I had nine brothers and sisters. There’s six of us girls and three boys and we’ve all retired now. We’re all living and we’re all retired now. None of us got away with nothing.The girls didn’t gang up on the guys. We had one brother that always aggravated us girls more than the rest of them.We made our own toys. We played jack rocks. We made our own little playhouses, and we did swimming. Of course, we worked in our gardens for our mother and we helped our parents. Jack rocks is a game with little metal peices and there’s a ball with it. You can get them in stores now.
Some chores around the house were washing dishes, cleaning house, and where we used to live, we had to carry water. All nine of us had things we had to do.
We lived in different homes. We lived in a boarding house when I was little, then we moved in with Virginia Hardwood Company to up to Wolfe Creek and we had a home on wheels run on a railroad track. Then we moved out of that when the Virginia Hardwood Lumber Company went into Burkes Garden. We moved back down Wolfe Creek into a three bedroom home and then from there down to this here where I’m living now.
I lived in the house on the track for about three or four years. It was pretty neat and different. It was heated by coal, and we cooked on a coal cookstove.In our garden, we grew every kind of vegetable you could name. We used to bury our cabbage. My favorite meal was dinner. Mother did all of the cooking, and of course we helped some, but she was an excellent cook. We ate just ordinary country food, what we grew in our garden.My first school was a one-room school at Suitor and from there I went to a Bogle school. No, from there I went to Bastian, from there I went to a Bogle school, one-room up Wolfe Creek and then on up the head of Wolfe Creek to a white school house. From there back to Bastian, back to Rocky Gap, back to Bland. We had seven different classes. You learned the four R’s there pretty good, reading, writing, and arithmetic. We had some very strict teachers at that time. Which they were allowed to spank then and they don’t now.
I had a couple of favorite teachers. Ora Gray Stowers is one of my favorite teachers. She’s still living. And then Harry Foglesong, of course he’s passed away now. We walked to school the biggest portion of time. Then they started running the schoolbus out of Wolfe Creek and we rode to Rocky Gap on it. I got into plenty of trouble at school. I wasn’t a troublemaker. I just stood up for my rights.In school, I played basketball and softball. That’s all we had. Back then you didn’t have no other sports but basketball and softball. We played, when I was at Rocky Gap, we played Bland and Ceres.Then when I moved, went to Bland, we played Rocky Gap, Ceres in softball. And then we played Parisburg and Narrows and Pembrooke, Ceres, Rocky Gap in basketball. Bland and Rocky Gap were as competitive as they are now.We celebrated Christmas. Our mother did all this baking and breads and cakes and candies and salads. On Halloween we dressed up and went out on the town. Get in a little trouble over it. We dressed up in long men’s underwear and stuffed and powdered our face in Halloween. But we got whipped over that. Or we slipped off and done that and our mother got mad and we got it when we got home. We never egged houses or did that stuff with toilet paper, but I’ve had it done to me. Turn over outside johns. Of course you don’t have that many now.
When you went on a date, you had to take your whole family with you. On my first date, I think I was about sixteen or seventeen. And then you had to take somebody with you when you went out on a date, even to a movie. It wasn’t awkward to take people with you on dates. You just had a lot of fun. The first movie I ever saw was a western.
This is how I met my husband. Back then you had birthday parties and he walked me home for the first time. We went from one home, everybody that had a birthday, why they’d have a little party and everybody, all the young people would go and he walked me home one night. I was married in Bland. It was just a simple wedding. It wasn’t a church wedding. We went to a parsonage and got married. Back then you didn’t have too many big weddings like they do now. We didn’t go on a honeymoon. I had to work and he did too. My husband’s name is Jewell P. Havens.
I have five children. I have two girls and three boys. My oldest daughter is a retarded child and she lives in Galax. Kathy lives in Lebanon. She owns the Waffle & Egg at Claypool Hill. Perry is the oldest son and he lives in Baptist Valley and he’s a foreman over coal mines, deep mines for Consolidated Coal Company. Stacy’s kind of a foreman in for American Power Company in Princeton. And Tony works for GIV. It was easier to raise children back then than it is now. You don’t have as many drug problems and things like they do now.
Growing up in Rocky Gap was tough. It was all right, I guess. When we went to Rocky Gap, it was a bigger school and you know at first kinda scary, cause we’d been going to one-room schools. But you got used to it and you learned to hold your own.
