USA > Georgia > Colquitt County > History of Colquitt County > Part 5
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CHAPTER X The Pioneer Family
SPEAKING OF PRETTY GIRLS and sparking, the girls of the pioneer period were not only easy to look at, according to all accounts, and judging by such daguerreotypes as we have seen ; but there was nothing to prevent Nature having her way in the business certain to arise, when youth meets youth. Marriage was both natural and easy. Land was cheap, some- times selling as low as 25c per acre, and cheap land is essential to the organization of families.
It is a tradition in Colquitt that, when "Uncle Bryant Nor- man" appeared in the legislature as representative of Col- quitt County, and was asked by some one what was the popu- lation of Colquitt, he answered, "mostly, beef and taters." The story is perhaps an invention of John Tucker, Norman's fellow citizen, at the time; but, if he did make that reply, he was not far wrong, at that. For cheap lands mean plenty of good solid foodstuffs; and Malthus is our authority for the assurance that a high birth-rate is dependent on a plenti- ful supply of "good rations." And it is easily demonstrated that a combination of good fat beef and baked yellow yams is about as perfect a food as has ever been in the world. Anyhow, the young folks of the pastoral era married, and were set up for making a living by their parents on a moderate sized piece of land with the necessary household equipment, and the babies came along as fast as the law allowed.
As illustrating this claim, reference is here made to Elder Henry Crawford Tucker, who had already settled in this section in 1830, and who died in the county about 1881. The Elder was married to three wives, who bore him thirty-
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two children, all of whom he brought to adulthood, and all of whom except one married and reared large families in Colquitt County. The exception was a girl of seventeen, who died from burns received when she fell into a kettle of boil- ing syrup and figs, which she was tending in the yard at her father's residence. The Elder himself was killed by a run- away horse, when he was still "going good" at eighty-one.
In 1898 Hiram Hancock, a grand-son, by the way, of Elder Tucker, married Emma Strickland, a grand-daughter of James M. Norman, another pioneer of Colquitt. This couple did not have a dime, but they bought some cheap land "on a credit," and went to work. Hiram "muscled out" the payments and got a deed to the land, which, by that time, was worth two or three times the original purchase price. In the meantime, his wife was doing her own work and hav- ing a girl baby every two years, and less time. She had eleven of them, one at a time, and died in child-bed with twin boys. The father himself is now dead; but every one of the thirteen children is alive and well, and a self-sup- porting citizen of Colquitt County.
Berry Hancock, a brother of Hiram, married Ella Strick- land, a sister of Emma, and they had, in all, fourteen chil- dren, raising ten of them. Jim Strickland, their brother, has seventeen children living, by his two wives. J. R. Edmond- son married Florence Strickland, sister to Emma and Ella, and this couple lives in Colquitt County with their eleven children. The parents of all these Stricklands had ten chil- dren themselves. Dan Strickland, their uncle, raised seven- teen children by his two wives. Steven and Elijah Strickland, cousins of Emma, et al., have eleven children each, by one wife.
Instances of such large families in Colquitt, now and in the past, could be extended till it would make a good-size book. All this seems the more remarkable, when it is con-
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sidered that, for the most part of the pastoral era, not a soul in the county had ever heard of a screened door or window, a germ, or a vitamin. Since seeing is believing, we close this chapter with a copy of a photograph taken at a family reunion on the occasion of a birthday of Hon. John Tucker. All in this group are descendants of Mr. Tucker, and his wife, Susan, except some elderly people, sitting at his right on the front row. It is put in because it is a good "Beef an' Tater" exhibit.
John Tucker is the man with the big hat. sitting near the center. The woman standing back of him is Susan Jane Tucker.
HON. JOHN TUCKER and his descendants
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CHAPTER XI Diversions in the Pastoral Era
IT IS DOUBTFUL if there was a white settler in the territory that is now Colquitt County, before 1820; and it is not known who was the first. In the panel of the first grand jury ever impaneled in Thomas County appears the name of Michael Horne. This was in 1826, the year after Thomas was created. A few years later, a man of this name was living in what is now Colquitt-that is, he was living in the 8th Land District of Thomas County.
