they were high, then maybe the people of Madison County could not afford to pay them, and that's the people we need to protect. The people that move in here have money, and if they want to go out and put up a half million dollar house, they do. And there are several of those coming to Madison County right now. And

it doesn't bother me if they have that kind of money. I wish you could separate groups of people on taxes, but you can't, so you have to give everybody a break and keep taxes low for that native Madison County.

Cain: If you have too many outsiders come in, you begin to change the character of the community.

Burder Reeves: Well, it's according to what kind of people you bring in.

Robin Singleton: If you bring in people, similar to people I work with, who came in and they're better than everybody else. If they come in and they want to be part of the community rather instead of changing the community, then you keep your community. But if you've got a person who says, "Well, I don't like the way you do it this way. Let's change that. And I don't like the you do it this way, well, in my opinion, they go back to where they came from, because they are not part of the community. You didn't buy here or move here because you didn't like the community. Why are you trying to change it?

Cain: I came here to be a part of the community.

Burder Reeves: I'm sure of that.

Robin Singleton: I wasn't saying you.

Cain: No, I understand that. But I also love the mountains.

Burder Reeves: Right.

Cain: I want a place that my kids can come to any time and their kids can come to any time, and if I can really work it out right, it's something that I can pass on to them.

Burder Reeves: That's right.

Cain: That's what I want, but everyone isn't as "good" as me, and this is going on the tape, too. There are people that have come in - now I know a little more about Sandy Mush than I know about this side of the mountain, although it's all along the same watershed - people that will not put up a mailbox but just have a little Post Office box in Leicester Post Office because they want to be totally isolated from their neighbors. You're getting that, too.

Robin Singleton: I have a Post Office box, but I have a mailbox too. But the postman brings it down here because I've always gotten my mail at my mom and daddy's. But, the thing about it is that you also have people that come trespassing on your land, don't ask, and if you ask them to leave, they call the sheriff on you. Now can you imagine that? And they're on your land! Well, that's the kind of people who move into the community who don't want to be a part and who isolate themselves from the community.

Betty Reeves: They want to be on your land. They want to use your land, but, "Don't you dare set foot on mine, this is mine!"

Burder Reeves: I've actually had that happen to me.

Robin Singleton: And you also have bear hunters from the other side of the mountain, from your side of the mountain (laugh), come over here, want to be following their dogs when they are hunting our bears. The wild bears are on our land. I'm in high heels and skirt, just got off from work, and we have to chase bear hunters off of our property and go to our mountain to make sure they don't get on that mountain, because they're wanting to kill our bears. And I would love for my child to be able to walk out and say, "Mom, I saw a bear out and about." And he can walk out and say, or Amanda (her daughter) can walk out, can walk up to school and say, "You know, I saw six deers over on the side of the hill." That's stuff that's important to me. Or for her to walk through the woods and say, "I saw seven turkeys." That is important. And my thing is, I don't want people trespassing.

Burder Reeves: Well it's not the trespassing, Robin, it's the way they do the trespassing. Most people are just as welcome as they can be to be on our property, but when they try to abuse it, they are not welcome.

Robin Singleton: There's a few things in my life that has made me feel the way that I feel. One of them is, Dad and I went to the mountain to check on the cows one day, and I was 15, 16, something like that, and there was beer cans and there was mattresses, and there was trash.

Burder Reeves: It took us two hours to clean the property up.

Robin Singleton: And I have very strong feelings about the way I feel about things like that, and then, also, we have, up where my sister lives, up where we grew up, my sister and I, and we have rabbits in our back yard. There was even rabbit hunters in our back yard, like right there, tried to come up and hunt our rabbits out of our back yard, and Daddy had to go out and run 'em off, (rabbits) that we fed every day. And so there are certain things that make my sister and I feel so strong about that. And those are the childhood things that make it... my father-in-law, he hunts deer, but you know, I tell him he can't hunt my deer, and he's my father-in-law, so a complete stranger coming up and saying, "I'm going to come on your property and I'm going to get my dogs." Well your dogs shouldn't be on the property because you shouldn't have been hunting the bears.

Burder Reeves: Well, if he hadn't asked. If he'd have asked to hunt.

Robin Singleton: And Daddy said okay, you can go.

Burder Reeves: But you should ask if you want to hunt on somebody else's property. I used to fox hunt, but I never fox hunted on anybody's property that I didn't ask to go on.

Cain: You are talking about rabbits, and I have a great big garden that just gets killed by rabbits, and I fence the heck out of it and I still can't keep them out.

Betty Reeves: You got to just plant enough for the rabbits, too.

Cain: But you know what they can do to a row of cabbage heads? You know, a few bites here, a few bites there, and.

Burder Reeves: You might be having a deer if it's a few bites here and a few bites there.

Cain: It might have been. We have a lot of deer too.

Betty Reeves: Don't blame it on the rabbits.