I don’t remember what the enrollment was at Rocky Gap was when I got there, but the grade school had a four-room white building, right up from that church down there and that’s where most of the grades went. And then from the, in the up of the brick part, they had fourth grade was in one room. The fifth and sixth was in one I think. Anyway, the high school, they didn’t have but two rooms for high school. There wasn’t that many.
Of course, back then you didn’t have but four high school grades. Eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh.There wasn’t as much prejudice and discrimination back then as there is now.The only businesses I remember being in Rocky Gap or in Suitor was just sawmills and garment factories. Well, the garment factory didn’t come in here until the early fifties.
Back then, you hardly ever got to go to a movie, but people got together and when we moved here boys came in here with music, and they played and a bunch of girls got here. We made our own fun.The weather was bad in the wintertime. Snow and big ice and when the creeks froze over, you could skate on them. We had to walk to school in the snow, rain, and flood.
For Christmas, we didn’t have many toys, but we had plenty of food. Mother always seen we had a ham and all kinds of cakes and bread, rolls, salads, and all that stuff. We had plenty of food. We always had a Christmas tree. We roamed the mountains and got it. We put homemade stuff on the Christmas tree, sycamore balls. We dip them in flour, and hang them on the tree. Stuck popcorn on the tree and crepe paper. We had our own decorations.
We also celebrated Easter. We had the Easter egg hunts at home and all the kids would gather around, and of course, we lived close to where two of my sisters lived and they had children. We’d all hide eggs. We didn’t have sunrise services in church until we moved here.
The first president that I can remember is Roosevelt. My favorite movie star was Clark Gable, everybody said my husband looked like him. My first movie costed a quarter. ome of them were ten cents. You could go to a western for ten cents. The crash of the stock market affected Bland County. When we lived in Suitor, people would come by when we lived up there and they didn’t have nothing to eat or nothing and Mother would feed them. It didn’t really impact us.
Franklin Rooselvelt helped the country during the Great Depression. He was the cause of the CC’s coming in here and giving work to the different places and young men around here. His programs helped the people of Bland County. I remember when Franklin Roosevelt died well because I was outside hanging clothes. It stunned the world when he died. Just like it stunned the world when Kennedy got killed.
I guess I was about twelve years old when I got my first radio. Mother got a little tiny one when we first got electricity. We had kerosene lamps and when I was about twelve and we moved up Wolfe Creek, they put lights up there. And that’s when we got out first radio. We’d take it to bed with us and listen to the Grand Ole Opry. One of my favorite shows was the Squeaking Door. There was a lot of daytime programs to listen to in the summertime. Little Orphan Annie was in the funny papers. Dagwood and Blondie, they were in there and Little Orphan Annie and I can’t remember all of them.
We didn’t get a telephone until after the kids left home. Electricity changed our lives. We was thrilled about it. We got a refrigerator. We had ice water and tea. Of course, we had tea back them, but it wasn’t iced tea. We was real thrilled over it. Electricity made a big difference to Bland County. Bastian had electricity before we did up Wolfe Creek. We had a party line for about two years and then I got off of it. I didn’t like it, everybody kept butting in on you.
I got my first television in 1956. I remember that. That’s when our house burned down. We got a second-hand TV and when the house burnt, it burned with it. One of the first shows I watched was Lawrence Welk. TV has changed things in a lot of ways. It’s made things worse for kids cause they watch all this stuff they shouldn’t watch. It’s getting to the place where you can’t even watch TV.
I lived up Wolfe Creek when I heard that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. I can just barely remember that. I think I was about twelve years old. I had two brothers that went and fought in World War II. I had one who went before the Korean started. During the war, my sisters made candy and sent it to my brothers. Mother sent stuff to them while they was overseas. It was a sad time. Of couse, our mother prayed for each one of then. It was really a sad time.
I am not the youngest in my family. I have one brother that lives in Chester that’s younger. And then I have a sister in Florida that’s the baby.
There was rationing. You had food stamps for sugar, stamps for shoes, for shortening, and a lot of things you had to have stamps for. Gas, even after the restrictions went off of gas. You could get gas for twenty to twenty-five cents a gallon.
I think the biggest portion of people supported the war. People around here didn’t support the Korean War. None of my family fought in the Korean War. My husband was really for President Eisenhower because he was a veteran. I guess he was all right.
Times in the fifties were on the average. Of course things change from the fifties to the sixties. It was sad when President Kennedy got killed. Of course he done things in office that this one’s doing too. Nothing was said about it. Kennedy is not any different from President Clinton. He knew what he was doing same as the other one did. But that was his private life. He’s done good so far as president. I think they should leave him alone until he finishes his term and then do something about it.