Investigation of the Thomas County records does not de- velop that citizens of the 8th Land District ever held public office in Thomas, willed property, or served on grand juries, although it was a part of the county from 1825 to the crea- tion of Colquitt in 1856-a period of thirty-one years. The same thing may be said of that portion of the 9th Land Dis- trict of Lowndes County that was incorporated with the 8th Land District of Thomas to make the County of Colquitt.
This condition was due to the fact that the sections that were joined in making Colquitt were remote from the county sites; were without a single foot of railroad; were not in the neighborhood of navigable streams; and had no adequate system of public or private schools; and no system of public roads, except the crude three-path roads of the period. And all these conditions continued after Colquitt was created, and till 1893. It is believed confidently that no such backward conditions existed in any county in Georgia from 1820 to 1893. In addition to these conditions, mail facilities were wretched. One mail delivery per week from such points as Thomasville and Albany; and during half of that time, there was not over one post office in the county.
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All this resulted in a curious thing: there was an actual falling off in literacy and culture. For illustration, the origi- nal settlers could, as a rule, read and write, having come from sections that maintained schools of some sort, but as a rule, their children could not read and write. These were fol- lowed by a third generation, alike illiterate. In preparation of this history, investigation has frequently confirmed this.
Emerson said somewhere that tragedy may lie largely in the eye of the beholder; so it is in order to take stock of some of the assets of life as it was spent in Colquitt County during the seventy years of the pastoral era.
To begin with, it was a hunter's and fisherman's paradise. Flocks of red deer could everywhere be seen, feeding on the wire-grass, cane-shoots and wild oats. "The saddles," as the hind and fore-quarters of venison were called, made good eating, either as fresh meat or as smoked; and the gravy was past all praise. Wild turkeys swarmed over wood and swamp in thousands; besides a wealth of squirrels, rab- bits and partridges. A Mr. Jeff Holder, with his wife, a Miss Sheffield, married and set up housekeeping in Early County in the early 1830's. They put up a log house, and made their first crop on deer meat. For bread, they strung up and dried out the "white meat" of wild turkey- breasts, after which they cut it up and beat it into a kind of flour, and kneaded it for bread. After gathering their first crop of corn, they changed to corn bread and hog meat. So the bride told this writer when she was ninety-five. A Mr. D. A. Mashburn, who lived for many years on the old Moul- trie-Doerun Road, told this writer, on the day before his death, about the red deer that swarmed in the vicinity of Moultrie, even as late as 1880. "We children doted on the gravy," he said. A pack of dogs were running a deer to the east of Moultrie, in 1881. In a panic, it ran westward squarely across the courthouse square. Seeing crowds on
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HISTORY OF COLQUITT COUNTY
the west side, it whirled and dashed away to the south. As Miles Monk, Sr., was standing to be married, in a Colquitt County yard, in the middle 1860's, a young fawn ran out of the surrounding woods, and stopped between his legs. So goes the tradition, and the accounts of surviving witnesses.
The wild turkey, as is well known to every hunter, is the shyest of all American birds. The pioneer in Colquitt caught them in pens built of sapling logs. After these pens were erected, a ditch or trench was dug from some point outside the pen, extending under one of the sides. Corn or other grain was strewed at the bottom of the trench, all the way under the side; and when the leader of a flock of these birds got to "gobbling up" this bait, he would pass right under the side of the pen to be followed by all the others, as fast as they could enter. Then with heads directed at the open spaces between the poles above the ground they would run around until they were taken out by the trapper. Too, many a fat gobbler has fallen a victim of the gunner huntsman, who had a way of blowing a kind of whistle on a bone, in excellent imitation of the love call of the turkey gobbler to his mate. One living citizen of Colquitt has assured the writer that he has seen his father, David Murphy, former sheriff of this county, shoot more than one wild turkey from his porch, four miles from Moultrie, as late as the 1870's.