Cain: Oh well. I also tried to put some trees in the back yard, nice little young saplings, whish, boy do they get stripped fast. Every winter, and I try to wrap them, too, and somehow, it all comes out. We'll talk a little bit about change, a radio, television, newspapers, paved roads, electricity. When did electricity come, when did you get power here?

Betty Reeves: We got power at my house in 1945.

Robin Singleton: I thought my most interesting story that they used to tell... it was the first car. Maybe it was Aunt Mary. Maybe it was Grandma.

Burder Reeves: Over here at the school, the first car they had up through here, they could hear it coming way down the road. You know it made a lot of racket then. And they turned out school to let 'em go out on the bank and see it.

Cain: About what year was that?

Burder Reeves: I don't know. I couldn't tell you that. I couldn't tell you that. I don't know.

Robin Singleton: Do you know who that was?

Burder Reeves: I heard, but that left me too. Seems like it was a Rumbow (?) or something like that.

Betty Reeves: Well Frank Lighthill got the first one up Spring Creek that I'd ever known about and heard of, and just about everybody that was out and could see it coming, climbed a tree. It was a frightful sight, (laugh)

Cain: What year was that, would you guess?

Betty Reeves: That was before I was born.

Cain: So that could have been pretty recent. (Laughter). There really have been a whole lot of changes. Look at all the people who have had heart bypass operations, I mean your cousin for one (Don Reeves). And in another era, he'd have been dead 10 years.

Burder Reeves: Oh yes, yes.

Cain: Bill Duckett, when I was out.

Burder Reeves: Bill's my cousin, too.

Cain: That's right, I did know that. I'll be talking to him in a couple days.

Burder Reeves: Bill's mother and my dad was first cousins, through the Reynolds.

Cain: He gets out of his operation, and he goes back to farming.

Burder Reeves: Yeh.

Robin Singleton: There was an amputation done on that table in there.

Cain: Who?

Burder Reeves: One of my great uncles. He had a limb cut off.

Cain: What happened?

Burder Reeves: Got a sore on it. Gangrene set in. They amputated it on that table in there.

Cain: Did he live?

Burder Reeves: Yeah.

Cain: What did they give him for anesthetic?

Together: White lightening.

Burder Reeves: That was about all they had back then, I guess. It's a wonder he hadn't bled to death, but.

Cain: Who took it off?

Burder Reeves: Can't tell you that. I've heard, though. I should have done my dad like you're doing here. I should have recorded lots of conversations we've had, but I didn't do it.

Cain: My father died without ever talking about his family. My mother, why, the Gilberts of Brookfield, there's a book like this thick (gesture three inches) that goes back to the 1600s, but the other side of my family is lost. No, I understand what you mean.

Robin Singleton: And then we have a honey dish that Uncle Graves (?)

Burder Reeves: The one you see back there.

Robin Singleton. And the horse bucked him off, and he held onto the honey dish, and it didn't break.

Cain: Who held onto it?

Robin Singleton: My uncle Graves (?). My grand uncle. There are lots of neat stories that have been passed on, and, you know, my Aunt Mary, I used to make her tell me about games that they used to play. Hack-me-not.

Burder Reeves: Hack-me-over.

Robin Singleton: Hack-me-over.

Burder Reeves: Throw the ball over across the top of the house.

Robin Singleton: And she would make me tops. She would take our spindle thread spools and make me tops out of them. And I remember when they started coming up with the plastic ones. I loved tops so bad, we had to take all the thread off it because I wanted a top.

Betty Reeves: And she was fascinated with plastics, and she saved, I mean.

Robin Singleton: Every plastic thing that ever come in the house.

Betty Reeves: That she got. She just had to hang onto it.

Burder Reeves: She was a saving person of anything that there was. She was very conservative.

Betty Reeves: Pieces of plastic.

Cain: Whatever happened to them?

Betty Reeves: When we cleaned out the house, they filled plastic bags.

Burder Reeves: They wasn't worth anything.

Betty Reeves: We just threw them away, I mean, there was boxes of them.

Robin Singleton: From the thick plastic when they first started coming out, I mean thick thick plastic, until.

Betty Reeves: Or Saran wrap.

Robin Singleton: And aluminum foil. She loved aluminum foil too.

Cain. Modern times. I mean there have been some advantages. I suppose there have been some disadvantages too, things that have gotten lost as times have changed.

Burder Reeves: We've got a lot of stuff since we moved and everything, remodeled the house. It's not exactly lost. We just don't know where it's at. (Laughter).

Cain: Partly I'm talking about a way of life, relations of people.

Robin Singleton: You know my grandfather, he ate fatback, he ate, I mean, fried meat every day.

Burder Reeves: Eggs.

Robin Singleton: Eggs. You know he worked, and worked a very hard life, and I think his body could process it, and now, you know, I expect a lot of people's heart problems is because they are not doing the exercises that their forefathers did. You know, they are trying to eat the same stuff but not do the exercise.