The shape of this country is today in my opinion is bad. They’re leaving out God on every corner and getting worse. Things have changed for the worse.
I’ve drove schoolbuses, I’ve drove coal trucks, and log trucks. It was scary. I drove with my husband. School buses, that’s a nerve-racking thing. The kids on the bus behaved pretty good. I’ve done I guess a little bit of everything. I sewed in the sewing factory. I worked at ABB at Bland. One year I was out of work and I picked turkeys for the Blessing Brothers, when they had a chicken-picking place over there. I worked for them.
My mother ran a boarding house and it was work. You tried to feed one hundred people three meals a day. She hired help to help with it . I helped out a lot. Of course, we were little. My older sisters helped. We did washing for the lobby. You had the big boarding house and you had the lobby across from it. We lived there for about a year. It was a fairly big boarding house. She had about on average one hundred.
Virginia Hardwood came in here in the early twenties and people from everywhere, cause there wasn’t no work for nobody, so they came in here and they built all these homes up here. I guess around ninteen thirty, maybe forty somewhere around here. They lived in them. This was the club house and over there were my sister lives, they called it the lobby, and then on the other end of the camp there was another boarding house and a lobby, besides the one that was up Suitor. Of course, they closed that one out up Suitor in about thirty four. They had a company store. They had a doctor, and then we had a doctor down in Bastian, Dr. Walker. Dave Shufflebarger had a store. The Kidd brother had a store. The Blessing brothers had a store. There was a Bland Supply where the train brought all the supplies in and left them. That was located where the Church of God is. R.E. Kidd had a Chevrolet dealership. A lot of homes, but a lot of them are torn down or burnt down.
The CC Camp came in and a lot of people came in on that, and we had a post office. We had two churches, which we’ve got three now in the community. It’s just a lot of things like that. It’s good to go back and see, but a lot of them’s torn down.When Virginia Hardwood moved their sawmill, that closed us down.They sold a lot of these houses in 1944, and people bought them and torn them down, and rebuilt them. My dad bought this one here for eight hundred dollars. Somebody bought the lobby next door and Daddy bought the land off of them. He gave them three hundred dollars for the land. The houses sold for real cheap, but they was more or less boxed up. You had to redo them. This room was the dining room, and that was the kitchen. My mother rearranged, and made that bedroom and this a kitchen.When I was young, this place was full of kids. We had a two-room school down here and it was full. We went to school from nine to three. My husband was in the army and he attended school down here in Bastian. He never did go to high school.
When me and my family lived in the cars, there was three other families, and then there was five or six familes that lived in smaller cars. When Virginia Hardwood broke up, the people went back to where they was from. A lot of them went to Kingsport, some to North Carolina, places like that. In the cars, we had a partition to make each room and each room had eight windows in it. We had two bedrooms. One of them, Mother and Dad’s had a kitchen in it. Then in between them we built a living room, and then when we got ready to move, we’d tear that living room out, and we’d take the things that were on the wall and benches and everything and put them in the middle of the floor and then the train would come by and hook it up and move it on to the next campsite. We moved around in it. The train would hook up to them and move them on to the nest campsite. We went to three different campsites like that. We did stay in Bland County when we moved. When we lived in those cars, two of my sisters was married and one of them lived in a car like that. There was three or four families in cars like that and then there was aboiut six or seven families in one-room shacks. They would have three and build a room in between them then. Virginia Hardwood furnished the cars, because we worked for them. When we lived there I was between eight and ten. I still went to school then. First time we had to walk five miles to school, and then when we moved on up a little further, and went to a one-room school. We had to walk about three miles and then we moved onup the head of Wolfe Creek, and to walk about three or four miles. When we moved back down Wolfe Creek and we went to Bastian. We had to walk about five miles and then the bus started running to Rocky Gap and we went to Rocky Gap then. There were other kids living in the cars too. Everybody around here worked for the Virginia Hardwood Company. One person wasn’t no better than anybody else.
We canned out of our garden every year. You picked berries in the summer-time and cherries. We raised our own hogs, and we had a cow, and we had chickens. It was a milking cow. I was always there when they killed the hogs and the chickens. I’ve killed many a chicken. I always wrung their head off. I never really affected me. We raised ducks too. We had a black cat. We had our own fun. We swang on grapevines, and we had a seesaw. And we make our own merry-go-round. We went fishing. We fixed our own pond, and had our own swimming hole. Of course we had to work hard before we could play.