The streams of Colquitt County were choked with fish for many years. The older settlers now say that the astonishing thing about it was the number of fish found in the little branches and pools. David Murphy caught them in the Ochlochnee a few miles south of Moultrie, fifty years ago, by the wash-tub full. So aver his sons, Henry Murphy and Aaron Murphy, both well-known citizens of Moultrie, today. Their mother, so they assert, when she decided she wanted fish to eat, simply stepped down to the Ochlochnee from
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DIVERSIONS IN THE PASTORAL ERA
their nearby residence, and caught a "mess," with pole and line. Other streams like Little River on the east, and creeks like Bridge Creek, the Warrior, Big Indian, Little Indian and the Ocapilco, were jammed full of fish. This condition fur- nished an easily obtained and toothsome food; and also much diversion, when an entire family, either in a separate group or in groups of other families, fished and picnicked, cook- ing the catch by the side of the streams by frying the fish in plenty of hot grease, with an occasional rasher of the smoked bacon of the period thrown in; and all served with black coffee and corn pone. It is here confidently asserted that a world which furnishes such experiences is not an altogether bad place in which to do a little sojourning.
Here is a list of varieties of what the poet would call "the finny tribe" that swam the streams of Colquitt, in the days of old: trout, blue bream, red-breast perch, jack, red-horse sucker, blue cat, channel cat, red-finned pike, warmouth perch. Every one of the above varieties made eating fit for Lucullus's banquets, given to kings; but the red-finned pike, according to the judgment of veteran fishermen, seems to have had it on all the others, having no bones except the backbone. However, the warmouth perch was perhaps the most popular fish, being plentiful that way, and sometimes so large as to make "more than a meal" for a single person.
And all these different kinds of fish are fairly plentiful in Colquitt streams, even at this late date; and there is no doubt that the stock could be so conserved that they would always be sufficient in numbers to make it possible to go fishing with hook and line, and come in with "a good mess of fish" for an ordinary family. Something should be done to protect our fish and wild life. Liming and other poisoning of our fish streams and lakes, which is now violative of our State
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HISTORY OF COLQUITT COUNTY
law, should be swiftly and sharply punished. Moreover, it might be a good thing to condemn or purchase whatever swamp lands are available for fishing and hunting preserves, and place it under the care of wardens; so as to preserve for posterity a part, at least, of the hunting and fishing privileges of by-gone days.
CHAPTER XII Education in the Pastoral Era
THERE WERE NO SCHOOLS in Colquitt County before the Civil War. At least, we have been able to hear of none. This, for the reason that there was no free school system in Geor- gia, anywhere, and the only schools at all were subscription schools, entirely dependent, for the teacher's salary, on tui- tion fees, paid by the parents and guardians of the pupils. Of course, there were none of these in Colquitt County, due to the scattered nature of the population. For these reasons, the children that came into existence during the pastoral era, very generally grew up illiterates, as did their children also, and sometimes, their grandchildren.
The first school we have been able to get an account of was a three-months term of a subscription school, taught by a Mr. Breeton, in 1866. It ran for three months and was held in a single room log residence, standing a little less than four miles north of Moultrie, on the west side of the old Moultrie and Albany public dirt road. Mr. I. McD. Turner, a present resident of Moultrie, has told us all about this school. He was one of the "scholars"; and, in company with his sister, Mary Lizzie, he "footed it" from the residence of his grandfather, Amos Turner, which stood on the present site of the Moultrie Carnegie Library. Two of the girl chil- dren of Peter O. Wing came and went with the Turner chil- dren. "Cam" Carlton, a daughter of Hardy Carlton, who lived in the Elijah English house, something like a mile on the Moultrie side of the schoolhouse, was a pupil, being about ten years old. Also, Nancy Tucker was there, being about eighteen years old, and the daughter of George Tucker, and a granddaughter of Elder Crawford Tucker, the patriarch,
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the prettiest girl in the school, Mr. Turner confidently avers, after seventy years. Of course, "'Twas ever thus, from childhood's hour"-a ten-year-old boy like Mr. Turner al- ways gets interested in a grown "gal," his "hopeless fancy feigning kisses on lips that are for others." Two years later, Miss Nancy married John T. Register. We have seen her when she was a grandmother; and so make no doubt that the boy, I. McD., was a good picker. John T. Register was him- self a handsome man; and their children were a good- looking lot.
O. N. Gregory's children came from a point north of the schoolhouse near what is now known as Schley, three or four miles away. The sister, Lizzie Turner, was to grow up and marry John Crosby.
Daniel Highsmith sent one or two pupils, and with them came Henry and Hiram Gay, all from the neighborhood of "New Elm," now so called.
