Tom King Archives - Wordy, She Wrote

“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.

Charley Phillips has lived in the same house for 18 of his 46 years in Possum Trot, farming the land for two successive owners. He was “knocked out” of work, as he puts it, three or four years ago. He reckons his age is 82.

“You know, I was always brazen to work,” he says. “It was strange when I got disabled, to be contented not working.”

Charley Phillips’ retirement in a sense signifies the end of an important era in American rural life. Most of his neighbors in Possum Trot, also have abandoned farming and turned to other ways of making a living.
Phillips rarely ventures out of the shade of the house now, but his face retains the deep nut-brown color baked by constant exposure to the sun.

“Farming is practically played out,” he says, gesturing widely before him. “They mostly raise cattle on the land now. But there are still the same old farmers around as been here for 25 years. I ain’t getting none of it, but these folks working off public jobs is doing pretty good.”
“The government has this thing allotted, and it ruins small farmers. You take the big farmers, now–it makes money for them.”

Phillips lives in the old Maxwell house (John Maxwell for years operated a “government still” beside County Highway 19, before the fork at Possum Trot Road). Although the paint has chipped off its gables and dormers, and its tin roof has turned a rusty brown, the house still dominates this part of the valley.
The surrounding land once supported yearly crops of cotton–one resident remembers a year when 102 bales were harvested–but now nothing, including the weeds and undergrown which thrive elsewhere in the region, seems to take hold of the red clay.
The insistent chatter of a television set from within the house disrupts the quiet which seems to prevail everywhere.
Perhaps the same modern age which has outmoded Charley Phillips’ way of getting a living has also invented devices which make it easier “to be contented not working”.
One of the few small farms left in Possum Trot belongs to Lloyd Kiker, whose income still consists mainly of the salary he earns as an employee of the county board of education.
The life of his family curiously combines the old and new in Possum Trot–the farm-oriented society of three decades ago, and the city-oriented society of today.

THE ANNISTON STAR, NOVEMBER, 1968

One Man’s Retirement Signifies End of Era By: Tom King

‘Tot’ Smith’s Seen It All ‘Come And Go’ , Possum Trot, 1968

One Man’s Retirement Signifies End of Era, Possum Trot, 1968

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