Tonight in my X feed.
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Notes from Prices Switch, October, 1932
- The health here is very good, except headache and colds. The weather has changed from real hot to very cool. Look for frost soon. The farmers and Mr. Boll Weevil are racing to see who can gather the cotton crop first.
- Several of our neighbors took dinner with James Garrett Sunday, it being his 58th birthday. Jim and I are not as young now as we were 50 years ago. Not as good either as we were when our father used to play a tune with “hickory” on our legs, and we had to dance to the music. It was no enjoyment to dance at that time.
- Miss Ruth Summers of Birmingham is visiting relatives at Maxwellborn. Mr. Summers section will extend to Prices Switch after Friday.
- We notice that our editor is bringing up some very interesting old records from Jacksonville and surrounding country. We surely do love to see the old things in print. Some day we will see our old friends and loved ones who are almost forgotten. Thank you, Mr. Johnson. ‘Tis a great improvement in our paper. I hope to write something about the old times in the future.
- Mr. Booler, our peddler, said he was badly disappointed week before last when The Journal arrived and the deacon was absent. Every subscriber likes the Prices Switch News, and we love them all. We would like to go into every home every week, but some people are so contrary that they won’t subscribe for the paper, but are your best friends to borrow the paper every week. We are glad to lend, but think they oughta subscribe.
- Mr. John Jackson is building a house to live in. He says it is impossible to rent, and when a fellow can’t stay in the other fellow’s house he’d better get a tent.
- Work had better open up. Farmers will soon be out of a job. Then what?
PIEDMONT JOURNAL, FRIDAY, OCTOBER, 1932
Princes Switch News -
“Well, I’ve seen this old country come and go.” The man laughed his quick, bright laugh and leaned forward in his chair until he seemed to rest on his knobby cane.
The kitchen boasted a new refrigerator and stove, and three tall jars of beans stood on a large space heater. As he talked, chickens pecked the ground outside the screen door.
Nathan W. Smith (his neighbors call him “Tot”) has lived all his life in Possum Trot—and that goes back at least 85 years.“It mostly looks like its been for the good,” he said. “I bought this in ’21 and cleaned it up—it was all in the woods, and now it’s in the woods again. Shoot-fire, I can’t help it, I can’t drive a nail, I can’t look up.”
The house had been anchored to the steep hillside, and the narrow upper reach of the valley stretched out beneath it.
“I made good cotton,” he said. “I don’t know how I managed to make a bale. One year I counted 25 weevils to the bloom, and if you didn’t poison them, the blooms would never pop.”
Smith came close to following a railroad career instead of farming. A supervisor, impressed with his strength, tried to talk him into taking a job with promise of quick promotion.
” ‘If you take a railroad job,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll go back to my office and send you ‘prentice wages from the first lick you hit. Then, in six months, I’ll give you a section.” He looked like a bale of cotton out there walking down the tracks–he said he never saw nobody dress slag like me. He knew I knew railroads. I turned it down.”
Smith said that as cotton farming moved west, leaving the South in the position of a jilted bride, timber raising increasingly filled the void.
“Our land here will grow timber nearly as good as it will cotton. Pulpwood beats anything I ever saw growing, and those quick-growth pines are the same. On that bottom land, where it can get moisture, it gets away from you. It looks pretty foolish, I’ll tell you, a man out plowing pines,” he laughed.
“It’s got where you can’t buy no land now. It used to be you could buy and sell it, but now there’s none to buy.”
“I could have had a town here by now,” he said. “I could have sold it by the acre and let them build a house on it. Some people ask me why I didn’t. But you might get somebody in here you don’t like, and then you couldn’t get them out!”Smith said that with the decrease in small farms in the region had come a shortage of hired hands. A back injury prevents him from any longer working his own land, and yet no one can be found to work it for him.
**Caption: Nathan Smith, one of the oldest living residents of Possom Trot, remembers when a railroad supervisor once offered him a job. He decided to stick with farming, and found the going rough. Smith’s son Hugh lives nearby, on Possum Trot Road.
THE ANNISTON STAR, FRIDAY, NOVEMBER , 1968
‘Tot’ Smith’s Seen It All ‘Come And Go’
By: Tom King
SIXTH OF A SERIES**You may leave a virtual flower for Mr. Smith and learn more about him on his Find-a-Grave page here.
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Salem Church has been a Possum Trot landmark since its construction more than 80 years ago.
In the interim, it has sheltered Presbyterian and Holiness services, as well as at least one generation of schoolchildren. Perhaps irresistible, its role as a social center has diminished.
The Salem Presbyterians were the first to break the rigid custom of seating men and women on separate sides of the aisle, and in the 1880s and ’90s the church often served as the site of picnics, box suppers, candy-pullings and all-day singing.
The present Holiness congregation still holds four services a week, but this organic function in the life of the community undeniably has come to an end.
Plain Building
The building itself suggests a Quaker meeting house, with its simple arrangement of pews and slatted chairs and its plain exterior lines. A piano and drum provide musical accompaniment during services, except when the din of passing trains drowns them out, and a large electric fan cools the congregation in summer.“My daddy used to be a deacon of the church at Pilgrim’s Rest,” Tom Couch, the preacher at Salem, explained, “but it’s died now. They advocated predestination, and I never did agree with it. I was rocked in the cradle, but they never could get it down me.”
A huge man who is known among older resides of Possum Trot for his almost legendary strength, Couch recalls the valley in its very early days.
“I can remember mighty well the first car that run along these roads,” he said with some pride. “We were playing int he yard, and Momma said she heard something sounded like one of them automobiles. We were all out in the road when it passed.”