Teacher Breeton whipped 'em when they did not "know their lessons," as Mr. Turner stands ready to vouch, having taken at least one in the palm of his hand.
There was only one room, and the boys and the girls oc- cupied straight benches without backs on opposite sides of the room. At such times as "recess," or at the dinner hour, they played in separate playgrounds. No co-ed foolishness was tolerated by Master Breeton. None that could be avoided, certainly.
The favorite game among the boys was "deer-and-dog," one that is still played; but one that was closer to life at Master Breeton's school. There were plenty of gall-berry thickets in which a deer could conceal himself, when the pack of dogs would be unleashed; and the hunters would urge them on till the deer was "jumped." This was followed by the biggest kind of a race. If the deer was caught, the game
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EDUCATION IN THE PASTORAL ERA
was ended, after a little rough handling. It was over, too, if and when the deer was "shot." The guns were hollow joints of elder, or sections of reeds. The bullets were various berries, such as dogwood, forced out of the gun by com- pressed air.
Well, all this has been a long time ago. Gone, and about forgotten is Mr. Breeton; and gone, and in process of being forgotten, most of his scholars.
Eleven years later, Hon. G. W. Newton, with us now, went to a school kept by Judge A. D. Patterson, over near Norman Park. Mr. Newton was about ten years old. A bench full of little country boys spied a nice green lizard "lifting and listening," on a log of the schoolhouse, and got to laughing, which, teacher Patterson seeing, punished by making the boys stand in a row in the middle of the schoolroom-each stand- ing on one foot. All the boys grinned a little, except Billy, who cried.
At that, and at everything else, G. W. N. relates that Pat- terson was a "good teacher," and that the scholars increased their stock of learning considerably-learned more, he thinks, than the children do nowadays, when there is so much to divert their minds from their studies. Mr. Patterson's school term was either two or three months, and it was one of the first free schools in the county. The first task in writing was to draw "free-handedly," a straight line. Norman Junior College stands on the site of Master Patterson's school, and there are three or four modern consolidated schools sur- rounding this spot.
CHAPTER XIII Women in the Pastoral Era
FROM WHAT HAS BEEN SAID about the work of the pioneers in southwest Georgia, and especially in the Colquitt territory, conclusion will be arrived at without trouble that the struggle for the necessities of life drove very few of the men to the lunatic asylums, or the grave. In fact, the matter reads like the section was a lazy man's paradise. There was always present the greatest abundance of wild game and fish. The patchy crops and gardens added to the milk and butter and the beef and mutton taken out of their herds, settled the business of sustenance for themselves and their families, leav- ing nothing for them to do except to keep up with their hunting and fishing.
A little otherwise as to the housewives. There was plenty of work for them. Theirs was the task of bearing, nursing and feeding the children; and, in addition, they cooked the food for the entire family, including the hired help, if any. Finally, they made much of the clothing for the family with their own hands out of cloth which they wove with yarn which they spun. We are informed by Mrs. M. M. Marchant, who still survives the old days with her husband, that her mother, Mrs. John Nelson Phillips, the wife of a pioneer in northwest Colquitt, did all these things; and, in addition, manufactured a nice supply of table and bed linen. And this was the rule in the homes of that early period.
Cooking was done in skillets and pots, set on log fires in the fireplaces, or in crannies in the jambs. Sometimes, the cooking vessels were placed on beds of coals on the hearths, and at other times, suspended over revolving cranes over the wood fires. A place on the hot hearth rock was frequently
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swept free of ashes, and a dough made from corn meal, sea- soned with a little salt, was placed on it and cooked, being turned over once in the process. Very frequently, such "johnnycakes" were spread on hot metal plates and stood in front of the fire with the dough exposed to the fire as near at right angles as possible. Sweet potatoes were baked in convenient vessels over such fires and in numerous cases they were roasted in the hot ashes which would accumulate in the ash-pan under the fire, during the course of the day. Both these, and the "johnnycakes" made pretty good eating, when used in connection with homemade butter and either buttermilk or sweet milk. Not long ago, the grave of a woman who died at near eighty years of age was pointed out to us by an aged citizen of Colquitt, who summed up her fit- ness to live by saying, "She, for fifty years that I knew her, cooked the best corn bread in the world."