Burder Reeves: We eat a lot of good things, too. We eat a lot of cornbread. We eat a lot of soup bones and green beans, and we eat a lot of healthy things.

Robin Singleton: And I love ice cream.

Cain: People are still neighborly, but they don't have as much time to be neighborly.

Betty Reeves: Well I guess one of the things I really miss seeing and I always dreamed of doing. When Burder and I first got married, his dad and Aunt Mary, they went out and sat on that front porch, I mean two or three hours every day. When we built our house, we didn't have a porch, two-by-four, it wasn't very much to put a chair on. We never had time to sit on the front porch anyway. I imagine, well, when we get that house finished, we'll sit on that front porch hours ... We still have not set on that front porch.

Cain: What you've done, though, is still manage to hold onto a lot of the old values, old ways, and heritage.

Betty Reeves: Yes. Yes.

Cain: And Robin, you have kids?

Robin Singleton: I have one that is my own, and I have four step-children.

Cain: So, are you trying to raise your kids the same way you were raised?

Robin Singleton: Yeah. A lot of it is. I'm in the computer business. I see that stuff changing every day, but I want them to prepare for the year 2000. To me, that's going to take us all back in time. That's one reason why we have a milk cow now. That's one reason why we have chickens now.

Cain: That's sort of the 1990s version of the fallout shelter.

Robin Singleton. Yes.

Cain: You remember fallout shelters, don't you?

Burder Reeves: Sure.

Robin Singleton: The year 2000 is going to be a very scary time, and I think people will be starving. Until you are in the field and you see that it affects everything that we do. It affects your electricity. It affects your telephone. And you think how many companies are not prepared for it. It makes you have a different outlook.

Cain: You have to pardon me again. You work for.

Robin Singleton: Mission-St. Jos.

Cain; Oh, okay. The hospital. And in what area?

Robin Singleton: Computer services, and don't go to the hospital (at the turn of the millennium).

Cain: Where did you go off to school?

Robin Singleton: I actually went to, have a degree in horticulture from Haywood Community College, so what I do and what my degree's in.

Cain: But you can run the computers, so they wanted you.

Robin Singleton: Actually, I started out in billing at the hospital.

Burder Reeves: Tell them how long you was hired.

Robin Singleton: I was hired for two weeks because I was looking for something else to do in horticulture. That has been my, horticulture has been what I wanted to do for 20 years, as a child in 4-H and Dad's farm. Started out in billing, collection rates for the billing department went up, so they offered to hire me permanently. So I said okay. So I was hired permanently and worked for the same vice president that I work for now, and a position came open in computer services as an operator, and things like that. We can't hold her back as far as money is concerned. And within two months, that billing department closed down. So it was like a blessing. Then I became a training coordinator, and now I am the (inaudible) coordinator.

Cain: And your husband?

Robin Singleton: He works for ASA Airlines out of Asheville.

Cain: And your sister?

Robin Singleton: She has a master's in chemistry. She works as the magistrate judge in the county on the weekends, and she works for Dynamic Systems doing research, which is a little plant right down the road here, during the week.

Cain: You live?

Burder Reeves: Right in back of us.

Cain: And your sister lives where?

Robin Singleton: Up the road about a mile.

Cain: And she moved away.

Robin Singleton: (Inaudible).

Cain: And how long was she there?

Betty Reeves: Five-and-a-half years.

Robin Singleton: She taught at Lewisberg Methodist College. If fact, when we were talking about the mountains. It was 25 minutes north of Raleigh, and there were more outhouses down there than what there is in this county, and I mean she was just amazed. The people were so poor. We don't have that kind poor people in our county.

Cain: But she came back here to, for family, for what?

Betty Reeves: She came for a visit for the weekend and, Labor Day, four years ago. Just like that. So Robin found out she (Robin) was pregnant, that weekend. And Neal Ann said, "I'm moving home, I'm not missing." So she went back in October. She made arrangements to go back to work down at Dynamic Systems and to move back home. So she did. She quit her job. Then in November, I was elected county commissioner...

Cain: You don't have to be a lawyer to be a magistrate judge?

Betty Reeves: You have to have a four-year degree. And so she took that on the weekends. Another boy took it through the week. They worked it out because he wanted off on weekends, so they worked together. She's had three-and-a-half years of two full-time jobs.

Cain: She has a child?

Robin Singleton: No, I have a child. She's not married.

Cain: Oh. I'll check the tape. I misunderstood.

Burder Reeves: She's 35.

Robin Singleton: She was moving back home to be around my child.

Cain: Ah, okay. I thought she was pregnant and moving back.

Robin Singleton: My sister and I, we fought like cats and dogs until she turned 16, and when she turned 16, she didn't want her little sister hanging around her, but now we are very very close.

Cain: I guess that pretty much wraps it up. thank you.

Burder Reeves: I hope it's all right.

Cain: Oh, it's fantastic.

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