I was going on eleven years old when the great catastrophe came, that of going to the farm and leaving our wonderful home and friends. My father had some way traded [the farm] for a team of young mules. These he traded for a one hundred and sixty acre hill farm six miles north of Patterson, an out of the way neighborhood called Camp Creek.
It had a very good four room frame house but not half large enough for us. My father didn’t want to sell the home or shop in Patterson, so it was decided that Will and Ruth stay there. My brother was to run the shop and Ruth to keep house.
A young fellow by the name of Dick Croy was to work in the shop with Will, and he boarded with them until a year or so later he married. The furniture was divided and we loaded on three or four wagons with Mother and us children atop and let out for the hills. Leaving Ruth and Will behind left six of us children. Eli, the oldest, myself, Virgie, Millard, Chas and Fred, who was just two and a half years old.
This happened March the 9th, 1900, and was the changing point in all our lives. How well I remember our first night at the farm. Everything was so strange and smelled funny, and it was so dark with only one house near enough to be seen and timber on all three other sides.
My sister Virgie couldn’t talk very plain and she would say over and over, “Ma, les go home. I don’t yike dis old pace” but the worst thing of all was that we couldn’t sleep for the house was literally alive with bed bugs. Mother cried and worked. We scalded all the walls. I was big enough to help some, and as we poured hot scalding water with carbolic acid in it, I adored seeing the bed bugs turn white and turn up their tail. Well, we tho’t we had them all but they got on our beds.
Then Mother made pallets, and the pests would crawl out on the rafters and fall down on us. Finally my father ceiled the rooms and painted them and finally got rid of the bugs. It was very lonely in the new home. Neighbors were a half mile, a mile or more away, and only a few families lived in this little neighborhood.
It was some relief to Mother though as she had had so much company at Patterson. My mother was a wonderful cook and very hospitable, but with a large family and never knowing who would drop in from the shop for dinner, it was very hard on her. Yet my fathers’ business demanded it, for some of his patrons had ridden horseback or in a wagon for several miles to have horses shod or wagon repaired, and Father would rather have done without dinner himself than to leave them there and not invite them to dinner. Being a preacher too he had many friends and ministers who came and “put up” at our house, so moving to the farm alleviated that to some extent as there would not be unexpected quests every day.
School started in the country districts in July, and my first teacher at Camp Creek was a young man, probably twenty-one year of age. I think it was his first school. His name was Jim Wilkinson. You didn’t have to have a college education to teach then, but no teacher before or since could have been a better teacher and how I learned that year. I was just a little over eleven years old but was doing eighth grade work. I think I almost fell in love with this teacher, but I was much too young, greatly to my sorrow at that time, so we will just call it hero worship.
Jim had an adopted sister named Mabel. He brought her to school a few times and we became great friends. They lived in the Peach Tree Fork neighborhood and were members of our church, where my father still preached once each month. By this time I was riding my own horse. We were only three miles from Peach Tree Fork now and my brother Eli and I went regularly to church and Sunday school there. Sunday school was in the afternoon, and Sundays when there was no church we went in the afternoon. Later on Mabel became my sisteir-in-law when she married Eli.
My next teacher was Martha Eaton. She was young and very popular with the boys. One time she had three boy friends at once and didn’t know which she liked best. She would tell me all about her love affairs and made a confidante of me. I used to wonder what it would be like to be loved by so many. She finally chose her long time suitor, her steady, and married at the close of school. She was always a very dear friend but has been gone these many years. She developed T.B. and died leaving five small children.
