Honoring Our Past is a weekly publication of single and continuous running stories of American History and Genealogy. As we preserve our old homes let us not forget those who have come before us. From the four walls that made up your childhood to the four walls of your dream home, take part in uncovering your family history, and share with us your stories. We want to hear from you. Please make your stories as factual as memory permits. Thank you.

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Detta Davis

I was born and raised in Scott County, Virginia. Mama told me that Grandpa John and Grandma Laura,(my Mama's parents) were born and raised in Scott County as well.

Mama told me that Grandpa John and Grandma Laura were married in Gate City, Virginia in 1885. That's when Grandpa John built their house near Dungannon Virginia. Grandpa was both a carpenter and a blacksmith. Mama said that he built the house from trees that he cut himself. He took them to the mill to be sawed, and finished them by hand. The house had one floor with four rooms. There was a kitchen, three bedrooms and a long rambling porch. Grandpa and Grandma had five children, maybe that's why there were three bedrooms and no living room or sitting room.

The outside of the house was built with unfinished boards with large cracks between them. The inside walls and the ceilings of the rooms were finished with narrow strips of wood that had been smoothed and sanded by hand. The finished unpainted boards on the inside covered the cracks in the outside boards. The floors were rough boards that had been planed by hand and scrubbed white with homed soap, and water. The roof was covered with rolls of tarpaper. My grandparents were very proud of their little boarded house nestled among the trees along the Clinch River. Mama said that the old house had a magic all of it's own. Grandpa used to say that "living along the Clinch River in the springtime was about as close as a body could get to heaven on this earth."

There was a paling fence around our yard. Grandma and Mama had all kinds of flowers in the yard. There were bluebells, rose bushes, day lilies, and all kinds of wildflowers. Beyond that fence Grandpa had a beautiful orchard, with all kinds of fruit trees, such as apple, pear, cherry and yellow plum, berry bushes and a garden. Grandpa dug his own well by hand. That well had the coldest water of any well around. It served as our refrigerator. We could put food in a bucket, lower it into the well and it would keep for two or three days. Neighbors came by often "just to get a cold drink."

Sometime in the year of 1936, when I was about 4 years old, our family moved into my Grandpa John and Grandma Laura's house. The members of our family were: Mama,(Mary),Daddy (Robert) my two older brothers, Ben age 9, Russell age 6 and my newborn sister, (Lou.) Mama lost her eyesight just before Lou was born. I guess that's why we moved in with my Grandparents,so they could help take care of us. How she lost her eyesight is a story that will be written another time.

I was too young to remember how the house looked inside when we moved into it. However, I do remember the fragrance of cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg drifting through the soft moist air, when Grandma was baking in her kitchen. My Grandma Laura died in 1937 and Grandpa John passed away in 1946. I really missed my grandparents.

I must have been about 6 years old before I paid much attention to our surroundings. We still had the same four rooms with the unpainted walls, that had begun to deteriorate with age. Daddy worked in the coal mines from dawn until dusk, and he just didn't seem to be the kind of man that wanted to fix things around the house. Mama stuffed papers and old rags in the cracks of the walls during the winter. She would fuss and say, "I declare you could drive a bull through those cracks they are so big." She covered the cracks in the floors with "hooked rugs" that she made from old worn out clothing. She tore the clothing into narrow strips and crocheted them into rugs. She used a wooden crochet hook that Daddy had whittled out of wood. When Spring came we lined the inside walls of all of the rooms with cardboard so that we could paper them with newspapers, catalogs and magazines that we had saved all winter. We used paste made with flour and water to stick the newspapers on the walls.

Our bedrooms all had the same plain floors, newspapered walls, iron bedsteads and homemade furnishings. Mattresses were unheard of. We slept on "feather ticks" or "straw ticks." The "mattresses" were made by sewing large pieces of heavy material, called "feather ticking" together and stuffing them with either chicken feathers, saved from "Sunday dinner chickens" or straw from the fields. When we bought chicken feed or flour from the general store we always saved the feed sacks. Four of the sacks sewn together made a fine sheet. Even though my Mama was blind, she could sew as fine a seam by hand as anyone. She made quilts for us from worn out clothing. She would sew the pieces of worn clothing together to make the top, put a used blanket in the middle and used a feed sack sheet for the lining. My mother, sister and I spent many winter evenings quilting by the fireplace in Mama's and daddy's bedroom. Our only source of heat was a fireplace in each bedroom and a cookstove in the kitchen. Grandpa John built all of the fireplaces out of creek rocks.

Lou and I had our own bedroom. We had a couple of homemade chairs, made of solid cherry wood, an iron bedstead with "feather ticks and feather pillows." We had an old chest of drawers in our room that Grandpa had made. This is where we kept most of our clothes. If we had something that needed to be hung up, we simply drove nails in the walls to hang them. Plastic curtains draped the old windows with broken panes that had been taped together to keep out the cold winds of winter. We placed Mama's hooked rugs in front of the bed so that we didn't have to step out on the cold floor. Lou and I liked to lay in bed at night, watching the flickering firelight dancing and casting shadows on the ceilings and the papered walls. We would lie there for hours "reading the walls."

The boy's bedroom was pretty much the same as ours, the same furnishings, they decorated their walls with guns, knives, bows and arrows and such. My brothers liked to hunt and fish, so their rooms were always cluttered with hunting gear.

My parent's bedroom was furnished the same kind of furniture. Mama had a dresser that Grandma had given her and a trunk that Grandpa made out of wood with leather straps on it. Mama kept all of her keepsakes in that trunk like special gifts that people had given her over the years. Mama had some of our family pictures hanging on the walls of her bedroom. Her quilting frames hung from the ceiling and could be lowered down in front of the fireplace when she wanted to do her quilting. Daddy didn't care what was in the bedroom as long as he just had a place to lie down.

The kitchen was Mama's favorite room, because she loved to cook. We had a "Warm Morning" cookstove that burned wood and coal. It was Mama's pride and joy. We had old cherry wood dining room suit that Mama had bought second hand from someone. It had six chairs, a long table and a buffet table. There was an old white cabinet in the corner of the room that Mama kept her dishes in. The "Water Table" stood next to the cookstove. That's where we kept the water bucket and the long handled dipper. Everyone shared the same dipper. There was a wash basin on the table beside the water bucket and Feed sack towels to wipe our hands on hung on a nail beside the table Everyone "washed up" here before meals. As the years passed the old tarpaper roof began to leak, but we always had plenty of buckets handy when it rained. Sometimes it leaked on our beds and we would have to dry our bed clothes by the fireplace or crawl into bed with someone else. When Daddy could find the time he would patch the roof with more tarpaper and that would last for a while.

We didn't have electricity, running water, bathrooms, or any of the modern conveniences in our home but we didn't miss what we never had.

Our old house had character from years of aging in the wind and rain. As the evening shadows lengthened, I used to watch the blue and gray shadows dance in and out of the cracks in the old weathered boards. During the day, the sun cast beautiful shades of rust and gold on the old boards. I miss the good times when there were no clocks to punch, and Mama and Daddy would sit on the porch enjoying the cool of the evening, listening to the crickets, frogs and other insects calling while my brothers, my little sister and I chased lightning bugs.

The old house finally began to fall apart and was torn down by a family member in 1983. Some of our cultures have been preserved, but we've lost a lot of the simple pleasures. Time has flown swiftly by and a way of life has gone never to be lived again.

-Detta Davis

 
 
 

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