“I remember back fifty years ago when I hauled cotton. They run it with mules then. Lord, O Lord, they got so many different machines now. Machinery’s took the place of people. One man is working over a hundred acres when it used to be that a man would make a good living out of seven or eight acres.”
Injured In Accident
Couch usually stays in one of several chairs in his yard, because of an accident which partially paralyzed his legs at the cotton mill where he once worked. Neighbors stop by to talk, and a beagle puppy named Popeye often noses about in the vicinity.
The family farms only to fill the deep freeze for winter, and Couch’s son-in-law owns acreage nearby, of which he does not intend to plant crops.“He owned timber and hade it pushed off,” Couch explained. “He’ll sow it in grass to make a pasture.”
A timber company bought most of the available land in the area ten years ago. “In a lot of the country where there used to be people, thick with settlers, there are hardly any now,” he said.
“It’s strange for companies to own land that people used to own.”
Apt summaries of the most heart heartbreaking changes that have come to Possum Trot: “Machinery’s took the place of people,” and “It’s strange for companies to own land that people used to own.”Still Preaches
Tom Couch still preaches at Salem Church, but he doesn’t hold with the hard-shell Baptist theology he was “rocked with” in the cradle. Couch lost partial use of his legs in a factory accident, and now likes to sit in one of several chairs in the yard. His family still does enough farming to fill the freezer.SERVED AS SOCIAL CENTER– Salem Church, still used for weekly services, once provided Possum Trot with its social center. It was the scene of picnics, candy-pullings and other community events. Today, Possum Trot lacks the Cohesiveness it had as a pioneer rural community, and its residents turn to Jacksonville and Piedmont for civic identity. (Tom Evans photo)
THE ANNISTON STAR, THURSDAY NOVEMBER, 1968
Salem Church Remains Possum Trot Landmark
By: Tom King
FIFTH OF A SERIES -
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In some mysterious way the news got circulated that Mr. F.G. Becknell, formerly of Piedmont, but now of Anniston, had died. Nearly everyone you met was under the impression our old friend had passed off the stage of action, but his family and intimate friends here were very much gratified to find when calling up his family in Anniston, that Mr. Becknell was not dead. Not only that, but stated that he had not even been sick or even feeling bad, so “I’m glad to tell you that I’m not dead, and glad of it,” was his comment to his friends.
F.G. BECKNELL NOT DEAD AND IS GLAD OF IT
PIEDMONT, ALA. , Jan. 5.THE JACKSONVILLE RECORD, FRIDAY, JANUARY, 1933
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We’re coming up on the anniversary of the passing of my all-time favorite speaker, Mrs. Jeanne Robertson. I was rewatching one of my favorite clips from her recorded specials earlier today. Since it’s one of those tales that’s lived rent-free in my head for a decade or so, I thought I would l share it here. It’s called ‘the Interments of Cousin Rudolph Elroy’ a/k/a ‘Rudolph Elroy Branch’.
Here’s Jeanne’s story about a relative who traveled a long way, ages after his death, to finally (at least we hope) find his final resting place.
If I ever find myself in Mr. Branch’s part of Mississippi, I know I’ll have to stop in and eat some fried chicken and potato salad, and pay my respects.
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I regret that my friends Messrs. Henry Farmer, and Camillas Landers of Jacksonville, could not be with us, but the presence of their onerous business kept them at home.
One of the most popular Vets present, was Uncle Dave Jennings of Rabbitt Town. This battle scarred veteran has passed through many battles, but the nearest shave he had was while a prisoner he in company with many others, were placed in line to be shot; when at that particular interesting moment, word was received from General Joe Wheeler, if the execution was carried he would certainly retaliate in double numbers.
The Hon. Jason Scott (the Duke of Merrellton) was there, big-hearted, govial Jason straight as a saplling and as happy as a sunflower–
Long years ago when I knew how to play the fiddle Mr. Scott asked me to play for him, so I turned loose on the “Bonnie Blue Flag,” when to my amazement he bowed his head with his hands and wept, yes copious tears. I was much flattered at his delicate compliment. He told me afterwards that he was suffering from granulated eyelids.While waiting at the station with Capt. James Crook and Uncle Charlie Martin of Alexandria, we engaged in conversation with a gentleman who claimed to speak 8 languages. The captain touched with the views of this paper. The Evening Star would like to be the favorite paper of everybody in this section who reads, irrespective of politics. It is a tribute to a paper’s excellence to be the favorite paper, either of an individual or of a community.
THE ANNISTON STAR, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST,1902
An excerpt, notes from Camp Forney Veteerans’ Reunion, REFLECTIVE NOTES.***In case you’ve never heard ‘My Bonnie Blue Flag’, you can listen to one version of it here.
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I was thinking.
You know what I hate? When a person is just minding their own business, and some bored instigator comes along and starts antagonizing them. Person One ignores the instigator for a while and eventually loses his or her patience and asks the annoying little goose what their problem is? But before anything can become of the question, some third interloper wanders onto the scene, looks them both over (likely just barely), and throws their arms up in some dramatic gesture and says something like, “Both of you, stop it!”
I hate that.
Is there a word or phrase for it?
I feel like this happened on Survivor once. Brandon was harassing Phillip and eventually threw a tantrum and destroyed the whole tribe’s food supply, just because he was having a meltdown. He had been up to this for a while before Phillip called him out on it, if memory serves. Anyway, when asked about Brandon’s violent outburst, one of the other tribemates said, “They’re awful to each other,” as if Phillip’s behavior was equal to Brandon’s, as if Phillip was the instigator?!
Anyway, I hate that, and if there’s not a word or phrase to describe it, there should be. That is all.
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I heart the internet.
Found this in my X feed. The comments are hilarious. My favorite: ‘Gotta start thumb-maxing, man.’