We played Annie Over. Somebody would get on one side of the house, and somebody on the other, and you had to catch that ball before it hits the ground. And you run around the house and tag them. You holler ?Annie Over?. We also played whip-crack. You line up in a line and the person on the end really got it. You run with them and you come around and snap them. When we was in the Bogle school, we was little then, and we used to play in the leaves. We had ballgames and jackrocks. We never did have roller skating. We’d skate on the ice with our shoes or we’d get an old peice of board and use it for sledding. When the snow came, we had snow cream. It’s like ice cream. You’d make it out of snow, and put sugar and flavoring in it. You can’t do it now, you got too many chemicals in it. We also had our own ice cream maker, and we’d make homemade ice cream.
We’d read a lot. We read anything we could get our hands on. Mother didn’t allow us to read funny books. Mother didn’t think we should read funny books, but we’d hide them and read them. here was a series of mystery books that had a lot of sequels, and my sister always got them. She’d borrow them from other people. We read them a lot. We was great readers, and I still do a lot of reading. I do a lot of quilting, too and puzzles.
My mother did a lot of sewing. She made curtains, sheetsm pillowcases, skirts, and blouses out chalk sacks. She did’t use patterns. She made her own. Mother would get colored feed sacks, and if she got two alike, we’d get a skirt out of it. One time she got three or four of them, and made new kitchen curtains.In Bland County there were a few well to do people, but most of them were just average. They was poor, and yet they wasn’t poor. And there was some that really needed help.
My father stayed home and worked. In the later years, when Virginia Hardwood moved into Burkes Garden, he went over there and cooked for them. He worked for the Blessings until he was about seventy years old or seventy five, and then he lived with my brother in Chester. They had a restaurant, and he cooked for them. And then he came and lived with me for about a year before he passed away. He was ninety years old when he passed away. Died with a broken hip; set up gangrene. Mother was the backbone of our family. She sold Macness products for years. Macness products was something like Raleigh. They sold flavoring, tonics for livestock, pie filling. Like Blair product.
We got a Sears Roebuck catalog every year. We kept it in the outhouse. We’d go out there and relax a while. Mother ordered a lot out of it. I did after I had kids. I ordered a lot of their clothes from Sears. In fact, I still trade at Sears. I think I still have the last one that Sears ever sent.
When we had the boarding house, we had lots of help. A lot of my father’s neices and nephews would help. About half of the people that stayed there were regular. You paid twenty five cents a week for room and board. You got to meet a lot of interesting people. There was two boarding houses in Bland County. There was two here and one up Suitor. And then one up at Crab Orchard. There was a lot of people that worked for Virginia Hardwood. You had to have people in the mountain, people that worked down here, people in the company store, people in the doctor’s office, people in the script office. People from everywhere came here to work at Virginia Hardwood, and then the CC’s came in here in the thirties, and that made everything grow a little more.
I remember the first time I ever went to the doctor. I had a boil on my elbow. I was about ten years old. I can remember the doctor that set my knee when I was about six years old. I busted it up Suitor, and he came and fixed it.
I was twenty when I got married. A lot of people got married young back then. I had two sisters that were up in their twenties when they got married, and my brother was up in his twenties when he got married. Three of my sisters were about seventeen when they got married. People didn’t date a long time before they got married back then. I went with my husband for about fifteen months before we got married. here wasn’t much divorce back then.
My mom was very strict when it came to dating. Ten o’clock we had to be at the house. You had to go to church every time the church doors open, boyfriend or no boyfriend, you went to church. Mother was very religious. She believed in morning worship, before we went to school. She believed in night worship, before we went to bed. She was strict all the way around. I think it helped the family out. Cause I have one brother retired from teaching. I have one sister retired from nursing. I have a sister retired from being a beautician. Josephine is the only one that never did work a public job. She worked for about a year and then quit. She’s the laziest one in the family. My first public job was in the sewing factory, sewing buttons on dresses in Bluefield, making button holes.Then I went to work at a hosiery mill, before I was married. I worked in Bluefield my junior and senior year, and then I went to work at the hosiery mill. In high school, some of the students had jobs. Some of them went to business school,then some of them went into nursing, and some of them went to factory workers.
I didn’t go to college. It was rough trying to go to college back them. There was a business school in Bluefield and Bluefield College and Bluefield State, but it was mostly black. There wasn’t that many black people in the community. We had one family that lived in Bland. There wasn’t no black people in Bastian, and then up Dry Fork. That one in Bland, he was treated just like us. We didn’t have too much contact with the ones up Dry Fork.
narration by Jessica DeHart