Lucifer matches were expensive in those days, coming in thirties, incased in round wooden boxes, the length of the match, which, with the contents, cost ten cents. So very gen- erally, fire was "kept" in the fireplaces by covering up the burning chunks and faggot ends in ashes at bedtime.
During the first fifty years after the Jackson cession, the use of gourds was general, as receptacles for water, lard, tallow, syrup, sugar, milk and other articles. Hence the ex- cellent note that sounds out of that era as a part of the ballads, exulting in "meat in the smokehouse, and sugar in the gourd." Gourds were grown that would hold as much as two gallons, and which being broad-based, would stand firmly alone on the base in the middle of the flowering end, which was exactly opposite to the straight handle. This handle, attached to a considerable portion of the body of the gourd, was cut out and used as a covering for the vessel part of the gourd.
Much smaller gourds, called "simlin gourds," and holding about a pint, were used for pepper, salt and other spices,
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as well as for individual portions of coffee or milk at the eating table, their long straight handles having been removed. By leaving the handle, and cutting out a good opening at the side of one of these "simlins," a splendid substitute for a dipper was obtained. In fact, there are plenty of us "old- timers" who are firmly convinced that drinking water is more satisfying when ladled out of a cedar bucket with a "simlin" than in any other way. And one of Georgia's later governors, Hon. Joseph M. Brown, kept such a gourd for use in the reception room of the executive offices, during the whole of his administration. The truth would appear to be that the poet who immortalized the "Old Oaken Bucket" that in his childhood "hung in the well," should have written at least a verse or two as a tribute to the "simlin dipper" that hung on a nail on the wall by the side of the cedar bucket.
We have already said that the housewife was the original textile manufacturer in this section, and this is how. Cotton was carded on a pair of hand cards, flakes of the raw cotton being first placed between the two cards, and by pulling the two cards against each other, the cotton became evenly dis- tributed on the face of the bottom card. Then, by bringing the empty card over the face of the bottom card, the entire spread of cotton was rolled off deftly. A bundle of such "rolls" was then placed near a spinning wheel, which was manipulated by one hand, while the roll was drawn out by the other, the result being a thread, some five or six feet long, which was wound back on the spindle by the simple process of putting the drive wheel into reverse. Another roll would then be attached to the end of the length of yarn, and, in its turn, would be converted into yarn; and so on in- definitely.
A part of such spun yarn would be stretched in looms, worked by the feet of the weaver, operating treadles, this yarn being called the "warp," while a coarser yarn was carried at
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WOMEN IN THE PASTORAL ERA
right angles to the warp in shuttles, by hand, this coarser yarn being called the "woof" or "filling." After about a generation from 1820, cotton factories were erected in the hill sections of Georgia and the Carolinas, and these turned out yarns for warp, of uniform sizes, which were sold at retail in the country stores of Colquitt County, and in fact, all over the State. This yarn came in "bunches" of four pounds each, and cost the housewife a dollar. In the mean- time, the "filling" continued to be largely carded out and spun at home. All the above, of course, applies to cotton cloth. The housewife also made woolen "jeans" and linseys, cloths in which woolen yarn was woven into cotton warp. No hand cards could change the raw wool into rolls; and so "wool-carders" were erected at various points in the rural South, which were driven by water power; and the rolls so produced were carried to the farm houses, and spun into filling like the cotton rolls, to be used in making winter cloth- ing. At least two sets of wool cards were operated in Col- quitt County-one before the Civil War, near the old "Brick Church," eight miles southwest of Moultrie; and the other on the Ochlochnee River, three or four miles above Moultrie, at a point where is now located the swimming pool and pleasure resort of the Swift and Company Moultrie plant. Others there were in Berrien, Cook and Worth counties; but the two mentioned as being in Colquitt County constituted the be- ginning of the textile industry in this section. Also, at the "Brick Church," there was erected before the Civil War, by Joel Graves, a factory for making buckets and tubs from sycamore boards. "The bucket shop," it was called locally. While on the subject of cloth making, it ought to be said that for the most part, colors in the household in the early days were derived from certain weeds and shrubs, such as sumac. A nice brown for jeans was obtained from a dye de- rived from black walnut hulls. The average mother of those days carefully trained her girls in the domestic arts, doing
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