The house in which I grew up was built in the 1920s by my grandfather to replace a boxboard house that once stood in its place. My grandparents were married in 1914 on West Main Street in town. When I say on West Main Street I mean in the street.

After my grandparents had courted a while he made her a proposal. He wanted to know if he had a good cotton crop that year if she would marry him. She thought about it and said she would.

Well, that year he had a lousy cotton crop, but he was still in love. So, he made her another proposal. Would she marry him anyway? She told him she had a good job teaching at Calvary’s one room schoolhouse and she thought they might be able to make it. So the answer was yes.

They were on their way into to town to find the preacher when they happened to meet him coming in their direction. They flagged him over and told him that they were just on their way to find him. They wanted to get married.

He said since the street was so muddy they could just stand up in their buggy and he would do the same in his. So there they stood in their respective buggies while he performed a little ceremony and pronounced them man and wife right there in the middle of the street.

After they were officially married they turned their buggy around and went back home to his aunt’s house. They had a big supper with the family before calling it a day and going up to his room where they lived until they fixed up a little shack across the road.

Grandmother said it wasn’t much of a place, but they were young and in love so any place would have been fine as long as they were together. Grandmother said boards on the floor had been put down while they were still green. Over time they had dried and shrank, leaving a gap between the boards large enough to see the chickens that walked around beneath the shack. She said all she had to do to sweep the floors was to move her broom back and forth a little and whatever was on the floor fell through the cracks to the ground below.

Winter was rough though. Every time they built a fire in the fireplace the flames pulled a draft up through the cracks in the floor and on out the chimney, so they nearly froze.

They remained on his aunt’s farm until after my father was born in 1916. That was when they moved to the farm where I grew up. My grandmother’s father, Dyonisious Bennett, had decided to give each of his children forty acres and a mule.

Her forty acres ended up being way out in the country in the middle of nowhere.

My grandfather told her there was no way he was going to live that far from civilization, he just as soon stay in their little shack. Her sister, Sallie Clark, decided to swap properties with her because her husband already had some property closer to town.

My grandparents accepted her trade and lived in the old house that was on the property until my grandfather could no longer stand all the mice and rats that were running around in the attic. That was when he tore that house down and built the one where I grew up.

The mailbox in front of our house was a bit unusual. My father had it made by Dave Gladney, a blacksmith on the north side of town.

The base was a large milk can and on top of the milk can was welded a plow stock. At the end of the plow stock sat our mailbox. He often said that those were three jobs he disliked the most; milking, plowing and carrying the mail. He was a substitute rural mail carrier for several years.

When people asked for directions to our place, we used the mailbox as a landmark. We would say, “Just look for the unusual mailbox five miles west of Louisville and that’s where we live.” No one ever had a problem finding our house.

I was little when my parents became afraid I would wander into the road or into the swamp. Evidently I was a lot more active than my older brothers or they thought I was too precious to lose. But it’s more likely that they didn’t want to have to look for me in the swamp. I was forever getting into trouble and wandering away from the house so my father decided he would fence me in.

He built a nice ornamental wire fence around our entire front yard. The posts were all painted white and came to a nice point at the top. When he built the gate, he used two tall posts and placed a double ox yolk on top of them. It was quite unusual.

Mother said Daddy was very proud of the new fence, stood back and remarked, “That should keep Ricky from running off again.”

Then they decided it was time to turn me loose for the kid test. The first thing I did was run to the fence, climb over it and take off toward the road.

Mother threw down her dish towel, looked at my father and said, “Well that was a waste of time and money. We’ve got a climber on our hands!” My father just stood there with the hammer still dangling in his hand, shaking his head. Little did they know that it was a sign of things to come.

Sometime in the mid 1950’s the state highway department decided to widen and pave the gravel road in front of our house all the way from the old iron bridge outside of Louisville to Carthage twenty miles down the road.

In the process of building the new highway, they plowed through hills, filled up valleys and built new bridges. After they finished working in front of our house the new highway was about thirty feet lower than the old roadbed had been. We ended up living on a high hill.

Along about that time Mother decided our farm should have a name so she sent off for a mailbox nameplate that was advertised on the back of a sack of sugar. I suppose she could get two as cheap as one, so, she had my father’s name embossed on one and on the other she had embossed with “OAK HILL FARM,” and that’s how our farm received its name. – Because of a sugar sack.

I was young, but I remember traveling to town with my father as they were building the new highway, and I often saw large earth movers and bulldozers pushing the hills out of the way. When they did, it exposed layers of different colored soil.

There was one small hill they cut through between our home and Calvary Baptist Church that I remember vividly. The bank on the south side of the road had bright bands of yellow and purple clay that had been exposed by the bulldozers.

One day when we were driving by, we saw a family on the side of the road digging into those bands of clay and stuffing it into jars. I asked my father what they were doing and he said they would take the jars home and eat a little bit of that clay every day.

I remember asking, “Why in the world would they want to eat dirt?!” That was when he explained to me, the clay had a lot of good minerals and vitamins in it.

I had no idea what the term privileged meant back then, I was so thankful for those little red One-a-Day vitamins my mother placed beside our plates each morning at breakfast. I couldn’t imagine her spooning out clay and asking us eat it!

Our house was surrounded by several massive oak trees. There were also a few pecan trees and some Crape Myrtles that lined our driveway all the way to the road. We had a couple of very large Mimosa trees, too. One was just off the back porch near our smoke house. The other was on the east side of the front yard and both were excellent climbing trees.

Whenever Mother would get after me with a switch or a belt and if I could beat her, I would run out the back door, jump over all our cats and dogs that lounged around on the back steps and scoot up the Mimosa tree that was just off the porch. (That was if I could make it by the man-eating rooster that stood sentry over our backyard.) I would stay up there until she either calmed down or my father came home from the fields.

When I was up in the top of that tree I was the king of the world. I ruled dominion over all the cats, dogs and chickens below me in our backyard. Mother could do a lot of things, but she couldn’t climb.

Sitting up there among the bees, hummingbirds and butterflies no one could touch me. In June and July the tree was full of pale pink and yellow blooms. Their fragrance was my cologne and it was like living in a fairyland up there.

After I dragged up an old door from one of the sheds on the farm, I had a platform to lie on. I would stay up there for hours daydreaming and watching over my kingdom below.

When Daddy made it home he would always tell me to come on down and I would get a whipping. I didn’t mind his whippings, though. He was never mad when he whipped me and only did it to appease my mother. She, on the other hand, could dish out one mean whipping.

Her favorite weapon of choice was a switch that came from what she called the Bridal Wreath bush in the front yard. Many times, I was sent outside to “pick” my own switch. It was one of those dreadful bushes that was perfect for whipping a rowdy little boy. All that had to be done was to snap it off near the ground, grip it near the top and pull it through your fingers. All the leaves would fall off and you ended up with a perfect switch. I can’t tell you how much I loathed that bush.

One day my parents went in town and decided I was old enough to stay home by myself. They were hardly out of sight when I devised a plan to get rid of that damn bush. I didn’t care if it had pretty little white flowers in the spring. To me it was the devil’s bush.

I cut that thing down level with the top of the ground, carried away every single trace of it out into the pasture beside the house and tossed it all in a gully. I thought to myself, “They’ll never miss it.”

As usual, I was wrong. That was the very first thing they noticed when they came home. Mother was beside herself. Her beautiful Bridal Wreath bush was gone.

Daddy looked at me and said, “Boy, I don’t know what you did with it, but go bring me back one of those switches right now.” Needless to say, I got another whipping and unfortunately, that damn bush grew back bigger and more menacing than before, proving that you just can’t kill evil.

As bad as those whippings were, I know my mother loved me. I’ll never forget her tucking me in every night and teaching me to pray. “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

That is still one of my favorite memories of my mother.

(To be continued)

	Tonny, Rick, and Terry Algood
Strand Theatre
Louisville	This aerial view of our home was taken in the late 50s before the highway was paved.
Adam Jenks

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Rick Algood
August 19, 2021